I think this gets at only half of the problem. Not only can meta not be trusted, even if I trust _you_ if you were friend, I wouldn't trust any _other_ random user of such a product. As such, better to not have such a product around.
It's basically the same backlash that hit Google Glass over a decade ago. Nothing has really changed about the product and the reason people reject is so viscerally when they're not the user.
We told em tough don’t use our kid’s photo. So even if institutions implement this kinda thing almost non want to do it.
It's rare we get serious wins over big tech. It's tough to think of something else that's been so roundly societally rejected, not so much as a bad product, but as something that's loathed so much it has no future.
Just make it obvious that they're not ordinary glasses, but recording devices.
Not just a tiny LED that can be covered, but something like the camera is on an arm that swings out in front of the wearer so there's no mistaking that a recording is in progress.
The fact that they're designed for stealth shows the nefarious intent.
I don't think we have to go so far as assigning nefarious intent here, there are a lot of reasons they're designed as they are. For example your proposed solution is bulky, expensive and prone to damage, so there's plenty of non-nefarious reasons they don't have it operate that way.
I am 100% on board with calling smart glasses "Pervert glasses" if worn in situations that call for it
i dont want to have a camera stuck to my face that i dont really control in order to see
This may be a body camera or a camera built into glasses. That is a very legit usecase as far as I'm concerned.
There are other professions in which such a device would be a net benefit, that was just a simple example.
what would these offer that can't already be done w/ their existing solutions, outside of streaming data to evil megacorps?
If it was about the latter then I'd agree that there is no usecase for them
I think we should really make a distinction between products that do and do not have cameras. Most people would probably be fine with the 'smart' aspects of it if it didn't have any video recording capabilities. On the other hand, most of the average people specifically want these things to be able to record videos, so maybe hoping for such devices is a non-starter.
I mean, the real answer is that we have the technology to be tech wizards. You could conjure spatially anchored widgets and screens and gauges.
You could put a cooking show screen above the stove, where a physical screen wouldn't work. You could put a synced calendar on the wall. Notes app on the fridge, weather reminders by the door. ...a million mundane conveniences in the house alone.
But still, its too heavy and to do the spatial anchoring you need a device with a constant camera feed and the only folks who make that at the moment have questionable morals.
Some of the attitudes on this website, especially ones like yours, are the literal reason we are in this mess today.
Please, please, if you have the power, push back on this nonsense from the inside. We need more people talking to other people like real humans, not like notes in a digital diary.
This push for « convenience » is how we ended up with microphones in people’s most private spaces.
I urge you to consider whether humanity really needs more technological solutions to social problems.
It's XR, for them it's a notes app in the convenient place, for me it might be a next meeting reminder on the wall next to my work screen, so I can work less distracted and more focused.
Why is their way of enriching their connected life a problem?
I think some of the worst attitudes on this website is projecting own worst case scenarios and implying bad intentions to the most innocuous or honest signals. That's the problem much bigger than someone's glasses - you support polarisation and teaming (us vs them) instead of seeking connection or understanding.
It's like people obsessing over window managers. 99% of the time, the amount of windows you have showing is not the problem, you can't really focus on more than one at a time anyway.
Consider as a demonstrative example, race car drivers. They have had options to have extremely detailed Heads Up Displays with all sorts of absurd data available at a glance for decades. But they largely do not use tons of data like that, because it's just not compatible with the human brain. They already are looking at things more often and processing more info than a "normal" person while racing, but that heads up display would not benefit them.
Similarly, the Heads Up Display for modern fighter jets is very lightweight, focusing on allowing you to see around it and provide you the very basics of flight instrumentation and a standard orientation instrument.
People just have wild ideas about how to "optimize" their lives that are just not supported by reality.
You would be better off making flash cards about those things you want to "know" in that moment and drilling them.
I too used to be drawn to this idea. Back in 2016ish, I got an ODBII dongle for my car and app for my phone and was so excited about all the data I was going to have at a glance, just like some sort of pro! But the data was pointless and meaningless. Oh, timing advance is at 20 degrees in this throttle regime. Cool I guess.
Eventually I gave up and only have my car showing instantaneous fuel efficiency, which is the only valuable data point for my needs.
It's kind of a bad example, because there are other reasons that we don't have HUDsin cars.
A friend of mine designed car interiors. His explanation went like this:
With a HUD, you have to pick a focus point.
In an airplane, when you look forward, your eyes are always focused at infinity, so the HUD is focused there. It has the same focus point as your eyes.
In a car everything is slower and closer, so you have to constantly change your focus.
