To no one’s surprise, women and girls are disproportionately targeted, making image-based abuse not just a technology issue but a gendered form of violence rooted in misogyny and power. In fact, in Laura Bates’ book “The New Age of Sexism”, she cites research that says that of the 96% of deepfakes that are non-consensual sexually explicit images, 99% of those depict women. In fact, most of the apps, bots and websites that will create deepfake explicit images don’t even work on pictures of men.
Deepfakes can be used to humiliate, silence, intimidate, or punish women for speaking publicly, participating online, or simply existing in digital spaces.
In the UK, women have reported being filmed by men wearing smart glasses while being approached in public spaces, with recordings subsequently uploaded to social media attracting sexualised and other gross comments. Similar “pickup” content has emerged in the US, where men have used smart glasses to record interactions with women in airports, gyms, and other public spaces, often turning those encounters into viral online content.
Last year, an Auckland man used the Ray-Ban Smart Glasses to covertly record a sex worker without her consent while she was naked. The recording was detected only because the woman noticed him activating the device (by touching the side of the glasses). He pleaded guilty to attempting to make an intimate visual recording, but was discharged without conviction - to the dismay of the brothel owner.
This is particularly concerning because wearable devices are designed to blend into everyday life. A child may not recognise that a pair of ordinary-looking sunglasses contains a camera. They may not realise they are being recorded, and will have little ability to control what happens to that image/footage afterwards.
Consent becomes much harder to meaningfully give or refuse when recording devices are hidden inside objects that look completely ordinary.
Too often, we're told that women and girls should simply be more careful, more alert, and more aware of their surroundings, remain vigilant, and constantly assess whether they are being recorded, instead of placing responsibility on those who design, deploy, and profit from technologies with foreseeable risks of misuse. The same is true for children and young people, who should not need levels of technological awareness beyond their developmental capacity simply to protect themselves from covert recording.
I don't get how Google glass got laughed out of existence, but people are out there champing at the bit to buy Meta spyware glasses... It's fucking insane.
The people excited to buy them aren't the same people who were laughing before. These are the people who sit in a bus and wish they could just whip their dick out and start jerking off on someone, but who have the social awareness to know that would be frowned upon. Now they can record their day so they can revisit that train ride or few minutes on an elevator with a child, or kids gymnastics practice later on and pull their dick out for real this time.
I think the corporations have done a great job at normalizing surveillance and anti-privacy in the intervening years. In that time there's also been a huge trend in marketing of getting celebs to do advertisements, which I'm guessing has some effectiveness seeing as it's spread like wildfire in the last several years, and meta's pervertware glasses have a dumbass-spokesperson in someone apparently famous named Kylie Jenner or something like that. I think your question is a good one; I think the answer has is how effective corporate manufacturing of consent has become (and the death of [mainstream] journalism; these days news outlets are just loudspeakers for corporations and politicians, especially in the tech space - critical thought need not apply)
We need to make tech moree difficult any way we can to drive the normies back out. Let them have their slop lol