There aren’t going to be a whole lot of people who are going to fuck with their eyesight if they don’t have a severe eyesight handycap, which isn’t as common as Meta wants smart glasses to be.

Also, every hearing aid is a microphone, yet I’ve never heard of a case where information from hearing aids was being misused. Almost like there’s a big divide between aids for disabilities and surveillance tech.

Short answer: No, this is not an issue. The FDA’s medical device regulations are not conducive to targeted advertising/data sharing/moving fast and breaking things. Data collected would be de-facto PHI, so it’s more liability than utility.

Meta want you to record things with the glasses to upload to Facebook. People who make DME firmware do not.

If they’re internet connected, sure I would. It’s a matter of trust. If I can’t be around you without Zuckerberg or someone looking at me too, then I don’t want to be around you.

It’s a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he’s not already conspicuous enough, he’s wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. 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. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

—Snow Crash

Neal Stephenson had it be ostracized.

Smartglasses were not “vilified”, they were already vile to begin with. They were just put on the list of vile things it’s socially acceptable to complain about.

I assume if we survive climate change and technology continues, that we will enter a society where we are recorded almost 24/7 through different means The question becomes “Will this be data owned by corporations?”, because that will dictate many things.

Probably not, there seems to be actual use cases for optical implants, instead of excuses.

Will they be made by a company with a history of mining your data and ignoring your privacy, with the capability to clandestinely record people?
If so, then yeah, as they should be.

If not, then they should be fine.

I think you’re fundamentally (willfully?) misunderstanding the problem that people have with meta glasses. The problem isn’t just that they have cameras in them.

Sad to say I would not trust anyone who is constantly pointing a secret corpo camera at me. Even if its curing their blindness

In your deus ex scenario who makes the augments? A mega corporation. So yes they will absolutely be vilified because they won’t be for the good of humanity they’ll be to charge a subscription for… vision, and spy on everyone you know.

Only way they should be accepted is as legit medical devices with open sources and no ability to stream or record video only pipe directly into the optic nerve. They should not be for tech bro fantasies.

If a frog had wings would it bump it’s ass when it hopped? That’s about as relevant as this question.

People twist and turn to vilify the things they want to vilify and excuse the things they want to excuse. I’ve been seeing it increasingly in the context of AI where people draw distinctions between “generative AI” and “machine learning” based on whether they like the individual application or not. It might be fine to use LLMs for assistance with programming, but the same LLM becomes Satan incarnate if it’s helping write a fanfic. Photoshop can use AI to do image segmentation for “smart select” but the same AI is taking jobs from artists if it touches one pixel’s colour values.

We’re a little way off from optical implants becoming good and popular yet, so I guess we’ll just have to see which way the winds are blowing when we get there. Probably it’ll be fine, I expect most people will find ways to excuse them.

That hinges on governments actually moving their arse and regulating such technologies. To ensure they would assist disabled folks who need them without becoming just another trojan horse for mass surveillance && ultracapitalist advertisement.

In other words, I can pretty much guarantee that yes, anyone with eye implants will be unwelcome in my circle.

Because governments won’t regulate things done by big tech (let alone something done by a marriage of big tech and big pharma, two of the most powerful corporate overlords).

And so the eye implants will be just as perverted as the AI Pervert Glasses if not even more so.

I suspect that this will get addressed by implants being able to output video except to the brain. I wouldn’t be surprised if that happens if only to airgap the sensor from being hacked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uASUHbFEhWY