Surveillance as a fashion statement

Recently, after I posted this bulletin in my profile, Facebook's AI banned me for violating their terms on "who can use Facebook". Coincidence? Bad timing or fb pixel? Then I posted it on a reddit sub for people who were wrongly disabled by Facebook and the subs admin banned and muted me. 

So I decided that since this opinion piece is so incendiary, I might as well upgrade it to a blog entry. So without any further ado, here it is:

Mark Zuckerberg being Mark Zuckerberg again is chasing a fad that already died, just like when he copied Second Life and made it crappier, or when he copied Twitter and made it crappier, or when he copied Twitch, Steam and well... you get the point. 

This time Meta is making their crappy version of Google Glass. An already tried and failed concept. Same thing, only this time Meta is using Ray-Ban for brand recognition. 

Now, this bulletin isn't about warning you about Ray-Ban's meta glasses. Those have existed for years. But rather talk about how it's seen as normal to go around filming people without even warning them. Because it doesn't matter if you don't buy them, as long as some idiot with more money than braincells buys them your privacy is voided. 

Not only that, but cameras can easily use IR sensors to identify everyone around you. It's already being done in Walmart for example, they create a profile of you to compare what you buy and what you stare at while shopping. But these glasses' technology also record sound which means that not only they're able to record what places you frequent but also what you talk about. In the USA, the supreme court ruled that you have no expectation while in public places. Other countries manage privacy in public places differently. 

Regardless of how you feel about this, you gotta admit that using people to scrape data in the real world is ingenious if not machiavellian.

I predict there will be a cold war in the coming decades between people who value their privacy and large corporations profiting from your data. This cultural conflict will result in some ingenious ways to jam surveillance systems, as well as more research into these systems. Me personally, I already bought my "Reflectables" lenses which bounces IR light to make it more difficult for these technologies to identify me.