Dilara was on her lunch break in the London store where she works when a tall man walked up to her and said: “I swear red hair means you’ve just been heartbroken.”
The man continued the conversation as they both got in a lift, and he asked Dilara for her phone number.
What Dilara did not realise was that the man was secretly filming her on his smart glasses - which look like normal eyewear but have a tiny camera which can record video.
The footage was then posted to TikTok, where it received 1.3m views. “I just wanted to cry,” Dilara, 21, told the BBC.
The man who filmed her, it turned out, had posted dozens of secretly filmed videos to TikTok, giving men tips on how to approach women.
Dilara also found out that her phone number was visible in the video. She then faced a wave of messages and calls.
Do these stupid companies actually think that any of these products aren’t just going to be used by perverts?
There are legitimate professional use cases: for example, imagine a consulting doctor looking in on what another surgeon is doing and offering opinions as the operation goes on. Or same thing with engineers.
But I can’t think of a single consumer use case that isn’t designed for perverts.
I’m 90% on-board with disliking these, but I can see uses for ‘Augmented Reality’ glasses. I just wish they worked the way they do in Sci-fi and video games.
Lots of interactions we have on our phones could be done hands-free on a HUD
automatic translation of text or voice when traveling navigation/directions and similar guidance, like automatic subway/train maps instant access to biometric data trends like heart rate, glucose levels and more
I’ve also been part of a pilot to get a HUD to provide AR data to a manufacturing operator, showing things like line speed, temperature and other kinds of data they would otherwise have to go to a computer for. This was around the google glass era, though, and the devices were too pricey to justify and the tech wasn’t there yet.
I do think these devices need to be more obvious. We called them glassholes when google was starting this wearable computing trend and people were using them inappropriately; and we’ve seen how any internet-connected camera like Ring and Flock can be abused.
The concept of the personal HUD is useful, but it still needs workshopping to make it socially safe. Also, the ones like the Meta/Rayban glasses are just pervert tools. No AR, just a camera has no value other than creeping.
Even if these companies try to create a technology with the express concern to make its use ethical, clean, safe, private, and pragmatically useful, perverts will still manage to gunk it up with pervert slime.
Not holding out much hope on either of these things right now. Maybe we’ll end up in the star trek universe somehow.