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I'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
by kstrauser 4mo ago
I'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.
- monkpit 4mo agoTo 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.
- kstrauser 4mo ago[flagged]
- RobotToaster 4mo agoThat's still common assault.
- thrownthatway 4mo agoGood people break bad laws.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- reaperducer 4mo agoThat's still common assault. So call a cop. Where I live, one might get around to responding to you in six to 12 hours.
- tremon 4mo agoActually, that's battery. The assault is by the person recording without consent.
- RobotToaster 4mo agoHow is filming someone causing physical contact or harm, or putting someone in apprehension of physical harm?
- thrownthatway 4mo agoGives a whole new meaning to the term spyware. Spywear
- kstrauser 4mo agoI'm stealing this, thanks.
- thrownthatway 4mo ago[dead]
- Cider9986 4mo agoI am highly opposed to these glasses, but there's nothing you can do about it in public besides swearing at these people and not being friends with them.
- Findecanor 4mo agoSometimes I have wished I had a handheld EMP gun for such situations. What are they going to do? It would be harmless to living beings and leave no trace. Their device would simply stop working suddenly.
- kstrauser 4mo ago1. I am sympathetic to the notion, in fictional settings. 2. Real world pacemakers, deep brain stimulators, infusion pumps, cochlear implants, etc. may be less tolerant of it.
- flir 4mo agoThe 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).
- Forgeties79 4mo agoThey haven’t even sold 10mill units. We can still say no.
- yuliyp 4mo agoThe tech's also been there to put cameras everywhere, and to wiretap every phone, etc. We put guardrails in place to control how that tech is deployed.
- awesome_dude 4mo agoVery limited guard rails (WRT cameras) - they can't be in bathrooms is about all I am aware of as a universal restriction
- senordevnyc 4mo agoMan, I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or not…
- yuliyp 4mo agoNot sarcastic, but I probably didn't convey the subtlety of what I was trying to say in a one line comment. I was objecting to the defeatist "oh the tech is there, so we can't do anything about it" attitude. I tried to choose the examples I chose that the tech being there definitely has some consequences and significant privacy implications, but some controls exist too (like, wiretaps are still applied very selectively, there's been a growing movement against Flock cameras and scaling back of their deployments in some places recently).
- innerHTML 4mo agowhile 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.
- kstrauser 4mo agoI can definitely see women not wanting to be facially recognized as they're minding their own business and walking home from work and not wanting to be stalked.
- footy 4mo agoI live in Canada (many dark months) and am a woman who knows many women and I've never known anyone to wear a vest with a light on them. I do own a hat with a light that I use when I'm walking to the gym in the dark so that drivers will see me, but so do many of my friends and it doesn't seem to be gendered. I also fail to see how facial recognition would be analogous to lights in terms of safety or frankly anything else.
- bryanlarsen 4mo agoThe big difference is that if a woman wears a camera to make her feel safer, she'll do it in a way that it's obvious she's recording. The whole point is to make potential attackers aware that they're being recorded. A gopro or a cell phone camera body mount works a lot better for this than meta glasses.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoI 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.
- kstrauser 4mo agoThat's an important distinction, but yes, it's irrelevant here. If Apple offered on-device, privacy-preserving, not-uploaded facial recognition, I wouldn't be inherently opposed to it. There's no way Facebook wouldn't feed that data right into their own Eye of Sauron. Same with Logitech Circle doorbells that tell you which of your friends or family is at the front door, using local computing. That's a great feature. I wouldn't use a Ring camera that was shipping the data back to Amazon and any number of police departments.
- ncr100 4mo agoThis is a good start, for thinking about evolving privacy policies in a governmental sense.