Comment by jimbo456
5 hours ago
We need to move beyond just banning these glasses - all smart glasses of all kinds - to breaking up these companies. Undo the acquisitions of Insta and Whatsapp - I don't care that will be expensive, thats a shareholders problem.
We should together stop calling devices which film in dressing / locker rooms smart.
These devices record video & sound track serve Ads and do Data fusion
What if you took a cam corder to a locker room? People would be upset, that is not allowed. That would not be nice. This is not nice either
Much like a cell phone, nobody would even really care if you brought a camcorder down so long as you aren't operating it (which is very obvious).
What makes these things gross is that it's not obvious when someone is recording.
Which Meta Glasses try to counter by making it obvious when someone is recording with the recording light; arguably more obvious than cell phones.
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I agree we should do something in this instance, but with the speed of which things are changing? Eventually, this tech is going to be undetectable.
"Oh no that's sci-fi and decades away", I really don't think so. I think neuralink, and competitors too, will next move on to reading the visual cortex. They already have plans to push data to the visual cortex, to enable the blind to "see", reading in healthy people seems quite doable.
I expect something like this to happen before 2030.
Regardless, I agree for now? Yes. But the future? I don't see it as blockable forever.
There are two ways we decide how severe the punishment for broken laws is. One is to enable just punishment. The other is deterrent. This may fall into "deterrent is the bigger part of the sentence", where people posting private information receive years in jail as a result.
There is a little bit of a conversation about this here:
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/other-autre/cndii-cdncii...
And the above certainly covers Meta glasses too.
I think it won't be long before it's the posting of non-consensual imagery that is so criminal, that few will do so. For years in Quebec, sharing of images captured in public isn't really legit. You control "images of yourself", regardless of where they are taken, public places or not:
https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/your-right-to-control-pho...
And they're so worried about problems with image sharing, they've almost automated the process to deal with it:
https://www.quebec.ca/en/justice-and-civil-status/support-vi...
So this is already being criminalized in a lot of places.
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They're basically Flock Cameras, except they could appear anywhere. Nobody wants mobile surveillance potentially brought into any room.
Yep, they're spy glasses / perv glasses.
I don't like it but it's totally normal, especially for youth, to have their cell phones out in locker rooms. Targeting only glasses with this concern is largely out of touch with current behavior.
That isn't normal and it's actively enforced against in gyms and pools where I live.
Glasses are passively recording. Recording with a phone is active (for the most part). You need to take it out and point it at what you are recording...
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My children's school have an interesting way of dealing with the ever growing list of devices they need a policy for. They borrowed the police term "data carrying devices" and wrote a policy based on that. When Metas glasses started to be come a problem no policy change was needed for the school, they were automatically covered.
That's probably the best solution, deal with the functionality, not the device type.
We need to go further and ban mini camera module for raspberry pi zero. Imeagine someone can record you with this stuff...
What does this have to do with WhatsApp?
Also as much as you might like to punish investors (most of whom just have it in their 401k) because you don't like people with money, there are legal protections and the government can't just do something like that without an actual reason.
WhatsApp is definitely part of Meta's distribution and reach strategy. So it's very relevant.
I don't think OP is trying to punish investors. I think they are saying the overall damage of letting these companies continue the current trend will be worse than the cost of unwinding it now.
I'm an advocate of reformed legislation to enable this.
Why shouldn't we punish investors? This is the risk when you invest in these types of companies where regulation is nonexistent. It's not the job of the government to make sure rich shareholders stay green.
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I know that shareholders just want monopolies and free money and don't want to compete for it, but we should make them. Like we did before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork shot the kneecaps out of our antitrust law. It's not about punishing shareholders, it's about making them earn their keep. It's just good business.
The government can do whatever it wants. Laws are written by the government. We have a democracy. If enough votes exist to, say, pass a law banning drug dealing (like meta does), then the company will die.
Simple as that
Also as much as you might like to punish investors (most of whom just have it in their 401k) because you don't like people with money, there are legal protections and the government can't just do something like that without an actual reason.
As much as you might like to defend the wealthy because the only thing you care about is money, regardless of the human cost, doesn't mean that we can't use the law and the government to limit the harm being done to humans.
I know what you are going to say. "Fuck people! I only worship money!" but I think you need to look beyond just the financial aspects of this situation.
I think the point is, it's been a good system, but it's out of control. It's not that people don't like people having money, it's people don't like the status quo of watching society and the world be destroyed by generating share holder value alone. We need a better system. Not saying that is communism or whatever, but the monopolies and corruption are off the charts.
How fo you think we can go about this the politicians are not in our pocket
> banning these glasses
(Networked) surveillance cameras are just as problematic, but people don't notice them. Any ban should affect them too. I don't want to build a world where corporations and governments film and surveil us in public (or privately-owned public spaces, like malls, parking lots, etc.), but we're forbidden from doing the same.
