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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Quite simply because people don't want to be casually recorded 24/7. By "casually" I mean by other people doing so indiscriminately, if not actively fishing for "content", as opposed to entities doing so for more justifiable reasons, like a security cam.

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Doesn’t that strongly suggest us that it’s not the filming that’s actually problematic, but something that happens afterwards?

No. People simply stop behaving naturally when being casually recorded. It creates completely artificial scenarios. For instance if for some reason I had a friend pick up one of these glasses I certainly wouldn't allow him into my house with them on, even if he assured there was no recording, and I completely believed him. The mere presence of a such would just create a dampening effect on normal behavior. It'd be akin to somebody constantly pointing their phone camera at everybody, even if it was indeed off.

And in practice many of the undesirable things that will happen with these glasses are 100% legal. For instance people are going to bars, finding drunk girls, and recording everything for clicks and humiliation. Ban the filming and you ban the glasses. Banning the publication would do nothing since there's endless ways to share "content" that would sidestep this.

And that's just one trend. There's endless ways for this stuff to be abused, yet very few ways it'll achieve anything good. And those are much more hypothetical than the endless abuses which are already rife in spite of these things being extremely fringe.

Thank you. I think (or hope) I see your point.

I happen to were in exact scenario that you have mentioned, and I think I understand what you mean. Just as an anecdote - no, it doesn’t always work that way. At least it didn’t worked that way with me, because I held a different belief. It irked me for a moment - when I recognized a camera the association of topic-adjacent controversies sprung to mind. However, I dismissed it, and in retrospect I can assure that my behavior returned to natural. And if not for Meta specifically, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me at all.

(The person with glasses had an - IMHO - very legit use case for having a device like that, if this matters.)

But that’s just me with my weird beliefs. In my head a camera is a sensor. It’s no fundamentally different from wearer’s own eyes to me.

When I emphasized “actually” I was (very poorly) trying to say that it ideally shouldn’t be a problem, because its not what causes harm, only provides a way to cause it. But you’re right, when the abuse is de-facto the only prevalent spoken about use case, and legal side doesn’t match social expectations, it creates all those ill effects, so even if it possibly shouldn’t be problematic - it becomes such, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy’s way.

People nearly always go for the lowest hanging fruits, I shouldn’t hate us for this. But it’s really depressing, to be honest.

The big difference is one's eyes cannot be used to record and share events in perfect detail. What happens between people stays between people, or relies on low reliability recounting. This is of course without even hitting on what you mentioned - that this is all being beamed back to Meta who's going to try to monetize it in any way they can, and then likely further onto the NSA who's sole purpose in modern existence seems to be to try to create Precrime.

And in exchange we get... what? Somebody can record things slightly faster than the approximately 3 seconds it'd take you to do so on your phone?

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