cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/c/technology/p/1812149/this-app-warns-you-if-someone-is-wearing-smart-glasses-nearby-404media
The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media’s coverage of how people are using Meta’s Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech.”
more at: @feed@404media.co
Here’s the problem, it’s not doing anything people already couldn’t and weren’t doing, it’s just making it a lot easier and making it more widely available. Honestly it’s the exact same issue with “AI”, every bad aspect about it was already being done with existing LLMs, they were just the domain of a much smaller subset of people.
It’s also manufacturing consent for society to accept being covertly recorded by random people at all times, and potentially for that footage to be posted out of context on the internet with brainrot edits and sound effects mocking people minding their own business because they happened to act a little funny but ultimately harmless in public. It used to be that wearing any kind of hidden camera on your person made you a creep and an asshole period, doubly so if you post any of that footage anywhere, even when it was technically legal. Is it wrong to want it to stay that way? Now you have tech companies not just providing resources to, but actively encouraging that same creep behavior and gas lighting everyone else into thinking they’re the problem if they don’t like it.
Isn’t making it a lot easier and more widely available the whole point?
This could be said of so many things.
Yeah that’s kinda my point.
But there’s often utility in that
This line of reasoning was already perfectly captured in Office Space: https://youtube.com/watch?v=yZjCQ3T5yXo
That’s… not even close to what I’m saying. That’s like saying using computers to steal money is illegal therefore using computers is illegal. Someone walking around with a camera is fairly commonplace, the problem is this tech makes it less easy to see and more accessible, which is a problem because of the number of people who would want to use it for something illegal. Remember back when they started making digital cameras which could take pictures silently, which was a big privacy issue? Then they started making mandatory sound effects when a picture was taken… until they stopped doing that?