I think the primary reason why I don't trust Facebook on this sort of project is that the marketing is only about the personal benefit - "If you wear these magic glasses then Facebook can augment your world with all of this useful information! Isn't that great!" That's Facebook selling the idea to people. They're telling people relatively trivial but fun use cases. Maybe that would make some people buy.
However, at no point does it mention what benefit there is to Facebook, which is effectively a constant data stream about the world around us: who is there, what's happening, what are people talking about, etc. Google and Apple get similar data streams from mobile phone location data, but a video and audio stream (and lidar maybe) would be a much richer information source. I want to know what their plan is for that data, how FB intends to use it, what I can do to opt out of it, and so on.
This, like Google Glass, is one of those ideas that has been popularised by science-fiction with the promise that it will make our lives better, but when you get down it's actual real world usage I don't see the benefit it provides.
Sure, it _looks_ cool, but none of the examples shown in FB's promo video are actually meaningful: the red light example, the restaurant... The real world already has UI for that!
Navigation is probably the only good example I can think of.
In the AR circles, what they are building is called the AR Cloud - basically a digital representation of the physical world.
A “complete state” of this digital world has a number of practical benefits for autonomous vehicles/drones, but you’re right that in the path to get there is mostly going to be filled with gaming and advertising, and the occasional niceties. I wrote about some applications here:
Glass actually had a really good use case, but it's the one thing they explicitly called out in the terms of service as banned:
Facial Recognition
The killer app for Glass would have been the thing that put a little nametag over the head of the person you were looking at, provided you'd met them before. So that you could say "Hey Steve!" to your kid's classmate's dad that you'd met 3 times before and still couldn't remember his name.
Way better than today's tech of saying "Hey!..." then introducing him to your friend Bill and hoping Bill asks his name or he volunteers it. Then hoping you're remember to memorize it this time.
Glass woulda fixed that. But it would have made everything else worse.
Well, if a social anxiety about asking a second time for someone's name is the only use case for a device, it's bound to fail.
I actually just say: Sorry, I forgot your name, what was it again? In most cases they forgot my name as well and are happy that I asked. Problem solved. Can I have my 500€s now?
> Glass woulda fixed that. But it would have made everything else worse.
Kinda like using x-ray machines in shoe shops. But now that I think about it, that could be said even about many uses of social media. Yes, it achieves something, no, it's not always an essential or even very good thing, and the price is rather gigantic compared to the convenience.
I'm not averse to the idea itself, in theory - it seems like the logical next step in consumer tech. However, as they've proved with Oculus (and generally their entire existence) I would not trust Facebook one bit with this, and I wouldn't want a pair anywhere near me or my house. What is needed is a federated version, i.e. you have your own pair which stores your own data of your own property and life, and public spaces (libraries, cafes, offices, whatever) can be shared between users, after anonymization algorithms and access control is applied.
That is something that must be done, but not by facebook.
It should be done by public and private institutions with a clear control of the data real access and ownership.
The problem with cloud providers is that you can not control them. They can tell you nobody but you access your data, but they can give data access to the US gobertment or their employers or their automatic surveillance and intelligence gathering software without notifying you.
They promise they won't access your data, but of course they do, because you can not prove they did. Everything is under their control.
The people currently trying to track everything you do online would really love a future where they can also track all your offline physical activity and map "inside of buildings and homes and all the objects inside of them".
Raph Koster predicted[1] this years ago. I hope anybody implementing this type of tech remembers that all tech is dual use. To understand the full impact of a proposed technology, Raph Koster advised[2], "Every feature must be looked at as a weapon." Promising that "...any faces and license plates captured by Aria glasses wearers will be anonymized." doesn't even begin to address the ways this technology could be used maliciously.
IMO this project has very little chances to succeed outside of trusted environments, simply because of privacy - same reason why Google Glass failed.
It doesn't matter if Facebook will blur faces and vehicle plates - the problem is that I can wear counterfeit which will do the opposite and nobody will be able to tell the difference.
The fucked up thing is that you can’t opt out. Facebook is capturing the world around you and you can’t stop that. There’s no guarantee that the house you rent next year won’t have been mapped by Facebook. Every store you go to, every theater... it won’t be long until they won’t need you to opt in. There will be a tidy alistproducer2 shapes hole in their data, all ready to infer your movements...that is, of the people wearing them don’t capture you as part their distributed data collection.
This is not hyperbole. Facebook already lays claim to the behavioral data of non users, creating shadow profiles ready to materialize should you become a user. This an extension of that.
regardless of the functionality, I cannot ethically support or use facebook, instagram, or whatsapp.
