Facebook says it is developing what appears like a fairly fine-grained way of monitoring sounds occurring in enclosed spaces – spaces that would also be mapped for any objects they contain. And Facebook is relying on artificial intelligence (AI) of one kind or another to achieve this, said a blog post announcing “AI Habitat.”
As is often the case, this type of “arrangement” between ordinary users and a data-dependent and hungry tech juggernaut like Facebook, and the trade-off involved, doesn’t seem to be really worth it for users would have to wear “smart glasses” to allow this invasive system into their homes, and in exchange get trivial help from their AI assistants in checking whether the front door’s locked and finding a phone that’s ringing somewhere else in the apartment. If that’s all the benefit to the user wearing a pair of awkward “glasses” loaded with sensors probing the privacy of their home to the core – it truly sounds like the worst deal ever.
You don’t even have to be a cynic at this point in time, knowing what we know not only about Facebook but also Google and others, to ask, why in the world would I let these corporations learn and ultimately control my life any more than they already do?
But Facebook appears to be relying on its users not being very privacy-aware, while perhaps a little infantile.
“At the end of the day, our hope is that these AR glasses are sort of giving people superpowers,” Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote in the blog post.
More likely, it will give Facebook even more “superpower” over those invested in using the platform.
(As a side note, it’s quite remarkable how even after multiple fails Big Tech continues to go back to the Augmented Reality (AR) glasses concept that is for some reason very alluring to them – even though Google has long since given up on its Glass project, and many competitors like Snapchat and reportedly Apple are either struggling or already failing.)
Other than the implied and unavoidable motive, given Facebook’s business model to collect as much data from its users as possible – the tech giant doesn’t really go into other reasons it may have for building this tech.
