Technology for those who don't do consent
There was a time when I’d have obstinately argued that technology cannot be inherently moral or immoral, ethical or unethical, and that was my position in discussions about the ethics of ‘hacking’ tools, encryption and privacy-enhancing software, when I was an undergraduate. The tools I routinely use for systems administration and security testing are (or rather were) the same tools used by many criminals to break into networks, install malware and commit identity theft. The encryption we use daily can both facilitate and prevent crime, but we collectively decided that strong encryption is necessary. What about mass surveillance? If Ed Snowden was anything to go by, the early iterations of that were prototyped from common technologies.
I’m much less certain of that position now, given what’s been coming out of Silicon Valley the last few years. Corporations are developing ‘AI’ in the knowledge, and even with the intention, of using it against humanity. The billionaire Tech Bros themselves, to hugely exaggerate the capabilities of ‘AI’, proclaimed it might become sentient and destroy humanity, or some other pure scaremongering crap along those lines, and that it would make half the workforce unemployed. The billionaire Tech Bros invested obscene amounts of money into trying to make that happen anyway.
There’s another technology that’s been the subject of many opinion pieces, the last year, and perhaps most of us will be deeply uncomfortable with the ethical ramifications of it even being on the market.
For those not in the know, there are ‘smart glasses’ on the market that look pretty much like any oversized pair of shades. They’re developed by Meta, the corporation that Takes Your Privacy Seriously. They are designed to optimise user experience for creeps, perverts, and others who don’t care about boundaries, while helping Mark Zuckerberg improve his Meta ‘AI’-model-facial-recognition-database thingy. We could say the wearable’s purpose is to be another means for the corporation that Takes Your Privacy Seriously to harvest more intimate data on us in a non-consensual way. And, in my honest personal opinion, Zuckerberg absolutely does look creepy wearing them.
By the by, despite there being 50-odd variations of ‘smart glasses’, including the Meta-Raybans, on the market, the only ones I’ve actually seen in the wild were in the discount case of John Lewis.
The underlying reason so many of us are repulsed by the concept of ‘smart glasses’ can be summed up in two words: information asymmetry. And it’s worth writing about because there does seem to be a limit to the degree of information asymmetry that’s socially acceptable. Even those who don’t have an academic understanding of information asymmetry can have a visceral awareness of it.
Most of us don’t particularly like having our towns and cities infested with surveillance cameras, but we know we’re rarely the main subject of whatever’s being captured, and we understand the purpose of surveillance cameras is somewhat related to safety and law enforcement. There is a considerable degree of information asymmetry between the state and the individual, but society knows something about the intentions of the state, and passively accepts that as a trade-off for safety. We can also submit Freedom of Information requests to find out what a state organisation knows about us, and why. Same with ‘social’ media - people think they’re making an informed choice to exchange some privacy for access to a communications platform most their friends are using. Collectively we accept mass surveillance and data harvesting through apathy.
A boundary of what’s socially acceptable is crossed when a complete stranger points a camera at us, and we know nothing about that person’s identity, motives or intentions. We have evolved to perceive that level of asymmetry as a threat (and it often is a greater threat for women), which is why we feel uncomfortable when someone’s staring at us. The barely-perceptible white LED that supposedly indicates when Meta’s ‘smart glasses’ are active (only made tamper-resistant much later, under pressure from journalists!) wouldn’t make a difference to our perception of them - a camera pointing at us is a camera pointing at us.
So, who on Earth might think it could possibly be a good idea to wear ‘smart glasses’? I’m going to steal a quote from Ava’s blog:
‘Them wearing smart glasses is in solidarity with the panopticon we are in, with all the pranksters, pickup artist, street interviewers and other online scum who embarrass, scare and harass strangers (especially women) to generate views on social media, and all the disgusting people who generate nudes of people non-consensually via AI.’
As Matt Muir, writing for The New World, points out, Meta will always face an insurmountable PR problem when trying to market that product. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rayban’s sales took a hit as a consequence of being associated with the venture.
Then we have the other problem, which I’m not sure many people care enough about, since the corporations had us bent over the washing machine of mass surveillance long ago: That the Meta glasses aren’t personal cameras. Obviously. We can’t have ‘smart’ anything without some corporate data harvesting involved, and often as the primary function. The smart glasses turn wearers into informants for a corporation that may, or may not, misuse or distribute that information. It would be an egregious intrusion into what should be private and personal.
The arguments around privacy and the harvesting of our personal data are the same we’ve been making for decades: Once we hand over personal data to a corporation, we don’t have any control over who that data is shared with, or how it would be used at some indeterminate point in the future. Being able to make informed choices about what we share and keep private is essential to having freedom and a healthy democracy.
Can we fight back against this? Yes, we absolutely can. I think we’re collectively doing a fine job of expressing how we feel about the technology, and some of the obvious ramifications, merely by nicknaming the devices ‘pervert glasses’.
Those who insist on wearing them would be ostracised simply because most of us aren’t comfortable with how the presence of how a recording device changes the nature of our social interactions, and with our more personal conversations on record and potentially shared on ‘social’ media.
Personally, I’d refuse to interact with anyone even wearing them. I’d assume the camera is active, whether the white LED is active or not. Obviously there will be instances of others reacting less politely, opting to deploy a no-tech method of physically disabling the devices.
Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Prof. Yves Jeanrenaud published a smartphone application for detecting nearby smart glasses. It works by scanning for Bluetooth interface IDs known to be associated with manufacturers of smart glasses. There probably will be false positives, and there might be one or two smart glass manufacturer IDs not in the list, but tt’s probably the best method of detection available.