The problem is that they still use you. If your email address was ever in a contacts list uploaded to them, they have a handle on you. They are tracking you on every website (apart maybe from this one) and have constructed a shadow profile for you.
It's the same problem with Google, you can try to avoid them but if anyone you know has a GMail address, you're in their system and they couldn't care less about your consent.
Readit News
However, at no point does it mention what benefit there is to Facebook, which is effectively a constant data stream about the world around us: who is there, what's happening, what are people talking about, etc. Google and Apple get similar data streams from mobile phone location data, but a video and audio stream (and lidar maybe) would be a much richer information source. I want to know what their plan is for that data, how FB intends to use it, what I can do to opt out of it, and so on.
They have stumbled upon scale, so like the unimaginative mindless dolts they are, everything is done at scale.
What the plan is, is just some post facto day to day reactive narrative to whatever that scale produces.
One day it produces a colony next to a sugar factory that keeps everyone happy and another day it opens a giant sink hole in middle of town.
They wheel out Zuck to apologize or take credit as the case maybe.
Sure, it _looks_ cool, but none of the examples shown in FB's promo video are actually meaningful: the red light example, the restaurant... The real world already has UI for that!
Navigation is probably the only good example I can think of.
A “complete state” of this digital world has a number of practical benefits for autonomous vehicles/drones, but you’re right that in the path to get there is mostly going to be filled with gaming and advertising, and the occasional niceties. I wrote about some applications here:
https://paul.copplest.one/blog/augmented-reality.html
Facial Recognition
The killer app for Glass would have been the thing that put a little nametag over the head of the person you were looking at, provided you'd met them before. So that you could say "Hey Steve!" to your kid's classmate's dad that you'd met 3 times before and still couldn't remember his name.
Way better than today's tech of saying "Hey!..." then introducing him to your friend Bill and hoping Bill asks his name or he volunteers it. Then hoping you're remember to memorize it this time.
Glass woulda fixed that. But it would have made everything else worse.
I actually just say: Sorry, I forgot your name, what was it again? In most cases they forgot my name as well and are happy that I asked. Problem solved. Can I have my 500€s now?
Kinda like using x-ray machines in shoe shops. But now that I think about it, that could be said even about many uses of social media. Yes, it achieves something, no, it's not always an essential or even very good thing, and the price is rather gigantic compared to the convenience.
Deleted Comment
It should be done by public and private institutions with a clear control of the data real access and ownership.
The problem with cloud providers is that you can not control them. They can tell you nobody but you access your data, but they can give data access to the US gobertment or their employers or their automatic surveillance and intelligence gathering software without notifying you.
They promise they won't access your data, but of course they do, because you can not prove they did. Everything is under their control.
Dead Comment
Raph Koster predicted[1] this years ago. I hope anybody implementing this type of tech remembers that all tech is dual use. To understand the full impact of a proposed technology, Raph Koster advised[2], "Every feature must be looked at as a weapon." Promising that "...any faces and license plates captured by Aria glasses wearers will be anonymized." doesn't even begin to address the ways this technology could be used maliciously.
[1] https://www.raphkoster.com/2014/06/11/how-to-build-the-scary...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgw8RLHv1j4
You have the provider aggregation threat: where a service provider could track and map all known faces within reach of any of their user's glasses.
Then there app threat, where an ondevice application that does something "cool" also harvest everything that it can see.
Then there is the government actor threat: where a government piggybacks/creates a law to make sure all movements of type x are recorded.
Its a whole new dimension of fuckery, and its something I worry about.
It doesn't matter if Facebook will blur faces and vehicle plates - the problem is that I can wear counterfeit which will do the opposite and nobody will be able to tell the difference.
Moreover it will probably look and feel creepy.
This is not hyperbole. Facebook already lays claim to the behavioral data of non users, creating shadow profiles ready to materialize should you become a user. This an extension of that.
We are sleepwalking into a dystopia.
The problem is that they still use you. If your email address was ever in a contacts list uploaded to them, they have a handle on you. They are tracking you on every website (apart maybe from this one) and have constructed a shadow profile for you.
It's the same problem with Google, you can try to avoid them but if anyone you know has a GMail address, you're in their system and they couldn't care less about your consent.
It's a really terrible state of affairs.
The big problem, the one that nobody seems to be willing to accept is that any AR system will invade privacy, no matter who makes them.
We as a sector have to actually grow up and think deeply about how we manage this threat, before its too late.