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Ordered something from Amazon in the last few months? Try searching your email for an order, like "cat flap" or "coffee filter".
No luck? It's because Amazon removed item details from their email – and it has startling implications for AR glasses. https://mssv.net/2020/08/16/digital-sight-management-and-the-mystery-of-the-missing-amazon-receipts/
No luck? It's because Amazon removed item details from their email – and it has startling implications for AR glasses. https://mssv.net/2020/08/16/digital-sight-management-and-the-mystery-of-the-missing-amazon-receipts/
For all its faults, Amazon has good customer service, which makes this user-hostile change baffling. What would lead them to remove useful info from emails?
Simple: free email clients are scraping customers' emails and selling the data.
Simple: free email clients are scraping customers' emails and selling the data.
Amazon knows the value of data. It's been accused of competing with its own AWS customers by watching their usage and using the private data of third-party vendors to launch clones.
For Amazon, turnabout isn't fair play, but they were able to stop "their" data leaking – for now.
For Amazon, turnabout isn't fair play, but they were able to stop "their" data leaking – for now.
There are other ways you could scrape customer info from Amazon, like browser extensions and even entire custom browsers – and there are ways Amazon could circumvent that, by requiring people to use their own apps.
But there's one thing they can't stop: computer vision.
But there's one thing they can't stop: computer vision.
Amazon can't stop you from taking a photo of your checkout page. Obviously no-one wants to do that, but what if – stay with me now – you're wearing augmented reality (AR) glasses?
Then you (or a horrible scam app) can scrape your orders and there's nothing they can do about it!
Then you (or a horrible scam app) can scrape your orders and there's nothing they can do about it!
That's the awesome power of AR glasses: always-on computer vision, aimed at whatever you're looking at and, by definition, interested in. You could use it for price comparison at a supermarket – or to scrape its entire inventory.
You can record the nutritional content of what you eat – or crowdsource a food database to compete with MyFitnessPal with far less effort than ever before.
You could archive *every single word* of every article and book you read, with full-text searching; map your social graph based on who you talk to on social media and in the real world... I call it "worldscraping".
Is this a security and privacy nightmare? It *could* be, but it doesn't *have* to be. Software can extract salient features without needing a direct camera feed; processing can be done on-device rather than in the cloud; crowdsourced data can be fuzzed and anonymised.
Anyway, worldscraping poses an existential threat to companies who've built a moat made out of proprietary data – which is to say, data about YOU and data YOU have collected for them. And that's a lot of companies, and they're very very big.
Unfortunately, it's those same few multi-billion and trillion dollar companies who have the financial and technical clout to build AR glasses. Like, we all know it's going to be Apple and Amazon and Facebook and Google and Huawei and Samsung making these, right?
The problem is, they aren't going to appreciate people using "their" devices to destroy their businesses. So here's my predication: they're going to lock AR glasses down HARD. You will not be able to install any apps that they don't approve.
Because there *is* a way for Amazon to stop you from scraping their data. AR glasses can only scrape what they can see, so if you display data on the glasses themselves, it can't escape.
If you don't want a Kindle book being scraped, just force people to read it in AR.
If you don't want a Kindle book being scraped, just force people to read it in AR.
It's HDCP for your eyes: Digital Sight Management.
How will they convince users this is a good idea? They'll terrify them. What if you accidentally install a malicious app that records everything you see and sends it to scammers/Russian/China/etc.?
They'll say the only way to stay safe is by entering their walled garden.
They'll say the only way to stay safe is by entering their walled garden.
This is unfortunately a winning argument. The recent Epic vs. Apple/Google fight has seen the same ahistorical arguments trotted out the giants’ supporters, that without Apple and Google’s oversight, our phones would be infested with viruses and malware.
This ignores the past, which saw the PC and internet revolutions boom due to the fact that you didn't need anyone's permission to write software or create a website.
And it ignores our lived reality, where anyone can install any app on their Mac or PC.
And it ignores our lived reality, where anyone can install any app on their Mac or PC.
It'd be one thing if Apple and Google’s walled garden only kept out genuinely harmful software, as Apple does on the Mac, but it extends to censorship of serious games about worker exploitation and the effective banning of entire business models. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/22/sweatshop-game-apple-app-store
Worldscraping has incredible potential. We’ll be able to extract *our own data* without needing Amazon or Google’s or anyone's permission. We can make a better food database faster than ever, a better catalogue of plants and wildlife, a better map of the world, anything.
The big losers from worldscraping will be incumbent companies and tech giants. They’ll want to keep it to themselves, and they’ll say only they can be trusted with its power.
This is false. There are ways to secure computers without unaccountable gatekeepers. Contrary to what Apple would have you believe, we all use software every day that’s as safe as anything inside their walled garden, if not safer.
We need to support and learn from those third-party companies and open source communities as we head into the next generation of computing devices like AR glasses.
There’s a place for the tech giants in this new world, if they’ll take it. Helping users block malicious software – as Apple does on the Mac – doesn’t require a suffocating grip on software distribution. And they'd still make tens of billions a year!
Google Glass was a joke. Augmented reality isn’t. We can’t just laugh at it or ignore it. That’s what we did with smartphones and social networks, and now we have genocides and anticompetitive corporate behaviour on a global scale.
We won’t be able to opt out from wearing AR glasses in 2035 any more than we can opt out of owning a smartphones today. Billions have no choice but to use smartphones for basic tasks like education, banking, communication, and accessing government services.
In just a few year’s time, AR glasses do the same, but faster and better. They’ll also do new and incredibly powerful things, like worldscraping. The danger is that the companies who’ll be threatened by worldscraping are the ones who’ll control the technology that enables it.
We need AR glasses to be treated as the incredibly powerful computers they'll surely become, which means open access for users and developers. If tech giants won’t do that voluntarily, they need to be forced to do so by governments.
The alternative is unthinkable: a world where *what we see* and *where we see it* is controlled by tech giants.
Full blog post: https://mssv.net/2020/08/16/digital-sight-management-and-the-mystery-of-the-missing-amazon-receipts/
Full blog post: https://mssv.net/2020/08/16/digital-sight-management-and-the-mystery-of-the-missing-amazon-receipts/
