Ordered something from Amazon in the last few months? Try searching your email for an order, like "cat flap" or "coffee filter".— Adrian Hon (@adrianhon) August 16, 2020
No luck? It's because Amazon removed item details from their email – and it has startling implications for AR glasses. https://t.co/ysKLB0nACZ
For all its faults, Amazon has good customer service, which makes this user-hostile change baffling. What would lead them to remove useful info from emails?— Adrian Hon (@adrianhon) August 16, 2020
Simple: free email clients are scraping customers' emails and selling the data.
Amazon can't stop you from taking a photo of your checkout page. Obviously no-one wants to do that, but what if – stay with me now – you're wearing augmented reality (AR) glasses?— Adrian Hon (@adrianhon) August 16, 2020
Then you (or a horrible scam app) can scrape your orders and there's nothing they can do about it!
That's the awesome power of AR glasses: always-on computer vision, aimed at whatever you're looking at and, by definition, interested in. You could use it for price comparison at a supermarket – or to scrape its entire inventory. pic.twitter.com/noDWdT9p0D— Adrian Hon (@adrianhon) August 16, 2020
You could archive *every single word* of every article and book you read, with full-text searching; map your social graph based on who you talk to on social media and in the real world... I call it "worldscraping".— Adrian Hon (@adrianhon) August 16, 2020
Anyway, worldscraping poses an existential threat to companies who've built a moat made out of proprietary data – which is to say, data about YOU and data YOU have collected for them. And that's a lot of companies, and they're very very big.— Adrian Hon (@adrianhon) August 16, 2020
The problem is, they aren't going to appreciate people using "their" devices to destroy their businesses. So here's my predication: they're going to lock AR glasses down HARD. You will not be able to install any apps that they don't approve.— Adrian Hon (@adrianhon) August 16, 2020