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Notes -
What do folks on the Motte think of the "Waves" glasses? Here is the link, quoting the short tweet:
The idea seems to be another in the long string of VC-funded tech companies who seek to make their name on being controversial in the beginning, and slowly becoming socially accepted. It's extremely frustrating that this profit model seems to work, but we can't deny it does (some of the time) at this point.
On the one hand I'm deeply incensed at the thought of other people recording me without my consent. On the other hand... we already waived these rights two decades ago with the Patriot Act, effectively allowing the government and major corporations to spy on us all the time with no repercussions. I personally find it hard to be sympathetic to outrage against these glasses when our nation's legal system has completely bankrupted any notion of a personal right not to be filmed anyway.
I'm not sure which side of the culture war this benefits either. As it stands, it seems a pretty predictable evolution of trends we've been seeing in privacy and technology for a while in the West.
The law in most of the West (maybe world) says that you can effectively record strangers in public without permission with a few exceptions. If this becomes popular enough it'll eventually change to require the filming party to have a large or obvious camera / filming apparatus. It only doesn't bother people because it's uncommon.
In a way, it's similar to the shelved 'search for anyone with a picture of their face' Facebook feature that Mark never released because they knew governments would destroy them for it; that's been possible for 5+ years now but the consequences are so obvious to Meta that there's no point in releasing it.
Is this true in the EU? I'm not the most aware of it's specific laws, but it seems like something GDPR and friends might frown upon. The EU is a non-trivial part of "The West", although I know the UK likes it's CCTV.
Probably EU countries have their own individual laws on this. I know that outside the EU, in Switzerland, you are allowed to record in public, but not allowed to publish photos or videos of people without their consent at all.
(This is interpreted as recordings where a person is the focus of the image, so if you take a picture of your friend at tourist spot and there happen to be some random people visible in the background, that's still okay.)
That means live streaming in public is essentially illegal in Switzerland, as is the popular genre of Youtube influencers harassing people in public to get a rise out of them, including those obnoxious 1st amendment “auditors” that are intentionally annoying people.
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