Snap’s new Specs want to know you better than you know yourself.

The person at the next table never signed up for any of it.

Snap has just announced its latest Specs, they are marketed as augmented reality glasses. The website is slick and clearly focused on making them a fashion statement. With a price tag of US$2,195 they are not an impulse buy, but we have said that about a plethora of other consumer tech when first released and five minutes later there was buy now pay later options.

The feature list of Specs is like someone emptied the junk drawer of the entire internet onto the kitchen table. They make calls, you can listen to music, take photos and video, stream, shop, live translation, collaborative games, sports coaching, note-taking, enterprise workflows and no doubt more. Couple this with Specs Intelligence, which Snap calls “anticipatory AI,” a service designed to understand a person’s goals, routines, relationships and priorities by drawing on the apps and tools they choose to connect and we have a promise that computing is becoming "more human."

But in the consumer wearable tech world more human can also mean more intimate and far more consequential in what it quietly gathers while you are busy living your life.

The story is for most of its short public life, AI has waited to be asked. You typed, it answered. Specs Intelligence is built for something else entirely and that is to influence what you want, predict what you need, and move through your day before you have said a single word. To anticpate what you will do in a human way, Specs Intelligence has to know you. Your calendar. Your messages. Where you go and when you go there. Your habits, your work, your family, the small private things you are quietly hoping for and have not told anyone yet. “Anticipatory” is the word that Specs is using sounds like that. It sounds like a thoughtful friend who remembers your coffee order. In practice, it is a system that needs a far richer picture of your life than any device that came before it, and that should prompt us to ask harder questions.

Who consented, and to what, exactly? How little data could this actually run on, if anyone really tried? What is kept, for how long, where is it stored and how well is it guarded? What might the system conclude about you, or about the people you love, that you never chose to tell it?

Credit where it is due. Snap is clearly working hard to put daylight between Specs and the most controversial camera glasses on the market. An LED lights up when images or video are being captured, and Snap representatives have said the glasses do not use facial recognition to identify people. Those are real design choices, and the people inside tech companies who fight for choices like these deserve to be heard but unfortunately they are not the whole conversation. Glasses with cameras and microphones do not only change the life of the person wearing them. They change the life of everyone in there range. The kid at the next table in the diner, working her way through a milkshake. The teammate on the sideline. The colleague in the meeting, the client across the desk, the eighth grader in the hallway, the stranger on the subway who is having the worst day of her year. Most of them will never know when they are being captured, analyzed, or folded into someone else’s AI-assisted moment.

None of them said yes.

Over the past two decades the online economy has been built about the product being a person. Wearable AI quietly extends that deal to the person standing next to the product, and nobody has even asked them to click through the terms and conditions.

As these devices move from novelty to normal, and they will, because the entire history of consumer technology is the history of weird becoming Tuesday, child safety cannot be something we tidy up later through moderation and takedowns. By then the image already exists and by nature of the online world it is impossible to un-ring a photograph. Safety has to be in the room at the very first design meeting, with a chair and a vote.

Whether you are a parent in Baltimore or Brisbane, a principal in Portland or Parramatta, these are the questions I would want answered before a pair of these glasses walks onto a school playground or a Little League field.

How will people, and children especially, actually know?  A small light that looks obvious under showroom lighting can vanish in the glare of a July swim meet, in a crowded hallway between periods, or in front of a six-year-old who has no idea what a glowing dot is supposed to mean. Children do not read privacy notices, they read faces.

What stops covert capture, harassment and image-based abuse?  And what happens in the places we built specifically for children like classrooms, locker rooms, youth sports, the school pickup line?

What can the anticipatory AI work out about a young person who never signed up for anything?  Their routines, their friendships, their soft spots. Where they are likely to be at 3:15 on a Tuesday afternoon. Please think about the last one, because it is precisely the question the wrong people already ask.

How will Snap assess what immersive, persuasive, always-available AI does to children and teenagers who are still learning where they end and the world begins? Adolescence is meant to be the time when you try on selves and throw them away. It is a great deal harder to outgrow a version of yourself that a machine has already learned.

These are not hostile questions they are the minimum that we need to be asking. On both sides of the Pacific, families have learned the hard way that a reassuring launch statement is not the same thing as a safe product. They have earned the right to ask for more and frankly they have paid for it.

I have tried really had to love this because I am not against this technology itself as there are so many positives for those with disabilities and I have spent enough time pointing and smiling apologetically here in Florence to know exactly what live translation could mean to a person. Glasses that help someone find their way through an unfamiliar city, or that open up collaboration for a person who has been shut out of it for years, could be a real gift.

But human-centered technology is not measured by how seamless it feels. Human-centered technology should only be measured by whether people keep meaningful control. Whether they understand what is happening around them and whether they can say no without paying a price for it. And whether they are protected when the commercial incentives, which never sleep, pull a product toward watching more and holding attention longer.

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