So far I am yet to be tempted into purchasing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. To a certain extent this is a function of possessing a large, misshapen and comically convex head upon which no pair of sunglasses has ever looked remotely appropriate. Nor am I one of those consumers who professes to be “really into gadgets”, a preference I’ve always found weirdly unspecific.
It’s subtly telling when people claim to be into “gadgets”, because they’re never talking about, say, a tin opener. What they really mean is something gimmicky and expensive that almost certainly requires the services of a datacentre and enough water to irrigate Kent. And even if I were to surmount these two obstacles, you then get into the ethics of the thing.
I’m nobody’s idea of a PR expert, but if your shiny new product keeps requiring patches and updates to prevent people from using it to do degenerate things to women, perhaps it might be worth walking it back to the research and development stage. Of course, Meta has no intention of doing anything quite so dignified or responsible as that. The prospect that users of its new glasses might wish to film people covertly and without consent appears not to have occurred to one of the world’s leading tech companies.
Nor the possibility that owners might try to disable or cover up the little LED that displays when the camera is recording. Instead, the company has embarked on a publicity blitz, reassuring us all that our privacy is, if not quite their number one priority, then certainly there or thereabouts. But unlike most items of consumer tech, smart glasses are not the sort of thing to which one can simply opt in or out.
These things are already out there – around nine million from Meta alone – scanning our streets, capturing and processing content, blurring the boundaries between the real and the virtual. Unlike security cameras, they are not fixed but mobile, arbitrary and largely unregulated. They raise issues that go far deeper than a piece of overpriced eyewear, deeper even than the dense thicket of technology and regulation, into the most basic questions of how we treat each other, how societies function.
Specifically: what happens to our shared public spaces when we are forced to confront the presumption that we are all being filmed, broadcast, processed? What happens to our cities? What happens to our trust, our bonds, our relationships with our fellow humans?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
