Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses(barrons.com) |
Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses(barrons.com) |
I see what you did there.
A couple of examples:
* We have one of the worlds best bottle deposit systems [1]. Now that the EU has made their rules. Norway has to spend tons of money regressing to a common system.
* Norway has good cleansing facilities for water/sewage. Now that the EU has made their decisions, based on research from urban regions of southern europe and the pollution of rivers, sparsely populated fjord communes of Norway dont know how the fuck they will pay for upgrades to their already modern systems, other than passing it on to an already strained population. [2] (Norwegiens are not generally rich. Our state is rich. They use the money for investing in anything but Norway. Manhatten real estate is good. Norwegian roads or hospitals are not).
[1] https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/eu-vil-tvinge-norge-til-a-innfor...
[2] https://www.nrk.no/vestland/nye-eu-krav-til-avlopsreinsing-k...
Is it the added convenience of the glasses?
True - many places where photography and video recording by people and organizations is already done on a broad scale with both smartphones and infrastructure cameras.
> "We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed, or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored"
... I think we're gonna need a bigger ban
Just because you’re in public doesn’t mean it’s ok to take secret upskirt photos, film in the gym showers, etc. There actually is a certain level of privacy expected in public.
Edit: corrected SE Asia to East Asia.
I live in "SE Asia" - specifically Vietnam - and I've never heard of such a law. I just looked it up and the two countries that come up are Korea and Japan, neither of which are in SE Asia.
Personally, I gave up years ago. People don't care about actual privacy, they just care about the illusion of it.
Targeting smart glasses specifically seems to narrow though, because there are obviously many other ways to carry around a hidden camera in public, like one disguised as a pen in your pocket or something.
Trying to ban recording in public is silly. People just need to realize that they're probably being recorded in public. That cat has been out of the bag for many years now.
Even if we banned smart glasses, we'd still see ever-expanding networks of privately owned cameras that record every movement you make. We'd still have networks of ring cameras and similar devices. We'll still have ever-increasing use of AI to sort and categorise the content.
Privacy is dead. Smart glasses are just an uncomfortable reminder of this fact, and banning them without addressing the over-arching issue is similar to sticking our collective head in the sand.
Just because we haven’t yet beaten ALPRs doesn’t mean I want some dickhead recording me at a hot spring without me knowing. Having both things to deal with is worse than having just one.
If you have to defend smart glasses based on a technicality, that doesn't reflect very well on the glasses.
It's the same as a buttonhole camera used for spying. The differentiator (vs a phone or SLR or similar) is that its primary function is concealed.
Maybe if we started with the "strap cameras to the face of the population" plan we'd all have been less inclined to act like frogs in rapidly warming water. Alas.
I would understand if you felt this way privately, in fact I can relate to that.
Society at large spent a long time ridiculing people with these concerns, are you really so shocked that I am enjoying the moment where the issue comes home to roost? I'm not obligated to be a constructive member of society in all regards.
The point is to ban widespread normalization of tools that make invasion of privacy easy. You can go find a shirt button spy cam on Aliexpress, but if you get caught wearing it then everyone knows what you’re up to. Wearing one in certain places could be taken as criminal intent.
(I don’t think restrictions like this would work in the US without an amendment, but I think we’re long overdue for a privacy amendment to clarify some things.)
Someone wearing weird 3D printed camera glasses is going to be obvious. Someone with the skill to disassemble a tiny glued together smart glass frame, bypass any hardware protections, and flash a custom OS will be rare, and they’ll get caught anyway when they “accidentally” wander into the women’s locker for the third time.
So yeah, I guess as long as you're okay with a law like that potentially becoming very easy to bypass then I don't have a problem with it. But I think once things start going down that path, most people aren't going to be satisfied with leaving it at that; they'll hear about a bypass and start pushing to restrict the freedoms that enabled it.