Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

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>I don't think that's fair. Smartglasses have legitimate purposes.

I think that's true in principle, but in practice there are going to be two kinds of smart glasses users; extraordinarily annoying kids or you adults acting annoying in public so they can post videos to social media, and then normal people who have no clear sense for how much they're violating the privacy of those around them, and just like cool tech.

Very, very few users are going to be an interesting or valid use case -- eg: someone who is using them to assist with a disability, or for research, or something.

Even most dash cams don't stream to Meta -- they just record the last _n_ hours and you need to know to save off the video if you're in an crash / incident. In other words, most of the time no privacy is violated, and the only potential privacy violation occurs during an incident.

Even policy body cams, which I wholeheartedly support, have some pretty strong downsides: currently, if you're at the end of your rope, having the worst day of your life, and in your dishevelment turn a speeding ticket into a BATLEO, you're famous forever for being a lunatic. Maybe the rest of the time you're a good person, and you can learn from this and move on. Except now you have a permanent albatross around your neck. This is a secondary penalty that the justice system did not intend, and has no answer for.

I saw there is at least one company working on offline smart glasses for disabled users. I don’t have such a problem with this, and I wonder if the industry as a whole could be nudged in this direction. Offline glasses seem more ok to me.

It makes a lot of sense for actual accessibility devices to be offline-capable. You don’t want to lose your “sight” when you step into a metal building or elevator.

Another bad thing about the privacy invasion glasses is that they’ve added a stigma to these potentially-useful offline ones.

Vacations smart glasses are great at translating signs, historical plaques, and even ancient inscriptions on walls. (That last one surprised me.)

For parents smart glasses are awesome, no need to pull out a phone to take a picture. No need to view the world through a phone screen.

They are also useful as being regular BT headphones as well. Podcasts while walking w/o tiny earbuds to lose.

That's all pretty cool, but unfortunately the trade-offs do not justify it

Gross to all three. Slight convince at the cost of full surveillance. No deal.

> full surveillance

You realize smart glasses have a battery that allows for all of 15 to 20 minutes of recording right?

Hell just turning on wake word detection for asking it questions murders the battery life and it is one of the first things people turn off.

The phone in your pocket reports your position to multiple ad agencies throughout the day. Stores track individual's movements throughout their buildings and see what aisles people linger at.

15 minutes of video recording via glasses (versus on a smart phone, or go pro, or drone) is not some huge mass surveillance issue.

> Very, very few users are going to be an interesting or valid use case

You then list a mere two categories.

Would your argument have been similar in 2008 if told that in ten years, everyone in the economic first world would be carrying multiple cameras including a dedicated "selfie" camera at all times?

I'm not sure I understand the point about a dedicate "selfie" camera, however I think we're conflating "percentage of users" with "varieties of use cases." I think there could be quite a cornucopia of potential use cases, but I think per capita most people will not actually be making use of these. As other commenters have pointed out, I'd be a lot more tolerant if the data were not constantly piped to Meta.

The point about a dedicated selfie camera was that in 2008, few would have considered taking selfies to be a major use case that would drive >90% of teens and adults to have a camera which has no other reasonable purpose. In the age of FaceTime calls, it would seem absurd to question why it's needed, but nothing like that was mainstream in 2008, which would lead to the same argument of "there are very few legitimate reasons to want such a camera (and it will enable creepshots)".

My wider point is that there are already many obvious use cases, and as adoption of cameras which are always on or plausibly always on rises, there will be a lot more, including augmented reality, translation, context hinting, AI agent awareness for assistants and personal security, and at least dozens of others, some of which I am sure no one has started building for, yet.

Meta is probably not the winner in this space (or, I hope not, at least, so we agree there!). However, the idea that people have a right to remember and process what they see and hear in full fidelity is pretty basic, in my opinion.

Thanks for clarifying, I appreciate it. I'm so burnt by the potential downsides (and by the last ~19 years of smartphones) that I don't think we can see eye to eye, but I really appreciate you taking the time to expand on your point so I could understand your perspective.

> However, the idea that people have a right to remember and process what they see and hear in full fidelity is pretty basic, in my opinion.

If that's what we were talking about, I'd be much less bothered. But it's not. What we're talking about is people recording others and feeding that data to a third party.

"secretly"

This is a specious argument because selfie cameras are not pointed at people and on at all times, recording whoever somebody is looking at.

None of the cameras you're mentioning are pointed at people all the time.

When you are wearing Meta glasses, they are.

You say that like it's assumed that ubiquitous smart phones were obviously a good thing, when it sure seems like there's an increasing number of people questioning that assumption.

would your argument be similar if I told you that everyone in the economic first world is influenced by signals beamed down from space?

no? You think what I wrote is just a scary way to frame GPS? Maybe that's because you're part of the conspiracy!

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