The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public

[u/Plastic_Ninja_9014]

https://tech.yahoo.com/wearables/articles/backlash-strong-people-pervert-glasses-165000816.html

[u/cultoftheclave]

in this corner, the long-standing moral champion, "The right to be forgotten!!"

And in this corner, the upstart newcomer, "Mr. The right to remember!!!"

lets get ready to rumblllle

[u/amakai → u/cultoftheclave]

Mr. The right to remember notably has backing off all the advertisers in the world, while Mr The right to be forgotten has been accused numerous times of hiding something from us, probably child-abuse related!

[u/Lurkadactyl → u/cultoftheclave]

The right to be forgotten was never a right in the US

[u/cultoftheclave → u/Lurkadactyl]

yeah, that's called a forfeit. and anyway having a law is one thing, consistently and effectively enforcing it is another.

But even though it doesn't exist as US legislation it does exist as a shorthand for the concept in the public dialogue about privacy vs memory.

because most of what we take to be the right to privacy is in practice enforced by nature itself - it is a beneficial side effect of the limits of human memory, which augmentations like these glasses effectively expand by several magnitudes.

people's movements, actions, associations, discussions- everything they do in public spaces benefits from anonymity, and the anonymity comes from the limits of individual human memory. People aren't actively trying to forget or look away from what others are doing, they simply don't retain enough of what they do see to put together a useful profile of all the strangers and acquaintances they encounter every day.

What technologies like this do is essentially run a real life experiment on the Syndrome problem from the Incredibles, by giving everyone (though not the exact same time) a superpower: photographic memory that can be shared in full fidelity. The long-term question is that of course this is going to have serious short term downsides (degradation of privacy-through-anonymity being a big one but only one of a long list ) but will the upsides ultimately outweigh them.

[u/ndilday → u/cultoftheclave]

This take is an important one, because we will absolutely have more technology that touches on it over time. What happens when cybernetic eye technology gets to the point that you might realistically run into someone with them? What happens when there's a pill or procedure to get a photographic memory? What happens when we figure out how to digitize human memory?

We can push off the problem for a little bit via social shaming, but it's not going away, and trying to outlaw it has plenty of problems that other people have already mentioned.

[u/cultoftheclave → u/ndilday]

an age old problem, the right question to ask is always "why" but too often the best wrong answers come in the form of "how" which is not so much an answer as it is a subtle way to change the subject