Meta glasses and the future of street photography

Picture by Hyperallergic

A couple of weeks ago I was filmed with smart glasses and I found the experience rather unsettling. With a new ad campaign featuring Kyle Jenner Meta are aiming to make them more mainstream will this have an impact on street photography and capturing scenes of daily life?

I woke up bleary eyed and tired, hurriedly got ready for work and headed to grab a coffee, I had been very busy that week with work, photography and the stresses of life so I was very much in my own world. As I was walking up the road with some amazing music in my headphones I could feel someone walking uncomfortably close behind me, I quickened my step and rounded the corner to my work entrance and then felt the person tap me on the shoulder.

As a kid this once happened to me, they tapped me on my shoulder and as I turned my head they sucker punched me square in the face, luckily this time I turned to see quite a tall well dressed gentleman holding a piece of paper “sorry, you’ve dropped this” he said. Now I’m quite notorious for losing stuff from my pockets I’ve never owned a wallet and also at times can be quite careless so it wouldn’t have been a surprise for me to lose a piece of nondescript paper.

I took the paper and thanked the gentleman, he beckoned with his eyes behind his thick rimmed glasses for me to open it. The note read “I like your style :)” with a instagram handle with the word artist in it. I smiled and thanked the guy and proceeded to work.

I thought nothing of it and went on with my day, a little later I had another look at the note and decided to have a look at the art this guy had on his instagram. There was no art but over one hundred videos of him going up to “interesting” people on the street and recording the interaction and posting the results.

At this point I was like oh f*ck he was recording me, I had zero idea. It was the first time I’d ever come into contact with Meta glasses naively I thought there would have been the light on them that tells people that they are being recorded but either he had disabled the light or covered it with tape.

It was a sense of disappointment that washed over me, to know that the interaction that I had in the morning wasn’t real, it wasn’t a genuine moment of humans being kind but quite the opposite of approaching “interesting” looking folk for content. I waited anxiously for the video to appear and it duly did at about 6pm. There I was tired, confused and as he was tall I looked incredibly small too.

“You never know who might need more confidence” read the caption! Wow! Errr jeez thanks, mate. Nice to know I also get a kicking too. His videos all seemed to focus on people with outlandish hair cuts, unique clothes or just pretty women. Some videos featured people declining his note and walking away, they will probably never know that they have been recorded.

I contacted him once the video was uploaded and politely asked him to delete the video which he did right away, which I thanked him for.  Though it raised many questions in my mind about my own work and the future of street photography, is there any ethical way to do street photography anymore with social media and ai? And does how you gather your “content” make a difference to how it is viewed?

*I should add that I never usually shy away from street photographers who take photos of me nor do I feel uneasy about it in the most part but content based on false niceness for clicks is abhorrent to me.

Street photography is some of my favourite types of photography I love to take the everyday movement of life and try to make something moving, poignant or amusing. I also love to see amazing examples of street photography from legendary photographers but the ethics of street photography is always something I’m thinking about.

If you’re gonna be serious about what you do you should always be clear in your mind about the ethos and reasoning behind what you’re creating and your boundaries should never be rigid. Why are you taking this picture? What do you hope to show? Is there more of a story to the image?

When I first started I had no real clue about how to go about this and capture the world around me in a respectful manner. I knew I liked humour and emotions of real moments that I would see but had no idea how to do it, as the years have rolled on I think I have a better insight and more confidence in my ability to be more open and approachable when shooting in public. It’s being open and visible which is more important than ever with the implementation of Meta glasses, a.i and social media, the power they can hold especially when it comes to our private lives.

Two Harvard university students ran an experiment with the Meta glasses that they called I-XRAY using the technology to run a real time facial recognition software which within a minute would identify who you were looking at by name, home address, telephone number and occupation.

They stood on a train platform and asked a stranger for directions, a few minutes they reproached the stranger “Are you Mr. Hoda? Did you work on an article about Muslims in India? I’ve read all your stuff”. Kashif Hoda had worked as a journalist and was shocked that this person had read that article, he thanked them and boarded his train. Months later Mr Hoda found himself the star of a viral video showing off this tech.

Caine A. Ardayfio and AnhPhu D. Nguyen of Harvard uni

It’s the stuff of a futuristic dystopian spy movie.  Meta had actually made an update to their glasses that ran facial recognition called “nametag”  that would give you the name and Facebook profile of anyone you were looking at in real time but after Wired ran an article on this they have removed this feature due to ethical concerns. It really is a massive breach of privacy and safety.

Meta publicised that this could be achieved just with a smart phone or a picture of a person, which is still troubling enough though a big issue is just how clandestine smart glasses are and how unaware you’ll be that it’s happing to you.

If you see me on the street I have a very big bulky camera that I raise to my eye to take a photo, it’s not a secret that I’m taking a photo. People will often stop or walk behind me to not be in my frame or some people will jump in front and ask to be in the photo both are very welcome. There is also a very loud “clunk” as my shutter goes off and that’s important to have visual and audio clues that an image is being made. In Japan it’s a legal requirement that all mobile phones have a shutter sound to stop “upskirtting” on public transport. Cameras are a signifier that an image or a video might be being captured. Even Ronnie Pickering would have known the presence of a recording device before his viral moment. But with the spyglasses and myself being up close and personal with them I had no idea I was being filmed I had no visual or audio information to alert me and I think that is a massive problem for safety and security.

Meta is a company that thrives on information, meta glasses aren’t just insanely creepy but they are also information gathering tools that will be used to train new a.i models and to give them unprecedented insight into our daily lives and what makes us human for very little benefit to our own lives. Yes, I can see how they could be useful for the visually impaired to have audio descriptions of what they are looking at or to have real time language translation when travelling in new countries but the negatives certainly outweigh the positives. We all ready give too much to these companies, we all basically work for Meta for free.

So where does that leave street photography as more and more images get shared online? Will the art form have to change? Or does the context of how the image was captured and the technology used change the way we look at it? Can we ever now truly be free to enjoy public spaces without the fear of being content? Should spyglases be banned? Should ai facial recognition tools only be used by governments and authorities? Should they be used at all?

I sadly only really have questions but I think we should be looking for tighter controls on what information can be accessed online by the public, how much personal data we have online and treating these platforms much more differently as they try to invade more into our lives. I am just a guilty as anyone riding the tech wave and being an early adopter i definitely have given a lot of information out than I would do nowadays. I did not heed the warnings from people with more foresight than myself about how this would impact us in the future and now I’m in the future.

As for photography I can only speak for myself, I will continue to capture images as my passion for photography is far too strong to stop but I’ll continue to adapt and think about the photos I take as we are in unprecedented times for the art form but one thing is for sure you’ll never see me in thick rimmed spectacles falsely telling you that “I Love Your Style :)”