The HUD though has a single focus point though, and drivers' eyes tend to lock onto the HUD's focus. This focus lock interferes with normal scanning, and drivers stop seeing important things. They don't notice important things, so they get into accidents.
According to him, HUDs in cars lead to much higher accident rates.
Honestly, they sound all useless. Like, junk gandgets you get because someone needed to give you a christmas gift, then you use them for like 2 weeks as toys and then they end up forgotten collecting dust junk.
The reason people dont have those is because they dont have real actual utility.
Its the final gadget.
Reminds me of ipad and to a lesser extent, apple watch. It came out with a ton of hype, tons of people got one, only to never really use it because hey, it only does the exact same stuff as the phone you carry around with you all the time anyhow.
I think the one thing that a headset does bring to the table is the hands free nature of it. There are quite a few AR apps and use cases that phones can currently do that fall short because you need to hold your phone out and that's really invasive and fatiguing.
In theory you could have things like a walk through of a DIY engine repair that adds virtual pointers and highlights to important things.
You could do this in a video where you go to your phone, watch a step, rewind, put the phone down, find where in the real world the thing is, do the thing, wipe your hands, pick up the phone, repeat etc. but I imagine it would be nicer in AR.
I'm not saying spend a trillion dollars on this, just that it would be a neat thing.
the new scooters and such will actually fix that as infrastructure gets rebuilt to better support them.
the end of having e-scooters will be that things are a little better for wheelchairs, even if there's a temporary rougher spot
The core problem of solitude is curiosity and sonder.
When I smell fennel on a hike, I want to know what it is - yeah, this is dog fennel.
When I see a strange symbol on a taxi car, I want to know why it is 3 arrows on bow and what that is.
Seeing a strange dog and wondering what kind of dog that is (a whippet?). A glimpse of a black bird with red shoulder patches.
Hearing someone's ringtone (not these days anymore) and wonder why it is familiar ("ah, it is spelled fa9la, who'd have guessed").
There is a twinge of "This is why we can't have nice things" about the whole article for someone who can't get enough of the world you can see through your eyes.
Different stokes, though.
It can be less intrusive than using a phone, I believe. That makes it a step closer to being present. (I don't know specifics, but I'm assuming that the display can be turned off when not in use.)
Also, if someone already wears glasses, why not have glasses that can do more?
You can simply talk to people, we don't have to enable your perversions because you refuse to interact with humans.
(didn't work out that way in practice, but that was the idea)
Mindfulness >>> recordings, any day of the week. Be there with your kid and don't worry about capturing every precious moment. You're never going to have enough time to curate them anyway. Even if you did, the time spent curating is time you could've just been hanging out with your kid instead.
People generally commit less crime if they think they're on camera
If they do commit a crime, at least there would be video evidence
Or if they just want to be creepy, I'd send those stares to their wife
Considering motivated perverts would use hidden cameras, as opposed to cameras literally on their face, I think the asymmetry here is in favor of recording the perverts rather than vice versa
Unlike the sword, the camera itself does not incite deeds of violence
My understanding at least is that cameras (or even signs) reducing/preventing crime by _some_ amount has been independently corroborated across multiple studies
Extend hand for a handshake. Hey, I'm [name]. We've met before but it's been a while.
First, it lets the other person off the hook, because they're almost certainly experiencing the same momentary anxiousness. Second, literally every time I've done this, they've replied like "Hi, nice to talk to you again! And I'm [name]."
Each reminder is geofenced to the business it's attached to. Thus, when I get within the vicinity of any of the businesses in that list, it shows me the reminder. Kind of like a Rolodex. It doubles as a flash card of sorts when I don't patron the business that day.
I don't depend on it as much these days as this simply existing helped me get better at name recall, but it was immensely helpful when I created it.
I’m not telling you that I think you’re wrong or foolish, to be clear! I just have this different instinct from you, although it sounds like we basically agree on the reflective level. I’m interested in what it is that directs peoples’ attention and interest in such a way that new information technology products pattern-match to “cool, shiny, new, handy, exciting; freedom” or to “dystopian social control, creepy surveillance capitalism; unfreedom.” People have different System 1 intuitions, orthogonal to their System 2 thinking!
It’s so weird because I used to be the other way. I can’t put my finger on when or how the phase transition took place in my mind.
In the beginning they stepped in with the cloud to bring the "always available" thing to the masses, while simultaneously socially and legally destroying the burgeoning p2p ecosystem. Convenience at the cost of freedom.
That had the effect of kneecapping the technological progress and knowhow of ordinary people and has left them trapped on platforms they moved their lives to but are owned by their abusers.
The abusers are now in complete control and the abused have no ability to even imagine an alternative.
