They innovate to infiltrate. 20ish years ago Steve Mann was beat up for invading people's comfort zone with AR glasses, then Google's AR users were "glassholes," now Meta is trying to make it cool. As much as I think AI is valuable, I hope they fail. The act of holding up a smartphone is much more explicit to signal to others they're about to lose all privacy to a centralized company. I don't think Quest is that innovative either, it's mostly first person shooters.
Where does Meta actually talk about things that could really be called "cool" at a society level? Or is it all just empty hype along the lines of Facebook being exploitation of social networking.
It depends on your definition of privacy. There's a lot of people who would argue that you don't have a right to privacy in a public setting. And there's a lot of nuance here depending on the state (assuming US).
I'm not a fan of the data being in the hands of a large corporation, but I AM a fan of more video recordings that are not government owned (cough London, Beijing, etc) that helps shine one more light of accountability on the "powers that be".
The idea of having no privacy in public doesn't extend to every cause and creeper creating their own spy system. They are rarely going to focus on useful 'powers that be' issues. They are going to be all about asymmetrical exploitation. If this is let go, anyone with minimal skills and intent will be fully weaponized, some will organize as they do now for lulz or outright malicious activities like doxxing and blackmail, but amplified and "accepted" (without critique, just "cool" innovation for infiltration), and this will be another unrelenting assault on society.
There's no good normal from some people being able to deeply track some other people using all the tools available. It should be strictly forbidden for individuals and corporations to collect and organize this information, and use by government should be strictly limited.
On the other hand, it should be perfectly normal and good for individuals to deeply track companies and governments as bodies. The lack of a society wide focus on this aspect is quite troubling.
In all seriousness, your point about Beijing and London makes sense - the horse has bolted on public filming, so every citizen having an always-on camera is probably the best and most likely outcome.
I'm in my house. Hopefully nobody is recording me there. My smartwatch tracks those things but in theory it should not be sharing that with the manufacturer.
They flooded the headset market by selling subsidized hardware at a massive loss for years which aggressively redirected funding away from abitious, interesting projects utilizing desktop levels of compute (next-gen 3D modeling and sculpting, architecture, fluid simulation) to Beat Saber level mobile game shovelware that has to be able to run on a cell phone
The vast majority of Quest users would never have invested in a high spec PC and Valve Index (which was like $1000 at the time), set it up with sensors and fiddled about with software to get it work. Mobile-quality gaming (Beat Saber) and professional applications are completely different markets and for the most part Quest just commoditized VR for people without the money or the means.
And you can literally use it with a PC via wifi or a cable.