Inclusivity versus Privacy in the Age of Smart Glasses
Smart glasses have real utility for vision impaired users. These glasses are however disconcerting in public places for others with privacy concerns. How can we resolve this dilemma?
Meta’s Smart Ray Bans have re-ignited the involuntary image capture privacy concerns originally sparked by Google Glass more than 10 years ago, which spawned the pejorative glasshole meme. Although I acknowledge unsolicited video scrutiny can manifestly feel uncomfortable, I don’t personally have much truck with self-conscious diners worrying about being caught literally with egg on their face or other culinary malfunctions. Anyone who has seen me eating would be forgiven for jests about feeding time at the zoo, and my only consolation is that at least I can pretend no-one is looking at me or shooting footage of me for a TikTok gastro-horror short. Although I fear the mainstream use case for smart glasses may be yet more gratuitous Instagram posting, for me they have remarkable potential utility.
I’m fine with restaurants having video free zones, but outright bans such as this are not exactly inclusive and are arguably outright discriminatory.
Previous posts in this blog highlight the huge potential for smart glasses as an assistive technology. Even in today’s limited form, they can already sometimes read menus for me or, in conjunction with a mirror, describe the devastation wrought upon my favourite shirt by my recent encounter with my favourite spaghetti Carbonara.
It would be frustrating if the comfort of other diners trumps inclusivity in the same way that guide dogs are occasionally barred from restaurants, despite equality legislation to the contrary. But hopefully this will become a non-issue when everyone finally realizes they are already captured on camera in almost every public space, resolves not to do too many embarrassing things in public, and engages their better self before exiling all those with Meta Ray Bans to the glasshole sin bin.
What’s wrong with the good old fashioned solution of braille menus I hear some of you ask? Two key problems:
- Not many restaurants have them, and they are impractical with a regularly changing menu or daily specials
- Much more significantly, only 7% of blind people can read Braille. I am not in that 7% because I lost my sight later in life and in any case I find speech synthesis and a smart phone way more convenient than Braille signage I cannot find, Braille books that are too heavy to transport and Braille menus that are out of date or non-existent.
I’m not anti-Braille, but like guide dogs, it’s an overrated panacea. Even in the most disabled friendly environments it can go unexpectedly pear shaped. At the disabled club where I waterskied for many years, the oversight committee for the new accommodation block meticulously accommodated every conceivable disability. On it’s inaugural weekend, the block was occupied by a group of wheelchair skiers and another group of blind skiers. The wheel chair team in the loungewere rudely interrupted by 4 blind guys wearing nothing but towels around their waist.
Wheelchair guy: Why are you coming to watch telly semi-naked?
Blind guy: We’re not coming to watch telly. The sign on the door says this is the shower room.
Sadly the braille signs were put on the wrong doors by the builders, who unsurprisingly did not read Braille themselves and didn’t think it worth checking with anyone who did.
My bottom line is that Braille will become as niche as auto-cues (i.e. there will be a few professions for which Braille is an important vision impaired career enabler, but it will not feature in day to day life. Instead, as we all become inured to a constant surveillance society, it will be entirely normal to wear smart glasses in public places, and the glasses will do much, much more for vision impaired users than simply reading menus and checking for food related wardrobe malfunctions.