I think you missed my point.

• We conflate Privacy with Anonymity. I have no expectation of privacy in public, but this is another nail in the coffin for anonymity ; and I used to have an expectation of anonymity.

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When I grew up, I could roam the local mall without an expectation that I was being recorded in perpetuity. My movements were recorded, sure, but stored for only as long as needed to prevent shoplifting or other criminal activity. I was anonymous unless there was a reason to look into my actions.

This is a not a new thing and I doubt you ever complained about being caught on countless CCTVs before.

CCTV is <100 years old and I’m rapidly approaching half that. CCTV was a shoplifting deterrent when I was a youth. Now it’s a weapon and it’s no longer CC.

Modern cloud-based video storage is no longer owned and operated by a single business or person. It’s all Amazon or Microslop or Meta and they will happily sell access to law enforcement or palantir or probably anyone who asks with a large enough check.

Anonymity is the ability to be a nobody. In the 90’s, we could expect that we were nobodies unless we did something worth noting. Recordings of us were ephemeral and irrelevant; overwritten next week.

Now they will be forever, and machine learning, face recognition, and processing power to correlate multiple data sources means that things you do today can be used against you in 30 years. I hope you can see that.

It’s not really the glasses themselves that worries me, it’s the rest of the tech stack. The glasses just add new vectors to the problem.

You have hot chicken. Alabama has mosquitos and humidity. I would move to Tennessee first.

The real issue in my mind is privacy and autonomy. I want to be able to walk around without the expectation that I’m recorded. I’m male and don’t have the same the impact from the creep-factor, and absolutely get it, but the implications are larger than dudes looking at women.

Big difference from a “I am in public and can be recorded” to a “I am in public and I should expect to be recorded”. Another big step to "that recording is on a mega-corp server and can be viewed, reviewed, used as training data, cross-referenced, and otherwise processed without my consent because the person recording me consented; I really think this is the the crux, as I can have a tacit approval to be recorded by walking to a store, but I haven’t given any approval for my likeness, my position, my emotions, etc to be recorded by walking down a street. A TV show using unsuspecting public will get people to sign waivers granting limited rights to their footage afterwards, or blur faces – or did – before retaining and publishing.

I walk into a grocery store and I can expect that they have a CCTV (note the CLOSED CIRCUIT part) system to be able to review what happened in the case of a robbery or whatever. The tech of my childhood meant that the store had a stack of VHS tapes, or maybe DVD/HD/SSD that rotated and could hold (lets way exaggerate) a decade of footage. A decade after I left the store, there was no record I was there – maybe a receipt if I used a card, but I don’t actually know the PCI retention requirements. With cheap storage and 3rd-party cloud-hosted camera systems, the business no longer owns the records of my presence, and has only a data retention ‘agreement’ with the provider. I didn’t agree to my footage being used for any purpose other than the one implicit for safety/loss-prevention by visiting the store. Any use beyond that should be unreasonable search and seizure, but it’s not being done by the government, so isn’t illegal or something I could sue over.

Very similar situation to Flock/generic-ALPR-esq cameras. The trend used to be that unless you were somehow a person-of-note that you had effective anonymity in public: It took resources to monitor an individual’s movements, facial expressions, actions, etc. It no longer does, and so all this is effectively captured and stored in perpetuity. The real problem is that it’s everywhere. Good luck finding a grocery store that doesn’t have some cloud-provider surveillance. Good luck finding a gas station that doesn’t. Good luck even driving to a specific store that isn’t recording you constantly because you pass several cameras on the way and some are specifically designed to track your movements.

Bringing it home to the current topic of ‘smart’ glasses. I haven’t consented to being recorded by random person walking down the street with Meta’s camera on their face. Meta has no ethical rights to my “content”, regardless of whether the owner of the glasses has agreed to give Meta a license to their video as part of setting up the glasses. Ethical vs Legal, but we can keep pushing back.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but this shit is pervasive and won’t stop until we force it.

I think this might be a good ground-roots way to sell the idea of privacy to folks that don’t get it.

Buy a cheap phone case or old phone or something that you can have destroyed by an angry recordee.

Walk around in public, obviously holding your recording device out, it doesn’t need to be on or actually recording, just the visibility.

Have a sticker on it saying “Ask me about privacy” or something, with a plan to point out the less obvious cameras if anyone does.

For bonus points, target some people who aren’t normally aware, like older white men, and help them to understand that it’s uncomfortable to be obviously recorded, but that they don’t notice when they are “surveilled.”

IANAL, I don’t think there’s any risk other than violence from the recipients, but they’re in public after all.

1 person doing this is annoying, 1k people doing this will be notable, 1m will kill public-facing-cloud-storage cameras and their ecosystems. Anyone want to help organize a flash mob to spend a few hours doing this in a city’s downtown?