Technology

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.