For the past 16 years, Ms Biggin, who lives in Ballarat, has not been able to do regular things like cross a road or get groceries without the help of a guide dog. But everything changed for the mother of three when she got her first pair of smart glasses. She said she did not think she would ever get a guide dog again. Ms Biggin said AI glasses had given her independence she never imagined she could have.
But the glasses are not without their problems. Ms Biggin said she got stopped at least three times a week by people accusing her of filming them.
“Halfway through the walk I’ll have somebody grab me on the arm and say, ‘Oi, you just filmed me,’ because [the glasses] light up when they’re in use,” she said. “People automatically assume I’m recording them. It gets exhausting having to explain every time.”
Wait … people stop others in the street for this ? I get being concerned in toilets etc but in the street ? ffs
Anecdote, I understand her frustration somewhat, I was pointing my phone at the veggie chiller section in Woollies a couple years back on a Signal vid call to my gf to check with her to confirm what it was she wanted me to get and a 19yr old (estimate, I was 55) girl who was 2m or so away started literally shoving me and slapping me in the chest and yelling loudly “I was a pervert recording her.” I told her to “fuck off” even more loudly but didn’t push back; me 100kg 186cm, she 165cm 65kg or so, would have ended badly initially for her and then longer term for me if I’d shoved her in anger after being assaulted, it’s a bit of a shock being assaulted in a Woolies .
Here’s the thing though, all that data they are generating is being processed and some portion of it retained. It’s cool that they have chosen accessibility over privacy, if they lived a life that kept them isolated that would be entirely their choice. But they are taking this invasive spy tech into society, people who don’t want to be closely surveilled are not getting a choice.
I have not been into a Coles store since the Palantir stuff was revealed, because I get to make a choice. There’s an IGA I don’t go to because they are pretty sneaky about their AI surveillance disclosure (you can only find the notice in the back corner of the store). I started shopping for hardware at Mitre 10 not Bunnings when they were doing their AI thing. I opt out when and where I can, but what do I do when some brings that surveillance tech into my workplace, when they take it to my kids sports games, when I walk past them on the street. I have endless sympathy for the situation they find themselves in but there is no divorcing the technology from the invasion of personal privacy.
Until we get those rights hammered out, fines in the millions of dollars for these shitful companies that are constantly spying on us would be a good start, I see this becoming a more and more polarising matter as time goes by.
Hell even if we had a company backing these glasses that didn’t want to use the incidental data generated by their operation, how long would it be before they had a competitor who would offer a more featureful set at a lower price and drive them out of business simply by offering a better deal by turning people with a disability into ambulatory Flock cameras?
It’s definitely not without issues because it hasn’t been regulated and the laws haven’t kept up.
I think these glasses could be a good accessibility aid and that would be the good use of the technology (as opposed to them just being a mass market gimmicky, whatever people are using them for product). But I also think that there needs to be limits and laws around pretty much everything you mentioned.
The disappointing thing is, I think, that they haven’t been designed primarily as a disability aid. It’s an advantage they have for disabled people but it’s not who they were designed for - which sucks - because if they had been then there’s more of a chance that they would have been made with all these issues in mind.
Instead they’ve been designed and marketed as a fun gimmicky product for uses that are just not necessary or beneficial - by purely profit driven motives. So they don’t care about the issues, the law, the social opinion on the product if it still makes them money.
I’m disabled and I work in the disability industry so I have a passion for this stuff. Some things the average person uses were initially designed for disabled people and then happened to evolve into things that benefited the average person. For example, voice recognition technology originally designed for disabled people, has evolved into a mainstream product. Other ones are electric toothbrushes, original typewriter keyboars, audiobooks, flexible straws, captions/subtitles, easy-grip utensils, stationery, etc and many more. It’s kinda shit to see this technology (the glasses) being designed pretty selfishly when it could have been so different!
Why would tech bros target a constrained market like the disability industry when they could target the much wider market of perverts? Honestly of there was any hope of these sorts of HMI devices being designed, manufactured or used ethically I would love them, tech enthusiast type I am. I literally bought in the first batch of the HTC Dream that reached my state, and bought the first Samsung Galaxy S (the first generation) that was sold in my state, I was the quintessential early adopter, really wanted to buy Google Glass back in the day. Now I am not and cannot be that person anymore, I see the privacy violations, the damage that unconstrained techo-capitalist manipulation is wreaking on our society and I have to be slow and measured.
These pervert glasses are bad news, and the pervert isn’t necessarily the person wearing them. If I was blind I would still get the ick from the idea of strapping a device to my face that allowed a techbro to filter and interpret reality, there’s at least a few cautionary tales worth of material in that, see episode 5 season 3 of Black Mirror for one example.
Yep and that first question you ask is everything wrong with humanity currently.