The alternative is to leave these platforms. Form alternate social groups with open technologies that stay resilient to outages and attacks.
We don't need the cloud anymore for the vast majority of civic and social life.
We got tech and only then realized all the things that we then lost.
black mirror is a breath of fresh air in that, but even that lacks in how to think about how technology and society really interact
The wrapper is hard/impossible to remove, only the company can trigger the self-release mechanism, and customers have to sign that they owe you a lot of money when they remove or damage it (which is risky, so they have to be careful or it's their problem). You basically just rent it to them, for lots of money per month, so they can show off their Good Guy Glasses (hey that's actually a name! can I have 10% please if anyone does this, I'll also help out if you want, maybe with the tiny sledge hammer. thanks!).
"Oh, you can afford Meta glasses to be a perv? Well, I can't afford the equivalent of a bunch of them every year, but I still do it because I'm a good person."
The ad could be some street kid in the rain with some guy (Morgan Freeman maybe) offering to sell it these glasses, saying "you can pay in tiny rates" and whatnot, and the kid just sadly shakes its head.. so the guy goes down on one knee, eye to eye with the kid and says... "When I was your age, I thought everything is about money, too. But some things are about being a good person. If you had a mommy, surely she would want you to be a good person, right?" The kid nods, still hesitates, but by the way the music swells as the ad fades you just know it's gonna be alright.
The no camera HUD is exactly what I want, except I also want SSH (Mosh) and sending text to speech to it before I'd buy these.
Imagine if tomorrow we invented ubiquitous instant teleportation to arbitrary locations.
There would be a moment where we hear how great it is to eliminate commutes, or air travel, followed shortly afterwards by the collapse of civilisation as societies grapple with the elimination of property, what remains of private space, and so on.
This is a phenomenon among the masses of consumers who use this tech, the corporation has nothing to do with it. In fact the corporation is trying to reign in your freedom to use these tools by stopping this perverted stuff from happening. Blame US, consumers, not our corporate overlords.
Here's what I think: I think it is essential to protect freedom of the press and freedom of speech. This is just an unfortunate consequence of those freedoms. If you want to protect womens discomfort then you have to restrict these freedoms. I'm against that. This is an unfortunate situation but the alternative is worse. Because ONCE those rules are in place and codified into law, censorship and freedoms can become bigger and worse.
Women just need to deal with it. Assume that whenever you're in a public place, ALL your actions are PUBLIC. A women (and men) should dress and talk in a way conducive to the public arena.
Either way, despite what I believe, it's already to late. This freedom is already restricted by Wiretapping law. If someone threatens to kill you and you wiretap it as evidence... that evidence is dismissible in court even after said subject (you) was found dead. We are rapidly moving towards a world where a persons discomfort can control your freedoms and even dictate reality (evidence).
Sounds absurd only because you don't understand.
Same for phones too while we're at it.
The freedom to record affectively tempers freedom of speech and stops people from using the former freedom excessively.
That's not how the law works in the U.S. or most of Europe. A recording of the defendant threatening to kill the victim is admissible as evidence, especially if the victim winds up dead shortly thereafter. For example, see https://www.thebulldog.law/california-penal-code-633-5-the-v...
And importantly, these exceptions are only required in two-party-consent jurisdictions, of which there are only about a dozen. The remaining states are one-party consent. Most of Europe is one-party consent.
People have been the subject of stalking, harassment, rape irrespective of how they dress for ages. If you consider "being polite to a customer at a coffee shop" as an invitation to any of the above, then I guess you can claim that its solely the victim's responsibility to prevent this sort of thing. But I ask, what is the victim's recourse if they legit do not want to be filmed and broadcast? Just stay home? Are we seriously going to give third-tier facebook-live streamers that much power?
I feel like "if asked, don't monetize content containing others, if the content only occurred because of the recorder's actions". Like, yes, if you're in public, you can be filmed, sure. But if I ask you not to film me, and then you make money off a recording of just me saying "don't film me", that feels less like free speech, and more like monetizing actionable harassment.
Obviously, we cannot wholly bar these jack wagons from going out and finding the exact edge of “harassment worth pursuing legal action over”. But we can lower the cost of pursuing legal action, and raise the cost of defending against such action. That’s all I’m proposing.
Flatly untrue. Can you get harassed regardless of anything in particular? Sure. Is the probability of harassment tied to various factors, like the way you dress? Absolutely yes.
My daughters have dealt with sexual harassment. Should I tell them to dress less sluttily? I mean, they wear what I buy for them, and I don’t think I buy anything wildly inviting of anything. But what do I know?! I’m just the father of a 7 and 6 year old.