I am part of the problem and recently started turning them on after realizing they were proving to be very useful inputs when using chatbots with connectors to tools that can see the transcripts. It's made scribing notes mostly a ritual and not a practical benefit.

Before I turned it on I asked my team if they had any objections. Silence for eight seconds before saying if anyone was uncomfortable objecting in the group they could reach out to me individually. No one ever did. The only request was that everyone internal get copied on the notes so they could correct them if needed.

These are company decisions to have these connectors and privacy choices. It's their data and their risk. There has never been an illusion that anything said, written, or done at work is private from the company. At home I partake in none of this.

> Even 1:1 conversations between direct managers and colleagues.

You can ask someone to turn it off.

It's fine, a leak of your meeting to a potential competitor could result in as much as another meeting. ;-(

>>Is there anything that I can do to minimize my exposure?<<

author a study that truthfully demonstrates an increased productivity, and by extension, reduction of costs, that appears in the absence of surveilance.

perhaps an ABC test of production under obvious surveillance, obvious lack of surveillance, and advisement of incidental surveilance at any time. this should be cross sectional and longitudinal, perhaps an exit survey to categorize the different productivity groups, such as we took longer because we knew we would have to work at a desk under a camera when we were done; vs the we could do it faster because, we knew we wouldnt be nagged about ergonimics, kinefficiency, or surruptitious movements.

A right to privacy the European Convention on Human Rights which every European country other than Belarus is a signatory to. It is directly incorporated into UK law and in all signatory countries appeals can be made to the European Court of Human Rights.

Some governments ignore it, pretty much all governments have tried to find ways to limit the right to privacy. It has not been terribly effective. As far as I can tell constitutional protections in a few countries (like Germany) have been far more effective.

A right is like a trademark. It must be defended, or it loses its power.

Lately, a German colleague shared with me why they are so focused on privacy. For the dark events that happened in Germany from 1933 to the end of WW2, they used data from a variety of sources that were available at that time. There’s a serious fear (now more than ever in the past) that if an authoritarian regime rose again it would have access to so much data to persecute minorities or even people with different opinions that it would seriously be a nightmare. This puts often overlooked initiatives like GDPR in a completely different light to me.

This UN declaration doesn’t seem to establish an enduring definition of privacy.

Hayek offers a significant observation that things that work among small orders, like a family, don’t work when applied to a whole city. It speaks to the gap between a single police officer seeing something and a city-wide camera crime detection network.

  Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or say our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were always to apply rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them. [Friedrich Hayek, The Fatal Conceit]

If you are in a country which has some decent legal system and institutions.

And even then it’s a crap shoot

The UN, a global entity that isn’t worth the paper its existence it’s written on. Probably the best ever example of the term “paper tiger”

Is this binding on and inside every member country?

"We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,"

This is a quote from an internal Meta memo about how they would plan the launch of these creepy glasses. There are too many crises that seem more pressing to a lot of people.

With the rise of cellphone video posted online I don't think it has the same visceral reaction it once did around the Google Glass era.

There is already a big backlash with these glasses, they've become colloquially known as "perv glasses" and it's been proposed to make them illegal to use in some places!

I think there are many reasons some but not all imo:

- The price difference. Calling a person who dropped $1,500 on a "tech glasses" in 2013 a glasshole made sense. It felt like someone with more money than sense. Meta glasses are $299 today that's just small gadget money so there is no "too much money, little sense" aspect

- Tech went 100% mainstream. It wasn't exactly an exclusively nerdy or geeky thing in 2013 anymore like the 90s or early 2000s, but there was still certain "Too much tech means you are a socially incompetent neckbeard". Today the biggest socialites online often do a tech haul style videos about the latest tech gadgets they got.

- Cameras exploded everywhere. Everyone has watched footage from Ring, GoPro, traffic lights, security cams, court cams, dashcams, police body cams, etc. Plenty of regular people got home cameras too and find it very useful to keep an eye on pets, backyards, etc. Plenty of very regular people have stories about how their cameras saved their ass in one occasion or another. There has been plenty of high-profile news stories about how a Tesla or a Ring camera helped solve a crime or catch a horrific murder or criminal.

- The proliferation of prank YouTubers in the 2010s. Even though most of them were paid actors, going out and acting as a douch and recording it became a mainstream. Kids love it, and despite the "backlash" they were getting millions regardless

- It doesn't matter how you feel about meta glasses or google glasses, you will have reports online of people who tell you how those products changed their life for the better because it helped them overcome some adversity, or protected them in a victim situation or literally saved their life in some situation

Because the frog as been continuously boiling for a while now, so even if it generates a negative reaction it will be smaller than before.

For some reason in the last ten years, people have gone from being critical of corporations to favoring them. I think these companies have become so huge, and they have gotten away with so much, that people have resigned themselves to being at their mercy.