Flat out banning a category of product because it is possible to use it for bad things is stupid. Thousands of people are killed by cars every year - should we ban them? (Being killed is far worse than being recorded naked in a locker room. Not saying the latter is great, but it's better than being dead)
There are also potential good uses for this tech. As someone who can't remember anyone's name worth crap, I can't wait for smart glasses with facial recognition and a name tag that hovers over everyone. I'm sure there will be great benefit in industry, giving workers heads up displays of all manner of important information.
Just like any new technology, there is equal potential for good and bad.
How inauthentic. If you don't remember someone's name, just say so. Ask them again and try harder next time. If I see you with glasses on, and your eyeballs looking above my head I'm going to walk away from you.
> I can't wait for smart glasses with facial recognition and a name tag that hovers over everyone.
What stops you from using a notepad? I do not want my face uploaded to Facebook.
Would they ask the person to hold their name tag over their head, or just require everyone to tape it to their forehead?
People don't generally tolerate me sticking a nametag on them... And they certainly don't tend to wear it for future events where we are both present.
A local only face recognizer with consent of the face owners would be pretty useful for me. Although it would require a lot of 'hey, I'm bad at faces and names, do you mind if I take a picture so baby skynet can help me out?'
Plenty of precedent to regulate harmful technology and behavior:
Cars are defacto illegal to operate in public. You must have a license to drive one.
You can’t yell fire to scare people.
You can’t buy a gun without some kind of check, or at all depending on location.
Civilians can’t operate jet engines with a variable nozzle size.
> Civilians can’t operate jet engines with a variable nozzle size.
I cannot find any support for that. Variable nozzles are fairly rare (but not non-existent) on non-afterburning engines, and afterburning engines are fairly rare themselves (and sometimes restricted as part of demilitarization of a former military airframe), but both variable nozzles and afterburners are entirely legal for a civilian to own and operate.
> You can’t buy a gun without some kind of check
That comes with a caveat -- this only applies to retail sales. Over half of States do allow private purchases with no background check.
> I don't care that will be expensive, thats a shareholders problem.
"I have no empathy for the two-thirds of Americans who will lose their personal savings that they need to retire" really undermines your case.
Edit: thoughtful tradeoffs against the stock market are reasonable. "I don't care" is not a carefully weighed tradeoff
You just unknowingly pointed out the real problem - the system is setup so that we think we are in on it, but as a wise man said "It's a big club and you ain't in it".
Also "lose their personal savings" is a hyperbolic bad faith argument. If anyone's entire net worth is put into Meta stock, they get whats coming. Second, 93% of the stock market is owned by 10% of the population. The average American has more to gain from holding companies accountable than letting them rape and pillage our society so the richest people can have even more money.
It's also possible that it would benefit those same people. It doesn't necessarily need to be expensive.
93% of equities are held by the top 10% of households. Most middle class wealth in the US is primary residence real estate. The stock market isn’t the economy. No one is entitled to wealth, nor it maintaining it's value.
> As of 2022, about half of households with a worker age 55 and older had no retirement savings, and 32% had no retirement savings or a defined benefit plan.
The scaremongering about equity values and your average person’s holdings and exposure is not grounded in facts and reality. It’s simply scaremongering.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)
This line of argument ("think of the retirees!!!") could be used in many cases, however when is it acceptable to break companies for the greater (non-financial) good?
On a parallel, can't we criticize any decision reducing the market cap of companies as an attack on the retirement portfolios? Say, if we required connected glasses to display a red light of more than x lumens when recording, would that be ok, even if it decreased Meta's market cap?
> decision reducing the market cap of companies as an attack on the retirement portfolios
Any decision that results in a long term net loss across the entire public economy? Yes.
That's something that hurts a lot of people and that hurt should be carefully weighed against whatever the assumed benefit is. Sometimes that's worth it, sometimes it's not
But it's never OK to just hand wave with "well I don't care about that class of people so screw them"
And let's not move the goalposts. OPs proposal was a corporate breakup of massive scale, not a minimum lumens requirement.
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> Undo the acquisitions of Insta and Whatsapp - I don't care that will be expensive, thats a shareholders problem.
Yikes. I thought this was America.
That sounds like “we’ve always done things this way and therefore will continue doing things this way”.
Which is a great mindset if you want to ignore new information and avoid improving the status quo.
The US has laws against monopolies and trusts.
Those laws have been nerfed since the Ronald Reagan / Robert Bork / Consumer Welfare Standard takeover. We should un-nerf the anti-trust laws.
Yep, and heck, on occasion we even enforce them.
When we do, it can be pretty effective.
I just wish we did so more frequently, and, more importantly, that the consumer welfare principle hadn't emerged as the prevalent antitrust standard.