Chatting to a friend who has bought a pair of Meta AI glasses

I’ll be honest, I was a bit surprised that I knew anyone who would buy a pair of Meta AI glasses.

Sure, they are readily available, and presumably heavily advertised, but most of the people with whom I spend time - online or offline - are not the kind of people who would buy them.

I’ve got friends who use Facebook. I’ve got friends who use WhatsApp. But the glasses just - to me, anyway - feel rather different.

Nevertheless, a friend did buy a pair, and was happy to chat about them.

My friend - like me - is a married, middle-aged, white man.

Unlike me, he saw the glasses in our local optician’s, and wanted them.

We didn’t chat for long, and, to be clear, I was kind , not accusatory.

And yes, he wore the glasses throughout our chat.

• No, it did not worry him that using the glasses entailed sharing lots of data with Meta, or that this would entail sharing the personal data of other people
• Yes, he thought that they were rather cool, and that, it seems, was the main selling point. He didn’t need them for anything, he just fancied them
• No, he hadn’t really thought about whether other people might want to be filmed, or whether people might be worried about being filmed
• Yes, he had seen other people talking about them online, and they were talking positively about them. He hadn’t seen any negative commentary / criticism
• Yes, he uses “AI”, and rather likes it

It was an interesting conversation, because it was so unexpected.

His choices would not have been mine, for sure.