At the time there were two camps: tech-optimists who saw the value in a device that brought the power of the internet on top of your view of the world, and the other camp who worried about privacy or the "creep factor" and believed that outweighed any potential benefit.

When Google Glass came out that latter group had more sway culturally and more political power to ban such things. They don't have that as much anymore but that could swing back in their favor again

It is a generational thing. Gen Z grew up with an internet where it was normalized to share your complete life online, create posts under your real identity, and so on. Give it 1 - 2 generations, and perv glasses will be seen as not intrusive.

> nothing will change until people start holding their representatives accountable

Which itself won't change. The term for holding representatives accountable is "lobbying", which the public believes is an abhorrent act!

> and start voting for people that will actually do something about it.

The thing is, who wins an election matters little. There are always exceptions, and we've definitely seen exceptions, but most representatives are there in good faith. However, they are not mind readers. They can't do anything aligned to the people until the people start lobbying to make it known what they want — but the people won't do that because it is seen as abhorrent behavior.

> This wont happen anytime soon

Especially when appears likely that those companies are responsible for making the people believe that it is unacceptable to lobby. They have the marketing budgets and know-how to keep pushing that narrative until the end of time.

"No" has been replaced with "Maybe Later".

The Internet was in many ways a better place before data capitalism came along so the likes of Google and Facebook could monetise.

We had email and it worked just fine. You got an account via your ISP or paid a small amount for a separate service and perhaps a custom domain that you controlled yourself. Centralising this with the likes of Google is not progress.

We had more content than anyone could ever consume in a lifetime on the Web even back then. It was mostly created by people interested in sharing for personal satisfaction and perhaps the enjoyment of a good discussion that followed or by organisations that benefitted from sharing that information freely. It wasn't done with a direct profit motive based on metrics like page views. We didn't have endless AI spam designed to host endless auctioned ad spots diluting the good stuff.

So here's my proposed privacy-friendly alternative business model: You don't get to harvest personal data for reasons unrelated to whatever products or services you're providing to willing consumers and if you do then we throw you in jail. I'm pretty sure the Internet would find a way to continue providing the functionality that is actually useful. I'm pretty sure the signal/noise ratio online would be much better too.

the constitution is about what the government is allowed to do, and we do have those

No. The only solve is to start voting and voting for people that actually fix these problems instead of bowing to corporate interests over people interests.

it would be interesting to see if the "camera light has been tampered with" 'privacy mechanism' could be remotely triggered by some carefully timed application of electromagnetic energy pulses ;)

Well, cell signal jammers are illegal. I could see the possibility of something like a Meta-produced device that could be set to disable recording by Meta glasses in the vicinity. That seems different in scope. But lol on that.

Exactly this. Anyone who wears these smart glasses are just selling themselves for a negative return. Like meta should be giving these glasses away given how much data they harvest. Instead they convince rubes and pervs to actually pay for it.

The response I tend to see is "why should I care? I'm boring. I'm not doing anything wrong."

There is no profit in privacy, but there is in exploiting people’s secrets.

What? Govts wants everyone (except politicians) to have no privacy.

Give it time. I am sure the Israelis, the Ukrainians, and the Russians will be world leaders in this type of jamming technology I have a feeling infrared light jamming cameras and sound frequencies beyond human hearing are going to be key components of this new technology. I’m ready, and so is my checkbook.

I’m not disputing the legality point but I don’t believe you can point to even one person who was jailed for using such a device.

So perhaps “face jail time” is not accurate.

Sadly that's not the case, or at least not in Germany. A judge actually refused to block the sale of the glasses because it was considered that the LED were sufficient warning. Sure, you can still use them covertly and releasing material often requires a waiver, but that's true of smartphones too.

There's a case right now (brought forward by the HateAid organization) arguing that these types of glasses should be forbidden, but I'm not optimistic that they'll succeed.

Expected an anti nuisance streamer app by now. Just playing ad reels and copyrighted music above and below human hearing levels. Since algo bots will usually scan that high/low and bury videos for whatever is considered an infraction.

People in Europe install surveillance cameras all over and threaten with the police when you tell them you don't consent being recorded. When you go to the police reporting the cameras, the police tells you to get a lawyer and open a civil case.

So on the contrary I'd say... you want cameras? We'll go all in.

If you are about to comment on it, why not read the article? Why leave it to chance whether your contribution will be signal or noise?

In the article, EEF discusses the currently emerging issue of not being able to consent to other people's always-on wearable technology in the context of the broader problem of our diminishing ability to speak openly. It ends with a clear message on how to oppose such developments in a constructive, meaningful way.

The AI tech companies already violated perhaps millions of copyrights.

They should have quite a hefty fine to pay.

> There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces.

As always, scale matters, as does the purpose of the surveillance and the affiliation of the surveilling party. This comment of mine from last month (and the document linked in the footnote) will be good reading for you. [0] Also keep in mind that private entities can be legally considered to be agents of the State... depending on how they and the State are conducting themselves.

[0] <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50027322>