This is an excellent article on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. I highly recommend it to everyone. Thanks for posting it here @JG 
“Most people have a Law & Order SVU-level understanding of this doctrine, and took it to assume everything is fair game and therefore there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy in public,” said Jennings. “A lot of technology, these Meta glasses being a perfect example, get built off of this public mentality.”
Kendra Albert, a technology lawyer and partner at Albert Sellars LLP, said that just because there is less expectation of privacy in public versus in private doesn’t mean that anything goes. Especially when things like facial recognition and live speech transcription can use an image or audio recording to unlock previously inaccessible troves of data about a person.
Conflating two tangentially related principles/things/ideas as one is a common mistake humans make when critical thinking skills are lacking.
This is how stupid these companies think we are.
Excellent share @JG!
When it comes to internet-connected devices that capture audio and video, the conventional wisdom of the smartphone era has been that everything in public is “fair game.” But while this has proven mostly true for activists recording the police, legal experts say this idea that private citizens have absolutely no reasonable expectation of privacy in public has been distorted to extremes over the years.
ON PRIVACY EXPECTATIONS IN PUBLIC
This is something that privacy advocate Carissa Véliz delves into in her 2nd book, The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance. I am hoping to eventually start some conversations about some of her ideas and positions, because I think they are very thought-provoking. One of her arguments is that just because something is public doesn’t mean you won’t violate someone’s privacy by sharing it.
For example, earlier this year, consumer rights activist Louis Rossmann raised awareness about Better Way Electronics (BWE), a PlayStation repair company who was treating their customers very poorly and unfairly, while also invading their privacy. BWE’s customers had reached to Louis because they felt like they had no other recourse.
So Louis called out BWE, which is based in Australia, on his channel of 2+ million subscribers. As a result, BWE dealt with the attention this was getting in bad faith by sending copyright strikes for Louis videos, calling it an invasion of their privacy.
In response, Louis decided to investigate who was the person behind BWE. And it turns out this person was a man who was criminally convicted for sexual offenses toward a child and did so by hacking into that child’s computer, i.e. invading their privacy. Below is Louis’s video for those who want more context.
The criminal history of the person behind BWE was technically public information in Australia, but it’s not information that most people in Australia or elsewhere knew about. By shining a light on it, Louis let the world know. Louis did not break any laws, and to his understanding, which I can appreciate, he did not invade this person’s privacy. But after reading Carissa Véliz’ book, I have mixed feeling about the ethics of his action. That said, I am admittedly leaning on him having done the right thing. This story was also reported in Australian media, who interviewed Louis.
Kendra Albert, a technology lawyer and partner at Albert Sellars LLP, said that just because there is less expectation of privacy in public versus in private doesn’t mean that anything goes.
I agree. There is and should be some reasonable expectation of privacy in public and for some public information.
ON PUBLIC UTILITIES AS SURVEILLANCE
Historically, the rules around public recording and surveillance come from a patchwork of different laws and legal principles. One of them is something called the “plain view doctrine,” which was established in the 2001 case Kyllo v. United States .
The case involved a police raid on an indoor cannabis farm in California that took place after cops had used thermal cameras to detect warmer temperatures inside the building. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that this violated the Fourth Amendment, because the thermal cameras augmented regular vision and allowed police to “explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion.”
This meant that the evidence used to justify a search had to be in “plain view” — something that could be easily seen by the casual observer without enhancement tools.
This is exactly why I am against smart meters.
In 2022, the EFF sued the city of Sacramento and the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) for doing the exact same thing. For over a decade, they searched through all of their customers’ energy data, and passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly “high” usage households to police, suspecting them of growing cannabis.
Users have plenty of good reasons to be concerned, given Meta’s history. The company has violated wiretapping laws and helped police investigate alleged abortion seekers by turning over their chat histories, and more recently joined other tech companies in very publicly cozying up to the Trump administration. […] Companies like Meta invest in these devices believing they can create conditions where the tech is normalized and accepted, or at least very difficult for people to reject.
This is why we must consistently fight and challenge these privacy invasive technologies in our personal and professional lives, bur also collectively through activism and policy. We mustn’t wait for these services and technologies to become ubiquitous and too big to fail, because it’s much harder at that point in time.
[…] ultimately, true privacy would mean getting the law, the tech, and the written / unwritten social rules to align. “To really protect people, what we’d need is more akin to the recreational camera-drone ‘no-fly zones’ — proactive restrictions baked into the technology as well as encoded in law that punish both the end users and manufacturers alike for their violations of recording consent boundaries.”
Failing that, good old-fashioned shame is still the most powerful check we have on nonconsensual recording, privacy advocates say.
But one thing many privacy experts agree on is that even if we can’t change the law, we can change peoples’ attitudes around consent.
“One way to think about it is protecting your community and the people you care about,”
I 100% agree. Surveillance is being more and more socially accepted and has been for decades. Fingerprints, SIM card registration, facial rec, all the uses of these privacy invasive technologies and policies should be challenged. We should also challenge our friends and family. I don’t want my phone number to be shared with WhatsApp and Google, but that’s exactly what people do when they share their contacts. I did not consent to this.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Thanks again for this great article @JG . I did not know about the Critical Internet Studies Institute (CISI), and its co-founders Dr. Joan Donovan and Dr. Chris Gilliard. I look forward to learning more about their work, and listening to their upcoming new podcast Control Shift when it launches.
I am reading that Gilliard is about to release a book about “luxury surveillance” titled Luxury Surveillance: How Big Tech Sells Us the Pleasure of Being Watched. I am very keen to read it when it comes out, but I am not convinced that this term will catch on.
Chris was recently interview on Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, and I look forward to listening to it.
Reminds me of that one Black Widow episode where a guy goes absolutely bonkers over a “cookie” that records everything he sees to catch his girlfriend cheating.
We already have people recording others with phones and film cameras, but it’s easier to tell them to stop compared to a world filled with always-on sunglass cameras.
I couldn’t agree more 
