Long, balanced, well-written and important read by Nicolas Steenhout about the use of Meta glasses for people with impaired vision. This one is not about how Meta treats people with disabilities as ”pawns” in their efforts to boost acceptance for the glasses and influence EU regulation, it is primarily a piece about what is being inferred about people with disabilities without their own involvement.
The quote below reflects a further concern and is an example of something I worry about more and more – the idea of giving Meta even more power and how that can then be used to disempower people with disabilities in yet-to-be-thought-of ways. Breaking free from a dependency on people in you immediate environment can be a shift into a long-distance dependency on people in a big tech company across the world. And what does this imply about autonomy and self-determination? What does it imply about costs, both financial and emotional?
”There's another kind of dependence here that I hadn't really thought about until a blind friend pointed it out to me. What happens after someone starts relying on these glasses?
Maybe they now use them to read their mail, shop, get around or identify things every day. Then Meta changes the privacy terms, starts charging for a feature that used to be free, or changes the product in some other way.
’Stop using it’ is technically an option. But it isn't much of a choice if you've built part of your independence around the thing.”
”The glasses can reduce dependence on other people while creating a different kind of dependence on Meta. The more useful they become, the more that matters.”
https://buttondown.com/nic-steenhout/archive/disability-meta-glasses-datasets-and-maid/