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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.
I think that there is a difference. Glassholes pose a different threat to privacy than governments or big corporations.
If I am in a McDonalds, I am probably recorded by security cameras. But it is also highly probable that McDonalds will not decide upload that footage in some viral video about funny incidents at their restaurants.
Likewise, the NSA can read my text messages. But again, I don't have to worry about featuring in "best of captured texts today", at the most some perv NSA employees will have a laugh with some other pervert spooks about it.
Sure, both government and commercial entities can get hacked, so I would prefer for McDonalds to delete their videos after a week or so (and they share that incentive).
By contrast, if I am recorded by some random pervert with a cell phone, the probability that I will land on the internet is much higher. This is why people react much stronger about cell phones pointed at them than about security cameras.
If someone openly records, my instinct is to tolerate it if they are clearly recording something other than me, and just move out of the picture. By contrast, if some asshole covertly records people without any extenuating context, I very much hope they will make "glassholes got their cameras and jaws broken collection, part 563".
Yeahhh...
I think there's a lot of work being done by cultural norms of "we are recording you for safety and security purposes, and we will never publish footage except to advance those goals." Hell, nobody is even going to look at that footage except to detect the criminal activity.
And we've been acclimatized out of those norms as high quality digital cameras are now everywhere.
And the understanding of 'privacy' is a bit ambiguous.
For me, I would agree that "I have the right to stop anyone from recording me while I'm out in public" is stupid. But, "I have a reasonable expectation that my face/identity won't be published on the internet if I'm not doing anything dangerous or illegal" is a decent standard, I think.
Otherwise, we kind of move towards a world where everyone dons a disguise out in public just to maintain some semblance of anonymity.
Any controversy about, say, recordings in bathrooms is going to go through the roof if these things become commonplace. You can (maybe) grab some pervert with a phone in the women's bathroom or changing room, but someone just wearing a pair of spectacles?
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