Traveling with Apple Vision Pro

My concerns are around the normalization of pointing high-resolution cameras at people around you all the time. Perhaps this specific device may have a company behind it that, at least at the moment, will resist handing the video feed with you in it to the data brokers.

Make no mistake though, the data brokers are foaming at the mouth to get access to high-resolution constantly-streaming video content that includes your face, your location, and your activities. Imagine the sorts of things that are going to be sold to whoever is buying.

"Jake Jacobs, who is married, is striking up a lengthy conversation with the young woman seated next to him. His wife might be interested in ads for divorce lawyers."

"Jeff Jones is taking a middle-of-the-week flight to San Jose, and he just finished writing an email to a recruiter from another company who is based out of that city. His company is paying the data broker for intel on employees who may be shopping around, so let's get this info to them stat."

"Jennifer Smith looks to be 3 months pregnant and is flying from Texas to Colorado. She's reading a Planned Parenthood pamphlet. The State of Texas passed a law in 2026 requiring data brokers to report on such activities, so of course we'll let them know."

As competing products come along that are cheaper than the Apple doohickies in part because of the subsidies they get from the data brokers, portable VR headsets are going to bring along a significant deterioration of our already-dismal privacy protections.

>My concerns are around the normalization of pointing high-resolution cameras at people around you all the time.

This already exists with CCTVs on every major city streetcorner and Ring cameras on every doorstep. Not to mention Tesla cloud-connected cameras pointed inward and outward.

To the degree that this is a risk, I'd note that airports and train stations tend to have a _large_ quantity of cameras in them; some of them owned by the airport operator, some by law enforcement, and some by lessees of retail space within the airport.

This problem is real, but it is better managed by creating massive, punishing fines for companies that engage in that behavior than it is by attempting to ban augmented reality devices (or laptops, or tablets, or phones, or any other camera-containing device).

Most of the CCTV and Ring cameras are pretty lousy and they're in fixed locations. All the time I'll be out walking and hear an obnoxious "You are currently being recorded" announcement, but I'm far enough away from that cheap camera that I'm probably a shadowy figure in a grainy video.

These VR headsets on the other hand are high-quality, very close to other people, and mobile.

I feel it's harder for a tesla to capture footage of a teenager reading a pamphlet on a plane, but who knows what Elon's plans are.

>Most of the CCTV and Ring cameras are pretty lousy and they're in fixed locations.

The CCTVs in Chicago are 360 degree panning plus up/down, and can zoom-in four blocks away with enough resolution to make out a face and license plate. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/09/29/chicago-police-cam....

Here is an example of the cameras in action: https://x.com/CWBChicago/status/1445124776742227980

The airlines can do that themselves:

"Newer seat-back entertainment systems on some airplanes operated by American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and Singapore Airlines have cameras, and it’s likely they are also on planes used by other carriers." https://apnews.com/article/4c3ca3b46c704c6080ba026729fc8d21

Oh yeah, no, you're definitely streaming high-definition video from the airplane. You'd better put your phone in airplane mode. The front camera is silently recording and selling your complaints about the airplane food to a competing airline in full HD. Some say they can tell from your pores. Airlines specifically upgraded in-flight wifi to 100 Gbps upload so that we could get seamless data brokering on-demand. A data broker I know sometimes hits a button to get instant live-streaming access to the inside of the seatback pocket. He really likes it. "He's watching Modern Family S4 E3" he laughed the other day. "He doesn't know the airline doesn't have S4 E4! He's going to be so disappointed"

Yes, the chairs on the Titanic aren't perfectly aligned with one another.

This is complete science fiction / FUD. Amazon can't even stop showing you ads for vacuum cleaners after you buy a vacuum cleaner, you think they have the compute for something that sophisticated?

Don't confuse temporary with forever. I remember folks dismissing digital cameras out of hand, and now you can barely buy an alternative.

Did you have to pick a video where somebody is killed?

It’d probably be mostly happening on-device. Why waste their own compute on it when they can just drain your battery and send themselves only the pertinent details.

I won't buy a device with cameras slapped all over it either. But anyone fearmongering over this has not thought through what it would take to do this at scale and really consider how this is worthwhile over existing tracking methods. The amount of compute required to squeeze useful targeting data out of hours of video is just not cost-effective compared to the plentiful data from your activity on a phone or laptop. In all your examples, the same signal would be visible from online activity that is practically guaranteed to be there.

My concern is the unforeseen consequences this might have on our eyes, long-term.

Not able to compute that won't stop them reselling or holding it. At some point it will leak, and available for sell to PI or someone will more personal interest on you

No one has the storage capacity necessary to store that much audio content, let alone video.

Furthermore, the incremental benefit over traditional ad targeting via search or web history is probably pretty marginal, and not nearly worth the effort/cost. All of these scenarios (Jake Jacobs' wife, Jeff Jone, Jennifer Smith) are already going to show up in a traditional search history, why would an ad company go through all that effort to get data they already have? This is real life not a Mission Impossible movie.

cctvs are fixed, this is mobile ! not the same difference.

It's Chicago and that's pretty normal there.

Try getting CCTV footage passed as admissible in court in most of Europe. It's basically impossible, even at HD resolutions. That's if you can even get hold of the footage under GDPR - as it requires the police to request the footage and follow up with the business to ensure its passed on.

Lol. Lines like this make it clear that anyone speaking about it has never actually lived in Chicago.

They may own a big hotel, run for public office, or (here) they may link a source or two leveraging a couple of neighborhoods raising statistics.

But they clearly never lived in, or know what it's like to live in, Chicago.

> Perhaps this specific device may have a company behind it that, at least at the moment, will resist handing the video feed with you in it to the data brokers.

In that case go with devices made by Meta. As selling the raw data is the last thing they would do.

But we don't have CCTV in bathrooms, locker/changing rooms or swimming pools etc. You can't take a Tesla in there either (please don't give Elon any ideas though).

While I can't promise that all CCTV operators are honest people, at least there's some chance of going after the company involved if there's a mess-up. Random people on the street where you have no idea who they are filming you, that's a different thing.

Randos installing hidden cameras in women's toilets seems to be a big enough problem in South Korea that some of the public toilets at major stations are security checked for them every single day, as far as I know. I don't want those people anywhere near me with an always-on camera, even in public fully-clothed spaces.

No need to live there to know its reality. This type of violence is normalized there.

https://heyjackass.com/

If 1% of people buy a second vacuum that ad placement could be very rational.

Some people have big houses, others want to buy another brand, and some people love their cleaner so much they buy a similar one for their cousin's birthday.

Just like we had with TVs and other screens. Interestingly enough though, when I look around in my office, the majority of people in my team wear glasses, so there's that...

Q.E.D. :)

> Imagine the sorts of things that are going to be sold to whoever is buying.

Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society.

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash: A Novel (pp. 140-141). Random House Worlds. Kindle Edition.

I fly a lot (though not in the US) and have never seen that. Would personally boycott airlines where I notice cameras in the back seats, wtf!

The current top comment in this thread recommends AR glasses from a Beijing-based company which has indirect Chinese state involvement (through Alibaba). So yeah...

Opportunity cost is much higher than the revenue generated from a redundant vacuum

Also, at least in Europe, you would be filming people against their will, which could be a GDPR violation.