Imagine that you’re in a waiting room and somebody sits next to you with four iPhones strapped to their forehead. You might relocate swiftly. Yet that is exactly what is happening when somebody straps on Apple’s new vision Pro headset. Each of these goggles, that’s it right there. It’s like, honey, I shrunk the world or shrunk the kids or whatever. This is a real Rube Goldberg thing. It was kind of a cross between honey, I shrunk the kids and then clockwork orange, isn’t it? Each of these goggles contains the rough equivalent of a head full of iPhones.

Two depth sensors, six microphones, twelve cameras. Twelve cameras. Twelve cameras. That’s why that picture there. Show that picture again. Twelve cameras all over. They don’t even have twelve cameras in that picture. Twelve iPhones, in other words. I got there and it uses them to continuously track people and to track rooms in three dimensions. It tracks every hand gesture, every eyeball flick and every couch cushion. We just had Amazon’s merger buyout of irobot, the people that make roombas little vacuum cleaners and stuff, and they have been mapping rooms and things like that.

A lot of people were alarmed by that and said, what if Amazon gets all that information and they’re going to glean all this information about what is in your house? What kind of, not just the layout of your house, but be able to glean other information, but nothing at all like this. And by the way, that merger has not happened. But this vision pro, $3,500. It’ll be released on Friday.

The next big thing after the smartphone is what Apple sees this as. And folks, if it catches on like the smartphones, this is very bad. It is the next big thing for the NSA and the CIA is what it is. When you wear one, you see the world around you with computer generated images and information superimposed on top. And by the way, when we talk about the fact that not only has all these depth sensors and cameras and all the rest of this stuff, it has big implications for everybody that’s around this person.

It has big implications for identifying the wearer in different ways. I mean, this is way beyond the ability know we have so many cameras in public areas now and in China and other places where they use this biometric data, they can identify people by the way that you walk your gate. G-A-I-T. Probably a Bill Gates idea, but I think, and it was mentioned by several people, maybe this is why they told us to stand 6ft apart so they could look at the way we walk.

This thing goes way beyond that. Way beyond that. It’s not only looking at everybody else the way they walk, but it can know everything about you and even make inferences about your health conditions and other things like that based on how you move your body. This is not a theory. This is the way the people who are looking at the technology know the technology knows it. This is all actually part of augmented reality as well.

There’s VR, which is virtual reality. You put on these headsets, and you can’t see anything. And you see pictures of people all the time playing games and running into a wall or something like that, or tripping and falling because they can’t see anything. The vision pro is not virtual reality. It is augmented reality. Of course, it could be used for virtual reality as well. But augmented reality means that you are superimposing AI, computer generated stuff, onto the real world.

In the past, there’s been, I remember a company about 20 years, actually, about 25 years ago, and I forget what it was called. I remember it got my attention because it had a pair of glasses for augmented reality, and they wanted to sell it to the military. They wanted to sell it to people who are going to be doing automotive repair, for example, the idea, the killer app for automotive repair, for example, would be that you’re looking at an engine, and this augmented reality would be able to put pointers and say, this is where the dipstick is.

It’d be more complicated than that, point out different things and kind of guide you along this thing over here that has to be removed and so forth. And so they even talked about tourist applications, where you might go to Rome, for example. You look at the coliseum, and it would reconstruct the missing parts, and it might even superimpose Romans walking around, people in togas and things like that.

So that’s been kind of the goal of these people now for decades. If I remember correctly, the company was called microvision, and it was a guy named Rotowski, because I knew somebody with that name. No relation. But anyway, the reason it got my attention, I thought it was so funny. You put on this pair of glasses, and it had lasers that it could steer, and it would basically do a raster scan of the images onto your retina.

Yeah, just like an old CRT, right, where you’ve got a gun and it’s painting a picture, and it keeps restoring that. And it worked under the same idea. It’s going to actually use a laser to paint images onto your retina. And that’s how it got the augmented reality. What could possibly go wrong with that? And it made me think of that Steve Martin movie, the jerk, where he invents the saying, it makes everybody go cross eyed.

First he becomes, like, a multi billionaire, then everybody sues him when they go cross eyed, and he loses everything. I don’t know if that’s what happened to that company or not. I don’t think they’re around anymore. So maybe that did happen to them. I don’t know. Anyway, augmented reality ar. Not VR, but augmented reality ar. You might think of it as anti reality, because all of this stuff is opposed to reality.

