6 ms·

I don't mean to go too much against the narrative in this thread, but aren't cameras on glasses necessary to achieve AR? Are people concerned about these glasse

by aierou 5y ago

I don't mean to go too much against the narrative in this thread, but aren't cameras on glasses necessary to achieve AR? Are people concerned about these glasses just because it's Facebook, or is there broader opposition to AR technology?

briandear 5y ago
For me, it’s because Facebook. They have no track record of trust. I work for a significant Silicon Valley tech company and have seen up close the types of shenanigans that have been attempted by Facebook — especially with their mobile apps. Don’t trust them.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  > They have no track record of trust. Its worse. They have a consistent track record for asking for trust and then breaking it in most abusive way possible, then issuing a non-apology only after getting caught and then repeating same process all-over again. Oh, I forgot mentioning FB getting rich in the process, so it somehow becomes justified and has zero chance for change.
  - aierou 5y ago
    Aren't all recorded breaches of trust (outside of admittedly predatory data collection schemes endemic to the software industry) the result of unprecedented attacks on social networks as a construct? How would one anticipate such attacks? I think it's fair to say that Facebook grew too quickly to mitigate the issues inherent to social networks at scale. I don't think that makes them abusive or evil, just naive.
    - freeone3000 5y ago
      Remember the time they asked for your phone number for 2FA and then used it for contact linking?
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      There was that one time they conducted a study on emotion manipulation on 700,000 people without informed consent. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
- aierou 5y ago
  From my position, the mobile app shenanigans look like little more than intracompany politics. Where Facebook is not getting data, Apple or Google are still happily collecting. Overall, I would guess that there is no track record of trust because expectations remain unclear. Concepts of privacy, data usage, and such didn't exist before Facebook and others. I suppose I am not eager to assume malintent outside what is standard for any business operating for the sake of profit.
  - amelius 5y ago
    We should take away the incentive for these companies to abuse our data.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "Concepts of privacy, data usage, and such didn't exist before Facebook and others." They did exist before Facebook. But not before "others", which include every company and person who ever existed. Not sure why you added "and others" to that sentence.
    - aierou 5y ago
      Sorry, yes, that is poorly worded on my part. I meant to say that there is a class of privacy discussion that essentially did not exist prior to the widespread adoption of social media.
jayd16 5y ago
I think its pretty much just a complaint against Facebook. You could buy the first gen Snap Spectacles and its the same thing, no?
- fortran77 5y ago
  THat's my thought, too. Anyone who wants to hide a camera on their person can do so easily. A small hole in a shirt, coat, or hat can conceal a lens and cameras can be tiny. Yet nobody's rushing out to pass laws against "concealable cameras" in general.
  - yati 5y ago
    You also have to see how easy these will be to use, with a dedicated app and all, compared to hiding a camera. In practice, if I spot a hidden cam on someone interacting with me in public, I’d call them out, but socially it would e super awkward to ask someone to put their glasses away. But I agree the FB association might be making people extra uncomfortable (can’t blame them!)
    - fogof 5y ago
      What if you met someone carrying their phone in their breast pocket, with the camera facing outward? Would you ask to see their phone to see if they were recording you?
macrolime 5y ago
These glasses have no AR though, just a camera.
- aierou 5y ago
  If these were AR glasses first, would we have accepted the cameras as a necessary evil? If that is the case, then the concern seems superficial.
  - macrolime 5y ago
    If the AR glasses were very useful, then I would think so.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    AR requires cameras, doesn't it? It's the connecting to the internet, recording the video and not allowing people a single shred of privacy anywhere, eventually even in their own homes, that is galling, especially when FB is doing it so they can track you down and bomb you with advertisements.
billti 5y ago
For AR they will need some ability to interpret the world around them, but high res photography isn’t the only way. Think Lidar and the like already used to get a spatial understanding, or the infrared dots used in some face/body recognition. I expect that companies that are more “privacy” focus will avoid a camera, or at least any ability for apps to directly access the images from them if they do have them.
jlokier 5y ago
It's possible to do AR without at the same time streaming and recording the video stream to a social network. Almost nobody will feel violated if a blind person has camera-based prosthetic eyesight... unless it's also recording for others to gawk at later. I think the key privacy distinction isn't whether there's a device using a camera to augment vision. It's whether the glasses are recording for publication via Facebook at one extreme, versus just processing locally to perform AR and discarding the stream at the other extreme. Where personal information may be involved for functionality, ideally it should use sophisticated privacy-preserving data queries, for example looking up faces and gaits without revealing to the cloud who is being looked up (technically challenging but undoubtedly possible to build). Even if the video is not published, but it's streamed to Facebook for, say, demographic manipulation analysis, race estimation, genetic healthcare analytics (affecting other individual people's insurance premiums based on what it sees), juicy gaffes that are "recommended" by ML to be posted as probable high-engagement rage-tweets, customer service profiling, that sort thing, it's going to make being around a person wearing these things high-anxiety for a lot of people. The list of possible dark applications is endless. For good reason: It has the power to ruin someone's life, and certainly end or prevent a career, should someone else wish to do that. Just recording the video (or even audio) without publishing it, purely for the owner's use, could be a problem if it's pervasive. It might be used later against you when you thought you were ok being relaxed and informal without paying heightened attention to your every action. Perhaps someone you thought was a friend decided later to use their private recording as evidence for a character assassination campaign or whatever. Imagine if everything you said, every gesture, every eyebrow movement might be plucked out of context and turned into an outrage tweet at any time after it happened. Panopticon is a problem. People need informal contexts where it's ok to not be on heightened alert at least some of the time.
- aierou 5y ago
  Right. However, it is my understanding that these glasses in their current form do not stream or publish data to Facebook, and I have no reason to suspect that future AR glasses would do that either. Technology has no inherent morality, and can be used for just as much good as bad.

