Wednesday Morning Rant

Remember Google Glass? For those of you who don't, it was a product Google made back in the early teens. It was an "augmented reality" product. It was a pair of glasses that could project information in front of your eyes (a heads-up display, basically) and contained cameras and microphones. You could easily take pictures and videos with it and it integrated with your smartphone.

It was immediately rejected by the market, including in its home market of Silicon Valley. Even before the product was released, many public places - bars, nightclubs, etc. - preemptively banned it. It was seen, correctly, as a creepy and invasive privacy nightmare for people who happened to be around the product, but not in control of it. At least with a smartphone, you have to pull it out to take a picture. Way too many people found it way too creepy, for good reason. Google eventually made it into an "enterprise" product, and then discontinued it completely last year. They found the "creepy line."

So it should be utterly unsurprising that a couple of years ago, Meta - which owns Facebook, which uses the "creepy line" as an operational goal - decided to launch its own version of the product. Unlike Google Glass, Meta's "Metaverse" product doesn't have a heads-up display and so is much cheaper. It's just a pair of Ray-Bans with a couple of cameras, some microphones and speakers. So you can wander around and talk to your Meta apps to record the world around you. The product has been available for a little while, but I've recently seen a huge advertising push for it on multiple platforms. Now, apparently, is the time to flog it as hard as possible.

It solves precisely none of the privacy problems with Google Glass, and in fact makes them worse. Unlike its Silicon Valley cousin and most other "smartglasses," they don't look weird. It's not obvious that you're wearing them. Beyond being able to blend in effectively, they are also necessarily tied to Meta, which isn't exactly known for good privacy practices or being good stewards of user data.

Best of all, they can be used for live-streaming. The user can snap some pictures or 60-second videos, but the user can also use it as a real-time camera for live streams. It does apparently light up when in use, but the indicator is tiny and easily missed - especially if you don't know that it's a thing at all.

And it is also, of course, an extension of the "digital assistant" concept. There's no point if you have to fumble with buttons or pull out your phone to use it, and so it's voice-activated. Like any other "digital assistant," that means it's always listening. It isn't special in this regard, but it is among the worse expressions of the problem because it's mobile and public.

The Wikipedia page on it is funny in how similar it is to the page on Google Glass (linked above). Most of the same concerns are noted, with the same criticisms. None of it has been managed, none of it has been solved. The privacy problems are, in fact, unmanageable and unsolvable. The only reason it's not a significant problem in most places is that this is still, despite Meta's desires, a fairly niche product.

But a sexy, high-tech and invasive idea is rarely allowed to wither and die. "Smartglasses" are no different in this regard. The privacy-free, always-on, high-tech dystopia must be built. Be it "smartglasses" or always-listening digital assistants or Google's exhaustive dossiers on everyone on earth or Microsoft's Recall (old threads, etc.) or dreadful things not yet invented, you will be made to love the creepy line.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

| Access Comments