So Apple says they’ve taken steps to restrict some of the data collection by the vision pro, including determining what you’re looking at, even. Right. It is constantly looking at. It’s got all these cameras, the twelve cameras all around it. It sees the world, but it’s also tracking your eyes, and so it can tell what you are looking at at any given point. Now, think about how that could be used by somebody who wanted to scope you out, who wanted to blackmail you or whatever, or just to identify what you’re interested in.

They can learn more about you, and this is a major step. Until they can get this brain computer interface thing in there where they can start reading your thoughts. They could read what you’re looking at. That helps them to infer your thoughts. Perhaps the last time a gadget raised these sorts of societal questions was in 2013 with Google Glass. It contained a small screen and only one camera, and people worried that it might be used to covertly record them.

Google Glass was so reviled that the nickname for people who wore them was glass holes. Now we want to brace for this new thing, perhaps the vision pro, we’ll call the people wear them vision bros, they said, I can think of better names. The technology Apple and others are inventing to replace smartphones could end up supercharging online problems like location tracking and the loss of anonymity. And all these data brokers gathering all the sentiment.

Details of our lives, folks. That’s where our government intelligence agencies have been since they started creating the Internet in the late 1990s. The fastest growing part of our intelligence agencies, as I pointed out many times, has been geospatial intelligence, to basically do tracking of where you are, to infer what you are interested in. Of course, losing your anonymity, but also being able to identify you in terms of your political beliefs, your religious beliefs, and all the rest of this stuff that is the center of their anticipatory intelligence, to try to be able to predict what you’re going to do.

The senior public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier foundation says this. Should we as a society really be going headfirst into virtual reality and augmented reality in our lives before we have strong privacy legislation? Data brokers already have way too much intimate knowledge about everything I do. I don’t want them to have this level of knowledge. Well, again, I don’t think the government is going to save us with legislation, do you? This is an individual solution.

This means that we got to stop being bugmen. We got to stop being part of the hive. We got to stop looking for the next thing that is going to entertain us or promises comfort if only we pay them $3,500 and turn our lives over to them. We got to get real. That means we got to get rid of the virtual reality. We got to get rid of the augmented reality.

Let’s just get rid of any of the adjectives, and let’s just get real, because you understand where this is headed, and I just read that to you, and that’s been there since after World War II. That’s the direction that they’ve been pushing us. And now, because they want to accelerate all this stuff, it is rapidly accelerating. And so Nikki Haley is a good example of it. The loss of privacy and anonymity.

She’s so far into this stuff that when she says, I want to know your name if you’re going to get on the Internet, she’s so far into it, she doesn’t even realize how creepy she is saying that. Think about that. She doesn’t see anything wrong with that. Everybody else is appalled by that. What’s wrong with that? I need to know everybody’s name. That’s the club that she is embedded in, these people.

It’s like George h. W. Bush. He’d never seen a barcode reader before he made a trip into a supermarket at one point in time, decades ago, 40 years ago, these people are so detached from the world that we live in that she doesn’t even think, demanding to know my name if I’m on the Internet. She doesn’t even see that as a creepy issue. She sees that as something that the government is entitled to do.

So getting back to the vision pro, as I point out, photographs alone are not the biggest concern here that you might get from all of these cameras on people’s heads. We know that smartphones, everybody’s being filmed all the time. We got cameras all over the place. Everybody’s got smartphones. We got door cameras, front doors, and all the rest of this stuff. So we’ve kind of come to terms with that.

But this takes it to a new level. The new problem is what else the device is gathering. It’s getting a map of all the space around you. The device needs to know the contours of the world around you so that it can know where to insert digital things into your line of sight. So it has to have complete knowledge, just like we’re talking the example before, about a motor, right? It has to have complete knowledge of that particular motor before it can make sense of it, before it can point out certain things and guide you in your repair.

And so it must know everything about your surroundings. Total information awareness. Understanding what’s in the room around you can be even more invasive than having a photograph of it, said Jerome Joseph Jerome, a visiting professor at the University of Tampa, former policy lead on sensor data at Meta’s reality lab. So I saw this. I thought, wow, that’s interesting. It was about 50 years ago, almost exactly that. I met Karen at the University of Tampa.

They didn’t have technology there at the time. I wound up going to University of South Florida because got into engineering. But surprisingly, they got a guy who is the former policy lead on sensor data at Meta’s reality lab. Vision Pro apps have the ability to access this data, he said, if a user grants permission. Just like how an iPhone app will ask you for permission to look at your location if you just click yes because you want this stuff to work now it grabs everything about it.

