Wait, hold the fuck on a second..... Australia still has K-Mart?
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Privacy
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It's a different company. Used to be a joint venture with the owner of the US brand, but it split off, and it's completely separate now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kmart_Australia
But in looking that up, I learned that Anko, the brand in the story, is K-Mart Australia's house brand, I guess kinda like Great Value for US based Walmart.
The backlash isn't as powerful as the drive to monetize another accessory and the hundreds of billions of dollars to make it happen.
Without any kind of privacy laws making this kind of thing illegal, every company would want that kind of mass data and will gladly give you the glasses in order to take it from you.
The backlash isn’t as powerful as the drive to monetize another accessory
Yah you're prob right. I always wish ppl just wouldn't buy these, or rings, or w/e. So co's would learn that it's a guaranteed financial loss, to bring them to market.
But I know that's a pipe dream. Sigh.
Capitalism over humanity, every time. No exceptions, no matter how "exceptional" you believe your country is.
I gotta say some of my bullshit on here again tbqh, I'm not afraid of the surveillance state I'm afraid of capitalist surveillance. You already have one, but people are in denial about it. Stuff like this will harden the situation & it will be undeniable. Maybe it's actually not so bad to constantly be aware of your every move, to be aware that you're being scrutinized by the Epstein class. That time is running out. That was true already. Now you have some dumb fuck with stalker glasses to embody it. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,
Go watch Southland Tales and tell me you don't just live in that environment in Australia
I have hyper vigilance from cptsd and it's actually really taxing to try and be fully aware of everyone, everything and yourself. I need like 10 hours of sleep because of how tired my brain gets. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.
actually really taxing to try and be fully aware of everyone, everything and yourself
Sorry you gotta deal with that level of stress.
The fucked up thing, is it just keeps getting worse. In-store cameras are bad enough. But at least there, the footage will prob never hit the tiktok circuit. When private citizens buy their own mass surveilence, and turn everything into social media content, that just keeps on growing. There are entire sites built around that form of content.
I heard about some poor guy in the UK. Got detained for "acting suspiciously" since he was avoiding London's cameras. Police stopped him and compelled a photograph for their facial ID. He never did anything wrong! Zero criminal record. Guy just didn't enjoy being on camera. Which they then forced him to be.
That's horrible. I hate that it's happening everywhere :(
Yah. TBH, I think it was inevitable once we hit an inflection point in the tech v. price curve.
In the 1960's, maybe the CIA could build a one off mechanical spy insect. But that was never gonna be a thing at consumer scale. Today, couple hundred dollars, euros, pounds, and every Joe Sixpack can wield surveilence tech 50 times better than the top three letter agencies could back then.
Well shit if it helps you relax after reading that loony rant from the other day, there are some weird upsides to these gizmos and silicon valley isn't the world leader in them. think about the benefits of instantaneous translation glasses!! all this augmented reality shit is about projecting unreality, but that's not what's going to make a difference imo. i dont need fucking entertainment i need THE VISION
I am recorded on no less than 6 cameras* on my commute home. It is likely the only part of my commute not completely filmed is the 100 or so yards from my subway stop to front door.
We have had ubiquitous surveillance for decades now. I refuse to believe meta glasses is going to be the straw that breaks the camels back.
*actual number is far higher.
The plan here is to feed those videos to AI training sets. The Internet has been scraped, now they want to scrape reality.
Things like Pokemon Go has already been doing that
Yes. Might depend on the région. For instance an average London commute is recorded by 300 CCTV.
The important word is closed circuit. Deleted every 31 days, by law.
Meta video is not deleted.
Low cost pervert glasses.
Been a while since I seen a Kmart. Lol.
Didn't believe it myself, but still very big in OZ.
And New Zealand
Both are interesting notes. Most in the US are pretty long gone now. I guess internationally they suck less? Ours were falling apart back in the 2000-2010s.
I can't even think of one in driving distance.
Oops didnt mean to! /$
I don't see a problem with these thing. You could achieve the same by wearing a GoPro on your head. The problem comes in when all of the footage is automatically uploaded to a malicious company like Meta.
You could achieve the same by wearing a GoPro on your head.
But a gopro on the head, or a phone held up to record, is much more conspicuous. These smart glasses are made for ppl to record their life 24/7. That automaticlaly means, other ppl's lives will be recorded by that person. Without their knowledge.
It is also bad with a gopro or a phone, ofc. But smart glasses make the prob even worse. That doesn't even get into the uses these will be put, creeping on women at beaches or w/e. If you go holding up a phone to creep somebody, there is social pressure to stop being an ass. You may even be asked to leave the venue. But when it is unobtrusive with smart glasses, the social pressure erodes b/c people don't even know.
I agree automatic upload is a prob. But even if it's local, the mere fact of walking around recording everything you see, means other ppl's worst moments are going to feature in tiktoks a LOT more often. And much more clickbait content made at the expense of ppl who don't even know they are being recorded, trying to make them look bad for the content. I agree, that happens already in other ways. But that doesn't mean we should want to see the prob get even worse.
I do 100% agree with the backlash of these cameras.
I also think that the general public should be just as weary of every front door having a ring camera, or every side yard having a blink camera.
While glasses are less conspicuous in public, these neighborhood cameras are already everywhere. You can’t take a walk at night without being on 20 different cameras. (While these cameras aren’t being used to be creepy) their footage is still going to a server where employees are doing whatever they want with them.
We gave up our privacy for convenience a long time ago. Meta glasses are the least of our worries if Palantir has anything to say about it.
Yah, I want the rings and flocks gone too!
We went down this road too much already, but going down it even more just makes it even worse IMO. It isn't a black & white situation, in the end. It's a matter of degree.
You understand this is a perverse foot in the door, right? When people become accustomed to the idea, of their every conversation possibly being recorded (for whatever reason), the follow-up step is bound to be cloud connectivity: with limited on-device storage and lack of redundancy (back-ups), cloud will naturally serve as the "convenient" solution for both of these self-created "problems". Problem-reaction-solution, always.
No I don't
Okay
People are already accustomed to being recorded in public. The "follow-up step" has nothing to do with local recording devices.
To some degree, but at least when it happens it's quite a bit more transparent and explicit. With the average consumer knowingly, or unknowingly, storing their smartphone's contents with a non end-to-end encrypted cloud provider, the recordings from this smartphone-connected device synced to it, will also become cloud accessible. So there's nothing inherently local about these devices, at least not in the hands of the average consumer.
Same, sousveillance is fine, it's when it becomes surveillance it's a problem.
And it already is surveillance because all the videos get uploaded to meta. (not sure about the Kmart ones)