[drdaeman]

Smart glasses (or any camera-equipped device) don’t have to record anything to provide utility.

If anything, the primary utility of smart glasses is the wearable display, not camera. YMMV, of course.

But even machine vision-capable devices can do a lot of useful things without causing you any trouble, unless your issues are more of a religious concern rather than anything substantial.

[itishappy]

I understand there are legitimate usages. There are also usages that make me uncomfortable. My issue is that I'm unequipped to know the difference.

Smart glasses sans camera would address my complaints (I take no issue with smartwatches, for instance), but that admittedly decreases the utility.

[drdaeman]

I'm not entirely sure what's your exact threat scenario, if someone records your image, especially given that you've said it doesn't matter to you whether it gets siphoned straight into some megacorp database, or private home server, or gets processed on-device only.

But... aren't already existing protections that make it e.g. illegal to distribute your image or its derivatives sufficient? If someone does you wrong, you can seek recourse. If everyone is respectful of each other (and we hate corporations instead of technologies), we enable a lot legitimate uses, making the world better: more accessible, and easier to learn and understand.

[itishappy]

Oh, it very much does matter to me what happens to recordings! I should have made that more clear. Self hosting is infinitely preferable than sending that info to Facebook. This isn't enough to flip my opinion on the technology in general, but if I had a friend who wanted to self-host their own smart glasses, I would not mind. The keyword there is friend.

My issue is that I don't have the ability to audit every smart glasses user to find out what their tech stack is, so I'm looking at averages. If I saw that smart glasses were being used and promoted as assistive technology, I would likely form a different opinion. Unfortunately, that's not what I perceive. I am open to the possibility that smart glasses could end up a net positive on our society, but the history of similar technologies does not encourage.

I will think more on your comments here. I find them quite insightful.

Edit: For a rather recent example of my threat model, I will repost part of my comment from elsewhere in the thread:

> I watched a guy setup a cell phone to record his laps in a pool yesterday. He swam one lap right about a meter from the 15 year-old girl playing with her mom, then climbed out of the pool, shut off his phone, and walked away. The remainder of the pool was open. Should I have called him out? I couldn't decide, and therefore didn't. This is normal now.