Here come the glassholes, part II

7 bookofjoe 5 6/13/2025, 1:31:01 PM ft.com ↗

Comments (5)

bookofjoe · 18h ago
rapnie · 17h ago
The sad thing is that a gazillion regular folks will happily buy these shiny gadgets and help pave the road to deep dystopia. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, plain stupid.
rickdeckard · 17h ago
> Meta has been floating the idea of adding facial recognition to smart glasses since 2021. [..] described it as one of many “nice use cases”. Then it was deemed too difficult.

Worth to note that Google banned Facial recognition apps for Google Glass already back in 2013 [0], when it noted that there was some developer uptake on such apps which increased the threatening perception of Google Glass in the public.

> Our concept of privacy has changed so wildly in recent years that we may now be ready to accept it.

Yeah? I'd like to see that, especially in Europe.

I understand the compelling idea of sitting at a conference or in a Meeting-Room and have the LinkedIn profiles of all participants floating next to their head, but the reality will be about people being harassed online because they drew attention onto them for whatever reason. In the world of today, people will DIE because of this "feature".

A Thought-Experiment:

Every car has a license-plate, standardized sufficiently to be machine-readable. How about mapping them to the names (and FB/Insta-Profiles) of the car-owners, show them in a HUD of your car and an easily browsable history on your touch-screen?

There's no technical difficulty to do this AT ALL. Cars already read street-signs, they're already online, they could do that easily. So is it a good idea to allow such a feature, are "we" "ready to accept it"?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/03/google-gl...

kasey_junk · 17h ago
I’ve long wanted to be able to upvote and flag drivers. Being able to see their crowd sourced driver rating would be valuable as well.

For my use case I don’t need personal details, some sort of anonymous avatar would be fine, but driver anonymity doesn’t seem particularly compelling as a privacy stance given the awesome powers we give drivers.

I’m much more sketched out by the use case you outline before that fwiw.

josefritzishere · 17h ago
I'd call them glassholes out loud.