#peerveillance — Public Fediverse posts

"the most striking trend in recent years has not been sousveillance of the powerful, but what — for want of a better word — I am going to call “peerveillance”. With the help of gadgets and subscriptions from technology companies, we are increasingly turning our gaze on each other, whether through cameras on our cycle helmets or our rapid adoption of camera doorbells such as Amazon’s Ring devices.

The next step might be smart glasses such as the Meta Ray-Ban Display, which Meta unveiled last week. The ordinary-looking glasses can do some handy things, such as overlaying an arrow on to your vision so you don’t have to keep looking down at your phone for directions. But they can also take photos and record videos, and some fear that at some point facial recognition technology could be added to them, too, so users could know in real time who they were looking at.

It would be dangerously fatalistic to simply shrug because privacy is “already dead”. There is a qualitative difference between the ability of people to film you or your children with a phone or doorbell, which are highly visible, versus their ability to do it undetected (unless you see the small “recording” light on the glasses), let alone to apply facial recognition. The potential benefits — perhaps a user could be spared embarrassment when they bumped into someone whose name they had forgotten — seem entirely outweighed by the obvious risks of this technology in the hands of creeps and stalkers."

https://www.ft.com/content/9fca417e-f2db-4e5c-a252-66a15007e526

#Surveillance #Peerveillance #Sousveillance #Privacy #DataProtection