alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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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.
This is a good start, for thinking about evolving privacy policies in a governmental sense.
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.
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).
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.