by aierou 5y ago

briandear 5y ago

For me, it’s because Facebook. They have no track record of trust. I work for a significant Silicon Valley tech company and have seen up close the types of shenanigans that have been attempted by Facebook — especially with their mobile apps. Don’t trust them.

e3bc54b2 5y ago
> They have no track record of trust. Its worse. They have a consistent track record for asking for trust and then breaking it in most abusive way possible, then issuing a non-apology only after getting caught and then repeating same process all-over again. Oh, I forgot mentioning FB getting rich in the process, so it somehow becomes justified and has zero chance for change.
- aierou 5y ago
  Aren't all recorded breaches of trust (outside of admittedly predatory data collection schemes endemic to the software industry) the result of unprecedented attacks on social networks as a construct? How would one anticipate such attacks? I think it's fair to say that Facebook grew too quickly to mitigate the issues inherent to social networks at scale. I don't think that makes them abusive or evil, just naive.
  - freeone3000 5y ago
    Remember the time they asked for your phone number for 2FA and then used it for contact linking?
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    There was that one time they conducted a study on emotion manipulation on 700,000 people without informed consent. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
aierou 5y ago
From my position, the mobile app shenanigans look like little more than intracompany politics. Where Facebook is not getting data, Apple or Google are still happily collecting. Overall, I would guess that there is no track record of trust because expectations remain unclear. Concepts of privacy, data usage, and such didn't exist before Facebook and others. I suppose I am not eager to assume malintent outside what is standard for any business operating for the sake of profit.
- amelius 5y ago
  We should take away the incentive for these companies to abuse our data.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "Concepts of privacy, data usage, and such didn't exist before Facebook and others." They did exist before Facebook. But not before "others", which include every company and person who ever existed. Not sure why you added "and others" to that sentence.
  - aierou 5y ago
    Sorry, yes, that is poorly worded on my part. I meant to say that there is a class of privacy discussion that essentially did not exist prior to the widespread adoption of social media.

jayd16 5y ago

I think its pretty much just a complaint against Facebook. You could buy the first gen Snap Spectacles and its the same thing, no?

fortran77 5y ago
THat's my thought, too. Anyone who wants to hide a camera on their person can do so easily. A small hole in a shirt, coat, or hat can conceal a lens and cameras can be tiny. Yet nobody's rushing out to pass laws against "concealable cameras" in general.
- yati 5y ago
  You also have to see how easy these will be to use, with a dedicated app and all, compared to hiding a camera. In practice, if I spot a hidden cam on someone interacting with me in public, I’d call them out, but socially it would e super awkward to ask someone to put their glasses away. But I agree the FB association might be making people extra uncomfortable (can’t blame them!)
  - fogof 5y ago
    What if you met someone carrying their phone in their breast pocket, with the camera facing outward? Would you ask to see their phone to see if they were recording you?

macrolime 5y ago

These glasses have no AR though, just a camera.

aierou 5y ago
If these were AR glasses first, would we have accepted the cameras as a necessary evil? If that is the case, then the concern seems superficial.
- macrolime 5y ago
  If the AR glasses were very useful, then I would think so.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  AR requires cameras, doesn't it? It's the connecting to the internet, recording the video and not allowing people a single shred of privacy anywhere, eventually even in their own homes, that is galling, especially when FB is doing it so they can track you down and bomb you with advertisements.

billti 5y ago

For AR they will need some ability to interpret the world around them, but high res photography isn’t the only way. Think Lidar and the like already used to get a spatial understanding, or the infrared dots used in some face/body recognition. I expect that companies that are more “privacy” focus will avoid a camera, or at least any ability for apps to directly access the images from them if they do have them.

jlokier 5y ago

It's possible to do AR without at the same time streaming and recording the video stream to a social network. Almost nobody will feel violated if a blind person has camera-based prosthetic eyesight... unless it's also recording for others to gawk at later. I think the key privacy distinction isn't whether there's a device using a camera to augment vision. It's whether the glasses are recording for publication via Facebook at one extreme, versus just processing locally to perform AR and discarding the stream at the other extreme. Where personal information may be involved for functionality, ideally it should use sophisticated privacy-preserving data queries, for example looking up faces and gaits without revealing to the cloud who is being looked up (technically challenging but undoubtedly possible to build). Even if the video is not published, but it's streamed to Facebook for, say, demographic manipulation analysis, race estimation, genetic healthcare analytics (affecting other individual people's insurance premiums based on what it sees), juicy gaffes that are "recommended" by ML to be posted as probable high-engagement rage-tweets, customer service profiling, that sort thing, it's going to make being around a person wearing these things high-anxiety for a lot of people. The list of possible dark applications is endless. For good reason: It has the power to ruin someone's life, and certainly end or prevent a career, should someone else wish to do that. Just recording the video (or even audio) without publishing it, purely for the owner's use, could be a problem if it's pervasive. It might be used later against you when you thought you were ok being relaxed and informal without paying heightened attention to your every action. Perhaps someone you thought was a friend decided later to use their private recording as evidence for a character assassination campaign or whatever. Imagine if everything you said, every gesture, every eyebrow movement might be plucked out of context and turned into an outrage tweet at any time after it happened. Panopticon is a problem. People need informal contexts where it's ok to not be on heightened alert at least some of the time.

aierou 5y ago
Right. However, it is my understanding that these glasses in their current form do not stream or publish data to Facebook, and I have no reason to suspect that future AR glasses would do that either. Technology has no inherent morality, and can be used for just as much good as bad.