My concern was whether the glasses might record or transmit data while switched off or in standby mode.
From what I can tell, they don’t do this intentionally. So the risk is broadly similar to other modern electronic devices.
The creepiness concern is real, but I think people misplace where the actual surveillance happens. The most consequential stores of personal data aren’t ad networks they’re things like banks, hospitals, insurers, and telecoms. These institutions hold information about your health, finances, movements, and relationships, indexed and searchable by employees you’ve never met, governed by policies you’ve never read.
Realistically, there’s very little an individual can do to completely opt out.
My take is: if the main outcomes are that I get shown ads for things I don’t need and my facecomputer knows the difference between a fork and a spoon… I… I can live with that.
> Realistically, there’s very little an individual can do to completely opt out.
Yes, but it's possible, at the cost of some minor inconvenience, to greatly limit data collected about you.
Communicate over private channels (Signal, own XMPP servers, NOT Whatsapp), pay in cash or crypto, runs free software on all your devices, and deny Internet access to devices across the board (this includes all TVs/monitors, all "smart" devices, cars, and other appliances).
The real issue is that (as these glasses exemplify), it is difficult to prevent others to intentionally or unintentionally provide data to surveillance companies. This happens when you walk in front of a Ring camera, when someone uploads a selfie to Facebook and you happen to be in the background, and in countless other situations.
> it is difficult to prevent others to intentionally or unintentionally provide data to surveillance companies
One that bothers me a lot are all the apps that want people to share your contacts to find your friends. This is a quick way for them to get all the contact information, which may also include birthdays and other more sensitive details.
Even if I were to never make a Facebook account, I could almost guarantee they still have my name, address, phone number, DOB, and maybe more.
> So the risk is broadly similar to other modern electronic devices.
No. When your record a video on your phone, it is not being reviewed annotators. Generally companies only pay to get labeling done on data that is being used to train (or evaluate) ML models.
The problem is that they aren't reinventing emacs.
The first person that makes emacs for the hoi polloi will suck up all the emacs people as well just based on interop frustrations.
I still can't believe that after seeing how slack just released irc for grandma's and pointy haired bosses that no one has done the same for a sensible defaults for normies emacs.
Yes! An honest to God, real, opinionated distribution of Emacs, with only curated packages with rules and regression testing actually enforced by the package managers. That would be neat.
I'm happy that at least a decent portion the comments here are treating this with the same skepticism as other studies on HN.
I was actually expecting people to accept it because of the hate towards Facebook.
I find FB and Instagram so unappealing that there isn't any risk of addiction, for me. The basic idea - sharing pictures and text telling your friends what you're doing - is brilliant, but in practice, most people I know are annoying, and their posts are tedious.
Hacker News, on the other hand, can be slightly addictive, because every time I load the front page, there's a chance there could be something interesting and not groan-inducing.
I read a lot of books on personal finance, investing and very interested in psychology. I also read medical studies etc.
Facebook is quite interesting. There are few people who I know that are living in misery but are in complete denial. They work really hard on their image and showing off how perfect their family is on facebook. Showing off expensive cars when they are one large bill away from defaulting.
I find this fascinating.
Just yesterday one individual had a facebook story, showing the private message she was getting from her friends, that she looks young and so hot etc. It is so bizarre.
> Can [Meta] be sued for its algorithm, or is the content to blame for social media addiction?
Replace [Meta] with [Hacker News] and re-read it again :)
Personally, since I discovered HN about 10 months ago, I have to admit that I got addicted to it in a way that it totally replaced FB and in recent, maybe 60 days, it swallowed my YouTube time as well! Why? Because, every single day I visit HN (or just refresh), I learn something new from the community, whether it's a "spot on" question, an interesting article, some hacker built something cool and "Show HN'ed" it or.. that ”well-thought” comment with some links, otherwise undiscoverable.
Thanks to all of the above and more, HN consumes about 70% of my free online time.
In my opinion, the addiction to Facebook is dependent of your oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genetics. It would be similar to the Dopamine 2 receptor (DRD2) genetics link with alcohol addictions.
I’d be happy to know what my friends are doing, but that doesn’t seem to be a service Facebook offers anymore. When I am stupid enough to go load my Facebook feed, it’s about 2/3 ads, 1/3 “recommended for you” posts that I have no interest in, and very rarely something from someone I follow will show up in between, and then half the time it’s someone sharing a news article or a meme instead of actually talking about themselves. The signal to noise ratio for Facebook is essentially zero.
When I take many-days breaks from HN it's nice to come back and just read through a few pages of the "Best" list available through the lists link at the bottom. In my experience the important stuff ends up there, so while I can't participate in active discussion of some of the older links, there's not much FOMO from time away. That's a nice feature.
The creepiness concern is real, but I think people misplace where the actual surveillance happens. The most consequential stores of personal data aren’t ad networks they’re things like banks, hospitals, insurers, and telecoms. These institutions hold information about your health, finances, movements, and relationships, indexed and searchable by employees you’ve never met, governed by policies you’ve never read.
Realistically, there’s very little an individual can do to completely opt out.
My take is: if the main outcomes are that I get shown ads for things I don’t need and my facecomputer knows the difference between a fork and a spoon… I… I can live with that.