Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the position to make security policies at work, and one of them is that no smart glasses are allowed in the office. We will not be having workers aiming Facebook glasses at our screens showing confidential information. And along those lines, I can think of damn few scenarios where I'd be OK with someone using face recognition against me. Restaurants? It's not Facebook's business to know where I like to eat, presumably to sell ads to show to me. Music clubs? They don't need to know what I listen to. Anything vaguely resembling a public bathroom? Fuck right off with that. Public sidewalks? I don't want them tracking who I spend time talking to.

No, I can't really think of any situation where I'd be remotely OK with this being used. To be blunt, I kinda hope this quickly turns not into just a public shaming against people wearing public spyware, but a situation where people are physically afraid to be caught wearing them outside. I think the branch of future possibilities where it's called out as antisocial behavior to poison public spaces like this would be a happier world than one where it becomes common behavior.

Edit: In before the "do you ban cell phone cameras at work, too?" unclever gotcha: Yes. Yes, we'd definitely ban people spending the whole day holding their cell phone cameras up to their screens to record their work. We don't share confidential info with anyone other than vendors we've vetted and contracted with. If I walked by a desk and saw someone recording, I would pull them aside and explain why they're on thin ice.

To make matters worse, I’ve seen threads where people with these glasses discuss how to circumvent/disable the “now recording” light, so people won’t know when they’re active.

I think it's important to keep in mind the difference between metadata versus full video as well as the difference between centralized versus device local solutions. I don't want BigTech tracking my every interaction any more than the government but I don't mind if the dash cam on my neighbor's car logs when I walk by his driveway so long as it isn't uploading that data to a third party. But of course most people don't want to self host and most services aren't E2EE so I won't try to pretend that any of this is important in practice at present. But if we're thinking about possible regulations and the world as we'd like it to be then it becomes relevant.

That's an important distinction, but yes, it's irrelevant here. If Apple offered on-device, privacy-preserving, not-uploaded facial recognition, I wouldn't be inherently opposed to it. There's no way Facebook wouldn't feed that data right into their own Eye of Sauron.

Same with Logitech Circle doorbells that tell you which of your friends or family is at the front door, using local computing. That's a great feature. I wouldn't use a Ring camera that was shipping the data back to Amazon and any number of police departments.

while I agree with you I can definitely see women wearing it to "feel safe". during dark months women wear vests with lights on them. admittedly I have not seen any of them wear bodycams yet.

I can definitely see women not wanting to be facially recognized as they're minding their own business and walking home from work and not wanting to be stalked.

I live in Canada (many dark months) and am a woman who knows many women and I've never known anyone to wear a vest with a light on them. I do own a hat with a light that I use when I'm walking to the gym in the dark so that drivers will see me, but so do many of my friends and it doesn't seem to be gendered.

I also fail to see how facial recognition would be analogous to lights in terms of safety or frankly anything else.

The big difference is that if a woman wears a camera to make her feel safer, she'll do it in a way that it's obvious she's recording. The whole point is to make potential attackers aware that they're being recorded. A gopro or a cell phone camera body mount works a lot better for this than meta glasses.

This is a good start, for thinking about evolving privacy policies in a governmental sense.

The tech's there. The genie can't be put back in the bottle, and it will only get cheaper and more invasive. Only question we have any control over is... do we want everyone to have it, or only govs and corps?

There's a second-amendment-like argument here, imo, that is very hard to push back on - because at least this stuff doesn't kill people. I want every cop to be surrounded by five or six recording devices that they don't control at all times - it's the least worst option.

(Obviously I'm not a fan of the "everying goes to facebook" architecture. I'm hoping we get past that).

They haven’t even sold 10mill units. We can still say no.

The tech's also been there to put cameras everywhere, and to wiretap every phone, etc. We put guardrails in place to control how that tech is deployed.

Very limited guard rails (WRT cameras) - they can't be in bathrooms is about all I am aware of as a universal restriction

Man, I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or not…

Not sarcastic, but I probably didn't convey the subtlety of what I was trying to say in a one line comment. I was objecting to the defeatist "oh the tech is there, so we can't do anything about it" attitude. I tried to choose the examples I chose that the tech being there definitely has some consequences and significant privacy implications, but some controls exist too (like, wiretaps are still applied very selectively, there's been a growing movement against Flock cameras and scaling back of their deployments in some places recently).

you're implying there is some kind of symmetry here, that facial recognition will empower individuals in a way to counteract the power given to governments and corporations.

I should try to compile my own database of everyone's location? I fail to see how it helps me in any way

You as an individual? Probably not, but you could lobby your local government to, for instance, require any such dataset taken from information in the public be subject to the freedom of information act.

Victims of stalking would likely be greatly harmed by such a rule.

This is all theoretical and pie in the sky stuff, just to be blunt. People are not going to organize like this in any meaningful way. It is going to be generally just bad for society.

We have traffic/crime cams all over the place. We’ve done nothing to flip that on its head. A little minor vandalism here and there and some bad press. Why would this be any different?

If only people already had recording device in their pocket they take with them everywhere…

How often you see someone taping a phone to their head and wearing it into a bathroom?

It's sociopathic to wear spywear in a public setting.

What about bodycams on public servants?

(I think the precise form factor is something of a distraction. I'm talking about cheap, tiny, always-on cameras hooked up to giant hard discs in the sky, however they're packaged).

Bodycams that just record video: I'm fine with that. There's a clear societal benefit to it, and if you see a uniformed police officer, you presume your actions are being witnessed (if only by the human police officer). I'm way less skeeved out by a policeman carrying a gun than some drunk rando in a bar.

Bodycams that feature face recognition: Not OK, whether it's law enforcement or some weirdo at a night club. The former, because I don't want to live in a society where police log civilians' movements. The latter, because it's creepy with civilians do it, too.

> Bodycams that feature face recognition: Not OK, whether it's law enforcement or some weirdo at a night club.

Ok, but... you know it's inevitable, right? Shops are already doing it, the first weirdo doing it at a nightclub is probably going to be the doorman (transferring the old "do not accept checks from this man" mugshots to the digital realm), I don't know about other countries but the UK police are doing it (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fac...).

One of the advantages of bodycams for the police is that the people they deal with get a bit better behaved when they know they're on camera. I'm saying we should have that advantage too. (This is "an armed society is a polite society" redux - a surveilled society is a polite society?)

Check out David Brin's concept of the Transparent Society. He's been banging on about this for a couple of decades, and he's a deeper thinker and more persuasive than I am. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

I stress I believe transparency is the least-worst option available to us, not the most desirable option.

It’s not inevitable if people choose to make it illegal. Illinois for one has strict laws around collecting bioinformatics.

Maybe I'm cynical, but it's already here.

Is this the Illinois law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_... Because the second sentence in that article is "Notably, the Act does not apply to government entities."

My whole point is that the tech is already on top of us, the only question that's still up in the air is who gets access to it.

This is more like putting hidden cameras in hotels. The difference is the discrete factor and the facial recognition. Both are disgusting imo.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle, but we can control how we react to it. As far as I'm concerned, I will treat people wearing smart glasses the same way I would treat someone shoving a smartphone camera in my face. I'll just refuse to engage with them.

Are you forgetting Google Glass? We put this genie back into the bottle once: we can do it again.

I was going to write something about that. The "techno fatalism" is annoyingly strong nowadays.

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