When Cameras Become Ambient

What even is a camera anymore?

Does it feel like cameras are going through a radical transformation? A smartphone has a camera. Smart glasses have a camera. What’s the difference?… there’s a big difference… maybe the difference is… well, everything. Last week, Hans Anders, one of the largest eyewear chains in the Netherlands, stopped selling Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses in the Netherlands and Belgium because of “privacy concerns.” Meanwhile, businesses like the Wetherspoon pub chain in Britain have begun restricting their use. It seems like the backlash against smart glasses is moving beyond people simply complaining about them and toward institutions creating rules around them. The reason has less to do with cameras than with what cameras are becoming…

Ambient.

When someone wants to record something with their phone, they reach into their pocket… pull out the device… unlock it… raise it… point it (often in moments where they should be helping someone out and not recording). There’s a physical language to the act of “capturing.” You can usually see/feel what’s happening. You may not consent to it, but at least you understand that a camera has entered the interaction. Smart glasses change that. It’s hard to know. Maybe it’s recording… maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s listening. Maybe AI is analyzing what it sees. There might be a tiny light indicating something is happening, but do most people know what that light means? I’m not sure I do. We haven’t developed a social language for this yet.

And that creates something I’ve been thinking about as “consent by proximity.”

If I put a smart speaker in my house, I’m making a privacy decision for myself and the people I invite into my home. If I enable location tracking on my phone, that’s my decision. But if I walk into a restaurant wearing cameras, microphones and AI on my face, suddenly everybody around me becomes part of my privacy decision. They didn’t buy the glasses… they didn’t agree to the terms of service… they may not even know what the technology is doing.

That “feels” different.

There’s another side to ambient cameras that I find equally fascinating… and it connects directly to The Intimacy Economy. Creating content becomes almost indistinguishable from simply experiencing life. You walk through a market… have dinner with friends… travel somewhere incredible… attend a concert… and the people following you can experience those moments almost exactly as you did. They’re not looking at you holding a camera. They’re seeing the world through your eyes. That creates an entirely different level of connection (to the creator, the content and their audience). And with that comes a dramatic tradeoff… the more frictionless this intimate content creation becomes for the person wearing the glasses and the people following them, the less obvious it becomes to everyone physically around them that they may have become part of the content too. One person’s intimacy in building an audience comes at the expense of everyone else’s privacy.

The Intimacy Economy is, like technology, neutral.

It can create real connection… or create consequences we haven’t fully considered. And smart glasses make that tension very real. Real-time translation… navigation… accessibility tools for people with visual or hearing challenges… contextual information appearing exactly when you need it… communications. Genuinely transformative applications. But all of that good doesn’t automatically grant a technology social permission… and that may be what we’re watching unfold. When there isn’t a clear social contract around a technology, somebody eventually creates one (just look at how hashtags and @ replies emerged from users during Twitter’s early days and eventually became part of the platform itself). In this instance, if individuals can’t reasonably negotiate whether they want to be recorded, restaurants, bars, workplaces, retailers and other institutions are making the rules when no one else is…

“No smart glasses here.”

Phones made cameras ubiquitous… now smart glasses could make cameras ambient. And The Intimacy Economy may give us a powerful incentive to embrace them. We want less friction between our experiences and the people we share them with. We want technology to disappear so that the connection can feel more direct… more human… more intimate. But the paradox of ambient technology is that making the technology disappear for the person using it doesn’t make its consequences disappear for everyone else. Once cameras fade into what we wear… our earbuds (there are already reports that cameras are coming to future AirPods)… our glasses… perhaps eventually almost everything around us… privacy can no longer be thought of simply as a personal setting we turn on or off.

The technology may belong to you… but the privacy around it belongs to all of us.

This (and some other topics) is what we discussed on CJAD 800 AM this week.