The worldview maps might just look like a wireframe mesh to a human, but to a computer, it reveals a lot. The vision Pro might know that it’s in a room with four walls and a twelve foot ceiling and window. So far, so good, says Jerome. But then add in the fact that you’ve got a 75 inch tv, suggesting that you might have more money to spend than somebody with just a 42 inch set.

Since the device can also understand objects, it could also detect if you got a crib or a wheelchair, or even drug paraphernalia. You might get swatted by your vision pro, especially if it mistakes something that is not drug paraphernalia. For drug paraphernalia, anyway, yeah, it’s going to be making these types of inferences, and of course they will. It’s amazing the kind of inferences that can be made by these devices, the Fitbit watches and other things like that.

Advertisers, data brokers who build profiles of consumers would salivate at the chance to get this data and also, the government, especially the government. A phone alone, he says, might be able to report that you’re generally near a hospital or a strip club. These devices know where you are, down to the centimeter, and they’re combining it with a bunch of other sensors to know exactly what you are looking at.

At the same time, on a website for vision pro developers, Apple warns the developers are going to be making the apps that run on this device. It’s your responsibility to protect any data that your app collects and to use it in responsible and privacy preserving ways. So just trust them. They’ll never take this information and sell it to the government? No, they’ll never do that. The information about you, the metadata about you is the most valuable thing they can ever get.

And this is really going to multiply this in an exponential way. Information about how you’re moving, what you’re looking at, can give significant insights not only to a person’s unique identification, but also to their emotions, to their characteristics, to their behaviors, to their desires in a way that we’ve not been able to before, said a policy analyst at the future of Privacy forum. The vision pro tracks your eyes so that you can select things with your gaze in the same way that on a computer you would move the mouse.

Think of this as the Apache helicopters. I had a friend who was a missionary in somalia, in the Mogadishu area, by the way, and he was there just a little bit before everything that’s chronicled and Blackhawk down happened. But he’d be walking around and he said one of these Apache helicopters had come over the horizon. And he said the guns are tracking, constantly tracking the eyes of the Apache helicopter pilot.

So as he’s looking around the horizon, the guns are moving that way as well. So they would come up and the pilot would look at him and the guns would turn on him. And the point of that is, all he has to do then is say, fire. Be careful what you say if you’re Apache helicopter pilot, I guess. But he said it was very disconcerting. You could see that pilot and you could see him look at you, and you could see all the guns turn immediately in that direction as well.

So tracking eyes, that’s something the military’s been doing for a long time, but now it’s going to be in your Apple vision pro. What about the rest of the body? Developers tell me that apps can get access to a stream of data about users movement, right down to the wiggle of a finger. Do you really want to be under this kind of surveillance? Microscope and pay $3,500 for it to boot.

You talk about somebody desperate for some kind of an entertainment fix. This is it. Sacrifice everything. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley that blew my mind when they explained just how revealing data about how your body moves while dancing could be. It’d tell you a lot about me if you watch me trying to dance. I tell you, it can make a lot of inferences about my life.

Last year, they discovered they could uniquely and consistently identify about 55,000 different VR users based solely on data about the movement of their head and their hands. That’s it. Like I said, it’s amazing the kind of inferences that they can make with this stuff. They said it is as useful as a fingerprint. Maybe more. Maybe more useful than a fingerprint. As I said before, their ability to watch the way that people move, wow.

It’s been documented for quite some time, and at a very long distance as well. In another study, they used head and hand motion from a game to guess some 40 different personal attributes of people, ranging from their age and gender to whether or not they were a drug user, or if they had a disability status. In cases where that motion data is being streamed to the cloud, even Apple has very little visibility into what is happening to it after it leaves the device.

Because this data can’t be entirely eliminated from most applications. Our suggestion would be to develop a privacy preserving tool for VR motion data. Or maybe just kind of skip the $3,500 device. And of course the price will be coming down if people don’t give it the Google Glass treatment, which they should. I asked Apple what it was doing to protect this kind of data. Its response was crickets.

In other words, nothing. The David Knight show is a critical thinking super spreader. If you’ve been exposed to logic by listening to the David Knight show, please do your part and try not to spread it. Financial support or simply telling others about the show causes this dangerous information to spread favour. People have to trust me. I mean, trust the science. Wear your mask, take your vaccine, don’t ask questions.

Using free speech to free minds. It’s the David Knight show. So. .

See more of The David Knight Show on their Public Channel and the MPN The David Knight Show channel.