Smart glasses give men tools to ‘stalk and harass’ women in private spaces, study finds

[IwantToRetire]

Even if they were / are a good idea, it is inevitable that men will use them as a weapon against women.

And happy enough to share it on line to advertise that they are perverts.

https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/smart-glasses-men-tools-stalk-150238570.html

Well, no shit, sherlock.

Men ruin everything.

Well there's a surprise
Tech used for perversion by men
I'm male..fucker in Aberdeen got caught filming in Primark on phone + comments saved.
£10,000 pound fine.

It was so incredibly obvious that this would happen. 🙄

Made me think of an interview I watched recently with Julie Bindel where she said that porn used to be driven by tech (from magazines to videos to DVDs…) but now she thinks porn drives tech. I thought that was a bit hyperbolic but maybe she’s right.

Bear shits in woods. This is why we can't have nice things.

Unfortunately, they are life-changing for the blind, so either they must do without or perverts misuse them.

There is a man on Instagram who films wherever he goes, he was on a hill walk the other week, a random woman walked by and they exchanged a few words, that’s now pinned to the top of his videos. Someone in the comments asked if he got permission to film her and was shouted down.

They could also be used for shaming pervy men in public spaces when you don’t feel comfortable blatantly filming them! Or altercations when someone is being intimidating. I don’t like the thought of them. I have this image of things in years to come we will all be wearing masks and long cloaks to protect ourselves 😂 It’s all a bit Black Mirror.

Well years ago, when I first got interested in how computers can help with communicating for those like me who are prone to strange spellings, I heard this story.

Before the internet one of the big breakthroughs was networking. ie physically linking computers to each other.

The first to propose this were techie men working in universities. They just started linking computers, not only in nearby rooms but used sewers etc, to lay cables to other universities.

And guess what inspired them?

Not sharing in depth academic work or profound discussions.

The motivation was to share porn.

(Surprised Bindel doesn't know this. Also suprised she would think magazines etc pushed porn. Clearly as we all know men's demand for porn meant that every new media was immediately coopted to add to the range of places it could be consumed.)

I daresay she does know that about computer networking and I think that’s the sort of thing she was talking about (I paraphrased her badly I think).

She seemed to be saying that initially, porn moved from magazines to videos and then to DVD’s as each format became available, but that after that, it might have become a case of ‘how can we make porn even easier and more obscene?’ being a key driver of development of newer technologies. (Computer networks to internet and smartphones with cameras and now AI and glasses with cameras 😫

Oh I thought this was well known?

Porn and other sex industry activities have been the driver of new technologies for centuries. It's very frequent for them to effectively fund the new technology.

IIRC sexual images were one of the early uses of photography, and heavily subsidised the more polite side of professional photography studios and technical developments in photography.

Pornography was an early use of the internet and www at all stages.

Wikipedia was developed by Jimmy Wales using the funding from his online pornography business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales

I'm sure I've previously come up with many more examples from across the centuries, which I now can't remember. Perhaps some were in medicine and chemistry, during the era of rampant STDs and high levels of prostitution.

Of course the official histories of the technologies often miss this out. Sex-related uses are often "under the counter" even at the time they're happening, and by the date the histories are being written tend to be even more thickly glossed over for politeness' sake or forgotten entirely.

Can't remember if there are already academic studies of this, but if not there should be!

She seemed to be saying that initially, porn moved from magazines to videos and then to DVD’s as each format became available, but that after that, it might have become a case of ‘how can we make porn even easier and more obscene?’ being a key driver of development of newer technologies.

Oh yes, definitely remember VHS being an example of porn funding the nascent VHS technology. IIRC the porn industry was an early adopter of VHS and on a large scale.

Essentially porn is a "killer app" of the sort needed for brand new technologies to become sufficiently widely adopted for the price to drop, at which point they start to become affordable for the masses, and the mass market of polite stuff can then sustain sales of the tech.

May well be true of some technologies within printing, too.

[edited for SPAG & clarity]

And yes, as PP said, it's absolutely obvious sexual uses and male control over women will be major drivers of camera-glasses sales.

All the No Shit, Sherlocks in the world...

Porn has always driven tech. That's why low quality VHS won over high quality Betamax.🤷‍♀️

She's right.

@TressiliansStone It probably is well known- just not to me! Apart from owning a smartphone and a laptop, I’ve never had many dealings with tech (or porn, thankfully!)

Thanks for the education folks. You don’t know what you don’t know until someone points it out! Interesting and depressing to learn that porn is behind everything.

Aha. I'm not imagining things:

This was in 2019:
Does pornography still drive the internet?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48283409

This was 1998:
Coopersmith, Jonathan. “PORNOGRAPHY, TECHNOLOGY AND PROGRESS.” Icon, vol. 4, 1998, pp. 94–125. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23785961. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

I think if I am reading PP correctly, this is a bit like saying guns kill people. Well yes they do but it is the attitudes of the gun owners.

Tech doesn't drive porn. Men who know they can make money out of porn are constantly on the look out for new outlets.

Seriously.

After all every new advance is a "technical" one. Its like saying men are hapless puppets of machines.

It wasn't clubs that made Hefner think I should think about having Playboy Clubs. It was Hefner knowing, because he was one of them, that pervy men will spend money on porn and buy magazines or visit clubs.

After all if the tech bros weren't so willing to go for the easy market of porn the internet would be a totally different place. But the tech didn't do that. Men did that. Men still do that.

Excuse my ignorance but how are glasses that record life changing for the blind?

I wasn’t suggesting men are hapless puppets of machines @IwantToRetire- I certainly don’t believe that. I just naïvely hoped that technology change was motivated by good intentions like improving medicine or something like that. I’m just a bit dim that’s all. 🤷🏼‍♀️ But I’m grateful the thread has educated me (and depressed, obviously).

They can give an audio commentary of what the glasses are seeing. Life changing for severely visually impaired.