Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses
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[0] New Privacy Menace: Cell Phones? (2003): https://www.wired.com/2003/02/new-privacy-menace-cell-phones...
[1] More trouble for camera-phones (2003): https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2003/06/195-2/
[2] Camera Phones Raise Whole New Set of Privacy Issues (2004): https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/camera-phones-raise-w...
[3] Cam Phones, Go Home (2005): https://time.com/archive/6671091/cam-phones-go-home/
I see what you did there.
Smart glasses should not be allowed to have a camera always pointed at people. If needed, let them integrate with a phone to use the camera which is much more visually obvious to people when it is being used.
The point is if you’re recording with a handheld device at least you can ensure there is some level of awareness to those around who can duck/signal they don’t want to be in it.
How can you do that with meta glasses?
Get real man.
https://www.adac.de/verkehr/recht/verkehrsvorschriften-deuts...
It could be, but that's a separate problem. Surreptitiously filming someone can be problematic even if the videos are kept private.
Isn't everyone already carrying an expensive wiretap around with them at all times anyway? Is the only difference that people don't know or care how their smartphone can be made to record everything they say and thus they don't worry?
I get weeklies about the machinations of my own country's parliament. It is almost entirely dull. The small amount of salacious action is seized upon by news outlets. Upshot: the plebs falsely believe they are informed.
The EU is like this but much more so. The vast amount of stuff is technical and boring. What you do read is likely removed from context and sexed-up to generate clicks. Does the EU do bass and stupid things? Yes. Is that what you're reading about? Unlikely, unless you're a politics junkie with a high tolerance for trade documents.
True - many places where photography and video recording by people and organizations is already done on a broad scale with both smartphones and infrastructure cameras.
> "We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed, or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored"
... I think we're gonna need a bigger ban
Just because you’re in public doesn’t mean it’s ok to take secret upskirt photos, film in the gym showers, etc. There actually is a certain level of privacy expected in public.
Edit: corrected SE Asia to East Asia.
Someone wearing weird 3D printed camera glasses is going to be obvious. Someone with the skill to disassemble a tiny glued together smart glass frame, bypass any hardware protections, and flash a custom OS will be rare, and they’ll get caught anyway when they “accidentally” wander into the women’s locker for the third time.
So yeah, I guess as long as you're okay with a law like that potentially becoming very easy to bypass then I don't have a problem with it. But I think once things start going down that path, most people aren't going to be satisfied with leaving it at that; they'll hear about a bypass and start pushing to restrict the freedoms that enabled it.
The point is to ban widespread normalization of tools that make invasion of privacy easy. You can go find a shirt button spy cam on Aliexpress, but if you get caught wearing it then everyone knows what you’re up to. Wearing one in certain places could be taken as criminal intent.
(I don’t think restrictions like this would work in the US without an amendment, but I think we’re long overdue for a privacy amendment to clarify some things.)
There are two sides to privacy laws, and the downside is not often discussed.
I live in "SE Asia" - specifically Vietnam - and I've never heard of such a law. I just looked it up and the two countries that come up are Korea and Japan, neither of which are in SE Asia.
This phrasing seems odd, considering that those two countries are firmly in East Asia, and would not be considered as a part of SE Asia by any definition.
It’s a habit of thought that I should break because it’s not really a common way to look at Asia, which makes communication difficult. It’s almost certainly a habit derived from discussion about the US, which is often discussed as four quadrants plus “the midwest,” which is really the center.
Personally, I gave up years ago. People don't care about actual privacy, they just care about the illusion of it.
Well except for America- there such creeps become pillars of the community.
My argument isn't that we should let "the wrong people" setup their own camera, or strap cameras to their face and walk around, or whatever the next thing is to come along and record people with impunity.
My argument is that, if you want to solve a problem then address the actual problem. In this context, there's no way to know whether someone is a creep before they act on their creep-like nature, so the safest things to do for children is ban recording of all under 18's in public as a strict criminal offense. Security cameras, mobile phones, glasses, implants, whatever.
Today, the suggestion is wildly unthinkable as a complete overreaction, but in the 1990's there was a brief moment where that could have actually been the outcome, at least outside of the USA. I suspect if people knew then what it would look like today - even disregarding smart glasses altogether - that the opposition would have been stronger.
Is it the added convenience of the glasses?
Trying to ban recording in public is silly. People just need to realize that they're probably being recorded in public. That cat has been out of the bag for many years now.
And it's hard to call it consent when the alternative is never going in public which is infeasible for most people.
But the world has changed. For instance last year I recognized my father in a travel video published by a youtuber from another continent. You would have thought that it is no big deal if a latin american can record video of people in europe because its target audience is unlikely to recognize anyone. Yet here we are, people nowadays can have relatives, friends and or former colleagues spread all over the globe, or consuming content published online but targetting a public from very far away.
Until now it wasn't a big deal as it was still easy to spot someone recording a video from quite far and move away or hide your face. And we would rely on good old shame and citizen vigilance to spot people recording kids for example. "spy cameras" used to have such a crappy quality you couldn't do anything too bad without getting close and in good light. Now it becomes a bit complicated with these glasses.
It's the same as a buttonhole camera used for spying. The differentiator (vs a phone or SLR or similar) is that its primary function is concealed.
If you have to defend smart glasses based on a technicality, that doesn't reflect very well on the glasses.
Even if we banned smart glasses, we'd still see ever-expanding networks of privately owned cameras that record every movement you make. We'd still have networks of ring cameras and similar devices. We'll still have ever-increasing use of AI to sort and categorise the content.
Privacy is dead. Smart glasses are just an uncomfortable reminder of this fact, and banning them without addressing the over-arching issue is similar to sticking our collective head in the sand.
Just because we haven’t yet beaten ALPRs doesn’t mean I want some dickhead recording me at a hot spring without me knowing. Having both things to deal with is worse than having just one.
Maybe if we started with the "strap cameras to the face of the population" plan we'd all have been less inclined to act like frogs in rapidly warming water. Alas.
I would understand if you felt this way privately, in fact I can relate to that.
Society at large spent a long time ridiculing people with these concerns, are you really so shocked that I am enjoying the moment where the issue comes home to roost? I'm not obligated to be a constructive member of society in all regards.
Targeting smart glasses specifically seems to narrow though, because there are obviously many other ways to carry around a hidden camera in public, like one disguised as a pen in your pocket or something.
The current regulation is good enough; we don't need more regulation - if anything we should update the existing regulation to ensure we protect our privacy in critical and sensitive places.
we keep forgetting that having cameras readily available is not just a negative thing, it does help provide forensics material in cases where something happens.
that said, we can probably find common ground rules for using these - norwegians are best in class when it comes to adhering to rules and regulations.
Laws prohibiting explicit recording of a person and espionage exist in many countries and they work fine.
I'm betting that the streaking has gone down as cameras have gone up.
Laws will seldom work 100% of the time, but I profoundly disagree with your implied attitude. "They don't cover this future case, so we shouldn't do anything now".
Guilty.
> I profoundly disagree
People will take to wearing corrective contact lenses that will have recording capabilities in a few years. This is going to open up a huge can of worms for privacy, cinemas, and more. I did not write that we mustn't do anything about it right now, only that it is short-sighted. Creating laws about wearable recording devices would benefit from addressing near-future technology, which will include easily concealed digitally augmented corrective lenses.
* https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/vil-innfore-midlertidi...
* https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dep/dfd/org/minister-of-digita...
* Contact: postmottak@dfd.dep.no