DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Like, I guess I don’t understand why these damn things have a camera in the first place. At most they should be roughly equivalent to a smart watch - a display and some controls. Maybe bone-conducting headphones or something for audio. It’d be neat to have navigation prompts in glasses, for instance. Buy why a fucking camera?!

Were it not for the fact that it’s the fucking privacy-invading big tech companies doing it, I would admit that there are good use-cases for the camera:

• Reminding you of the name and possibly previous interactions with the person you’re talking to, for instance (if it only did local lookup based on consensual photos you had previously added to your address book). I’m not face-blind or anything, but my memory is bad enough that that would be helpful to me.
• Scanning, OCR-ing and making searchable any papers you’re looking at (hooking to your selfhosted Paperless-NGX).
• Displaying augmented-reality translations of street signs (which is one of the few reasonable things Google Glass actually did).

They’d be helpful when interacting with police. Heck, I could see them being useful when interacting with anyone in a hostile situation. What people will say when they don’t think they’re being recorded and what they will say when they know they are can be vastly different, and the people that will speak and act differently are the very ones you want to record. I’ve had occasions in the past where these would have been very useful, though it turned out recorded audio was sufficent.

Unfortunately the tech is ripe for abuse and I understand the mistrust they cause. Too many crappy people, and too many crappy tech companies that will abuse the video themselves even if the person wearing them only used them with good intentions.

Even though I agree with recording police, the fact that your first thought went straight to “hidden camera for the purpose of recording without consent” makes this a nonstarter to begin with.

Most states it’s legal to record audio without consent if you’re a party to the conversation, and it’s legal federally. Recording video in public is ok most everywhere.

For me personally I went to jail for false accusations of assault. I had no choice but to interact with a very scheming and hostile individual for a long time and if I’d not recorded the conversations - on advice from my friend and attorney - I’d have likely not beat the charges. So yeah… I very much have a scenario in mind where these would have been helpful and there are certainly others who can probably relate.

This is similar to the type of arguments made by those wanting increased surveillance with stuff like flock camera and ID online verification expansion. Pointing to the bad things in the world it helps prevent or track down that happens.

And pointing to the law to keep pushing what they are allowed to record and track.

Privacy and security has been a balancing act. And even examples of bad thing that happens I’m sure you can relate is the very common attempt at emotional appeal used by them.

Not denying your use case, but when it comes to surveillance they all seem to use the argument of safety.