Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has introduced eyeglasses that can record what the user sees with only the smallest indication that the people who fall into the field of vision are being recorded. That this would lead to a serious problem should have been obvious but they plowed ahead anyway and now they are facing a backlash with content creators who use them being barraged with hostile comments, even leading to calls for the glasses to be banned in the UK
Despite being marketed as the latest must-have gadget, Meta’s smartglasses, which can record video footage while being worn, have faced a vicious backlash, particularly relating to concerns about surveillance. There are widespread fears about the glasses being used to film people, especially women, without their consent, and the resultant footage being posted on social media. This has earned them the label of “pervert glasses”, and content creators, no matter how they are used, have faced a flood of negative comments for deploying them.
…In one instance, a woman told the BBC a man had recorded her, and then demanded money to remove the videos from social media. Another woman described being recorded during sexual encounters without her consent. Last month, police in Scotland said they were investigating a far-right TikToker who allegedly filmed himself making sexualised comments to young women and telling a Sikh shopkeeper about a plan to “breed out the white race” without their knowledge.
Restaurants, theatres and pubs in the UK, including Wetherspoons, have even joined in on the backlash, banning the Meta glasses over privacy fears.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook/Meta keeps repeating his claim that Facebook helps us by connecting people to one another. While it does do that, it has also become one of the major vectors of hate and the propagator of false information by allowing hate groups to form and spread their vicious lies, responsible for massive violence in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Ethiopia by allowing posts making false claims against minority groups.
As always, when the negative aspects Facebook are pointed out, Zuckerberg and Facebook respond by apologizing for the negative things and say that they are working to fix the problem by tweaking their algorithms. But they never do. And they never will, instead taking actions that often make the problems worse because, as the book An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel and Ceclia Kang (2021) points out:
[The] platform is built upon a fundamental, perhaps irreconcilable dichotomy: its purported mission to advance society by connecting people while also profiting off them. It is Facebook’s dilemma and its ugly truth. [p. 300]
As the book exhaustively documents, Facebook’s profits depend upon having more and more users and having them spend more more and more time on the site. And one major factor that drives growth and engagement is virality and all too often that is generated by posts that are racist, misogynistic, homophobic and generally hateful in so many ways. That is what makes the company so profitable.
This is a problem that can be solved but only if the company willing to take a hard line against false and hate-generating content. But it must have the willingness to weather the charge that it is censoring free speech even if it risks having the hateful people migrate to other sites. But as the book documents, whenever Zuckerberg was confronted with solutions that might address the serious problems, if there was a chance that it would result in lower engagement numbers, he would veto it, hiding behind the noble claim that he was an advocate of free speech, when all he wanted was to increase profits.
Facebook is undoubtedly an evil company. I am glad that I deleted my account well over a decade ago, even before all the major abuses came to light.
I have a
Golden Gate bridgeMonterey Bay aquarium for sale if anyone truly believes that Facebook has a dilemma vis-a-vis profit/power v/s anything else.If you really want to understand the mentality behind Zuckerberg and Facebook, just realize that the original codebase that became Facebook was Zuckerberg creating a ‘Hot or Not’ site back in University so he and his ‘bros’ could rate how good-looking the women on campus were.
Starting from that as a base, the whole ‘pervert glasses’ thing seems to be a perfectly natural outcome, and I have frankly little doubt that this exact sort of thing happening was part of the interest in this all along from Zuckerberg and his closest associates.
I’m wondering if this backlash is also going to hit deaf people using captioning glasses, which are not made by Meta but look similar. That would be an unfortunate side effect if so.
Maybe at long last my wire-frame glasses will come into style!
… only if the company willing to take a hard line against false and hate-generating content. But it must have the willingness to weather the charge that it is censoring free speech …
Such a charge would be true: free speech does, often, lead to resentful reactions. What good would be a medium that, say, allowed only positive things to be said about politicians, corporations, and other hustlers?
Zuckerberg is one of those people who could not possibly care less how much harm he causes as long as he profits. The human brain is a complex organism, producing MLK, Fred Rogers, and ruthless POS’s like Zuckerberg, Trump, Musk, et. al. And of course it is those without a conscience and a lust for power that run the world.
Actually, they probably do ‘tweak the algorithms’ as promised, the problem however is that does very little. A post stoking anger, resentment, grievance etc. against migrants lets say is made somewhat less likely to bump into a person idly scrolling through their feed, but a person actively searching for such will of course still find it. The post -- and many others -- are still there to find. And once a person has salted their browsing history with plenty of that type of material, even their unguided scrolling will find such promoted to their personal feed.
Zuckerberg is happy to promise that remedy because the remedy is fundamentally flawed -- the problem still exists to be found, and only the accidental encounters have been reduced in frequency. This is most likely intentional; anything else will hurt his bottom line and so will not be undertaken unless made to by law. So, the remedy is with Congress.
The previous incarnation was Google Glass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass), which was removed from the market fairly promptly, but not before giving rise to the neologism glasshole.
Headlamp cameras don’t seem to have garnered the same opposition.
If these predators find a hot button issue, their first reaction is to monetize it, not “fix” it.
“pervert glasses” is a dumb name.
remember when google came out with google glass? glasses that could record etc.
the people that used them were called “glassholes”