In our chaotic digital landscape, pop-ups, privacy alerts, and consent requests offer a small measure of control, particularly concerning your images and video recordings. For instance, certain corporate notifications may require your approval for a platform or entity to utilize your appearance in a photograph.
TL;DR
- AR glasses obscure clarity on when companies gather your information, raising privacy concerns.
- The rise of AR glasses with recording capabilities challenges digital social contracts and consent.
- Data like name, age, and pupil dilation can be captured, with questions on legality and governance.
- Stylistic design of AR glasses makes it harder for individuals to know data is being collected.
Reading that small text becomes more challenging, though, with a new set of glasses, particularly augmented-reality (AR) ones. Our digital social agreement gets even tougher to uphold when there are a million people sporting fashionable glasses that can record you immediately.
“How do you roll that out, when you have, say, a million individuals with glasses just walking around, living their lives? Are they to wear T-shirts or signage that says, ‘Hey, I’m not myopic, I’m not [near]-sighted. I’m wearing these glasses because I’d like to take pictures of everyone as I walk about doing my daily life,’” Joe Jones, director of research and insights at nonprofit privacy organization IAPP, told IT Brew with a laugh.
Jones discussed with us the security and privacy dangers, along with the benefits, of wearables as this technology progresses.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Are you seeing mainstream adoption of AR glasses to help people do their jobs?
I'd describe it as not mainstream, but I'm certainly observing a rise in engagement and growing interest with AR glasses or similar devices designed to simulate or enhance real-world settings. This trend is evident across various fields, including mentioned dentistry, medicine and wider scientific exploration. It's also apparent in professions requiring extremely precise manufacturing, engineering, or detailed work—areas that don't typically intersect with privacy or civil liberties concerns as much. For instance, detecting infrastructure breaches or radiation hazards differs significantly from applications in dentistry or casual conversations with friends, colleagues, or family via AR glasses.
Do any privacy concerns come to mind as this technology gets adopted?
Information like your name, age, assumptions, and pupil dilation could be captured by AR glasses. This moment is both incredibly brief and incredibly widespread. Questions arise concerning the legality and effectiveness of not only documentary protections but also the governance and compliance measures in place when data is collected. This includes when individuals should be informed about data usage, how it will be managed, what rights they possess, and what avenues for redress are available.
What about security?
Many of the more established companies in this field are handling a significant portion of that information as close to the source as feasible. A good number of them are processing their data directly on the device, meaning within the headset or on the glasses, and once that information ceases to be useful or no longer serves its purpose, much of it is discarded.
Is it possible to integrate documentation and compliance measures into our daily routines? Or are we resigned to accepting this risk?
I believe we'll witness some manufacturers and system providers of these products stating, “data is collected, and here’s how we’re dealing with that data.” Consequently, if you're on the street and observe an individual sporting these glasses, your initial thought might be, “Okay, I want to know how Company X may have collected my data there.”
The big challenge to all of this is the stylistic design, which makes it harder and harder for individuals to know that their data has been collected in the first place. It’s one thing to talk about CCTV. You see the camera. It’s one thing to talk about the selfie; you see a phone go up…A lot of this technology is going back to a more analog design so that we don’t know it’s technological, and it becomes even harder to understand what safeguards, what documentation and checks and balances exist.
Would you have any advice for, say, a dentist who is using these glasses?
It's crucial that organizations maintain oversight of their governance, infrastructure security, and privacy compliance. While their control over devices made by others is limited, they possess greater authority and face higher expectations regarding how they collect and utilize data within their own systems.
This report was originally published by IT Brew.