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Comment by throa8923489 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of this talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG0KrT6pBPk by moxie. We thought we would get facism, instead we got social democracy.

We will be able to deal with this, though, using appropriate laws. Europe will certainly go down that route, the US will probably follow. For example, using the camera to take pictures or videos that are stored or shared (vs. just processed by some augmented reality algorithms) could enable a small lamp on the frame of the glasses. Just like a video recorder, but without the ability to (easily!) turn it off.

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> We will be able to deal with this, though, using appropriate laws.

Ah, yes, in the same way that we've dealt with music piracy through law.

More seriously, people are going to have to get over the feeling that recording an event with human memory is obviously acceptable while recording an event with higher-fidelity devices is obviously not. Especially given that recordings can be faked, there is no dividing line between these. If you don't want people to remember something, don't let them know in the first place. Trying to regulate people's memory, whether internal or external, seems like a terrible idea.

> Especially given that recordings can be faked, there is no dividing line between these.

How many of the people you know have ever created a video that seems completely true but is actually doctored? I'm a software developer, reasonably comfortable with technology, but I wouldn't know how, and I'm not even sure if I know anyone I could ask to do it. Certainly not without a fair amount of expense. Contrast that with verbal accounts of "internal memory": even a three year old is perfectly capable of lying, about pretty much anything.

So, if you tell or show someone something privately, you at least have the fallback of denying it if they go and share it against your wishes. If they record it, then in almost all cases people will take it as fact and there's nothing you can do. Not only that, but then they can actually show other people rather than just telling them. For many things, that's a much bigger deal.

> using the camera to take pictures or videos that are stored or shared could enable a small lamp on the frame of the glasses

> you can see a light in the prism when the device is recording

This appears to already be true of Glass, although recognition of what that light means won't be widespread until the devices are.

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