Among many of the announcements that marked the 43rd AGM of Reliance Industries Limited, such as of Jio 5G, Jio Mart, its deals with Google and Facebook – one thing that showed a glimpse of its future plans was Jio Glass.
Following Mukesh Ambani’s speech, his children came to the dais like in every AGM, and introduced us to Jio Glass among many of its plans, giving a demo and showing how enjoyable the thick, bulky, and possibly creepy product is, and can get.
Reliance Jio says it is ‘innovating, serving and making India one of the first AI nations’ and there may be a crucial kernel of truth in it. But it’s also equally important to remember that Reliance has acquired, or invested for a majority stake in a total of 14 digital corporates or startups since 2016, ranging from Drone Technology company Aesteria Aerospace to Suraiya Services which provides data solutions and provides govt schemes to blockchain technology companies.
Tesseract – the company which designed and built Jio Glass and the Jio Holoboard unveiled last year –has become a subsidiary of RIL now, like many others, after Reliance acquired a majority equity stake.
In this context, Jio Glass seems to be the beginning of the from-energy-to-now-digital-conglomerate’s inroads into wearable computing systems i.e, devices which can be worn over the body and have the ability to process, analyse and transfer data.
This has to be anything but surprising, since Jio’s unstoppable need to expand itself from telecom to now digital retail and future technologies (where there is hardly any formidable indigenous competitor for such a big market) was going to lead it here.
A person poses while wearing smart caption glasses designed by Epson, at the National Theatre in London, Britain, October 3, 2018. Photo: Reuters/Henry Nicholls
Smart Glasses and their Fragile Past
Past ‘smart glasses’ efforts haven’t always received the warmest of welcomes by customers. The first significant product in this category was announced and released by Google as ‘Google Glass’ back in 2014. The product’s initial avatar was largely a failure – it was one of the few times when the public spoke and Glass received immense privacy backlash for allowing its users to record, live stream or take a picture of anyone around them, without their consent or knowledge.
The positioning of the Glass – right in our faces, is also what makes it so difficult to know whether we are being recorded, in comparison with a camera or phone where you have to hold it in your hand. People rightfully said that though Google may have received privacy policy approval from the user, but it has not so from the non-users, who it could possibly surveill and record continuously, anytime, and anywhere. The Glass was banned from several pubs and by some companies in their premises.
The company’s indifference to people’s concerns was manifested when John Hanke, the VP of Product Management, Google, said, ‘Ultimately, we will want these technologies, wherever they are on your body, to be totally optimized based on the job they’re doing, not on what is more socially acceptable at that first moment of creation, just because it reminds people of something they’ve seen in the past’, or when the founder said, ‘People have a natural aversion to innovation’.
The technology, without safeguards, has chances of increasing crimes against women and gender minorities too, who are more vulnerable to sexual assault, which could be recorded by perpetrators, or their invasive photos be taken.
Inevitably, there was a possibility of facial recognition being integrated via apps in Google Glass, which formally, after intense pressure, Google had to strike out. Still, developers persisted, and facial recognition apps could be installed in Glass, causing great ruckus. Legal frameworks have historically lagged behind technologies, leading to which there aren’t strong protections against such implementation of technology.
A person sports the Google Glass. Photo: Reuters
Soon, Glass was stopped from public purchase by Google, and was instead taken into the industrial and manufacturing sector for workers – the guinea pigs who are to be experimented with in the name of ‘worker productivity’, until it gets normalised enough for a public rollout.
Reliance Jio Glass seemingly appears to resemble Google Glass in atleast one way. From the few photos and looks available of it, it appears to have have a camera at the center, although the use-cases that have been pitched are a cocktail of mixed-reality productivity solutions.
Besides Google, there have been other corporates making smart glasses too, such as North Focals, Vuzix, Intel Vaunt, and Snap Spectacles. Though most, especially Intel Vaunt, which had good initial reception but was shelved a few years later, have been unable to make a foothold. The one which had the best potential, North Focals, with the company steering clear of some privacy concerns as it didn’t have a camera in Focals 1.0 – suffered losses in its business, and recently had the pleasure of being acquired by Google, which saw the potential in it and swallowed a drowning business. As a matter of fact, North Focals wasn’t clear on their privacy policy for further projects either, confirming that Focals 2.0 will have a camera through a video on Twitter. Several employees have also warned the company of creating products which have a male bias, or are male-focused, and severely overpriced.
Snapchat’s Snap Spectacles ended up in a by-now familiar storm of privacy concerns for glasses, which made it an absolute flop, having bought by only 0.08% of Snapchat’s users, with half of the users stopping its use within a month.
Also read: Amid Pandemic, Investors Bet on Jio and Its Giant-Killer Playbook
Wearables and Naked Surveillance
Vuzix, on the other hand, is doing business with UAE government, to provide smart glasses to Dubai Police, in deal with the facial recognition software created by NNTC, a Dubai based software company. NNTC envisions to provide the government with body cameras and drones too, saying it as the solution to prevent terrorism and to “monitor immigrants”. It is unargurable that State is going to be one of the biggest procurers of such technology, and are going to use it for all the purposes they want. This situation is also beginning to surface in India, evidenced by a tender floated by the public sector enterprise of GoI, Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Limited, which, under the garb of COVID-19, is demanding wearable devices such as patient-tracking wristbands, fever-scanning tools and hand-held thermal imaging systems which can “detect, prevent and investigate threats to national security using call data records, internet protocol detail record, tower and mobile phone forensics data”, “geofence an area of interest, such as meeting place, airport, mosque, railway station, bus stand”. That they could write mosque without any hesitation speaks for the lengths they are beginning to go.
In the days to come, brands such as Jio Glass can surely contribute to this. The potential of making and selling further wearables – and even body embedded devices and body melting devices categorised as Internet of Bodies – is nearly endless by the corporates when left to themselves.
It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that Jio carries with it an implicit stamp of government approval on the tech sovereignty front, considering its history of regulatory forbearance.
Reliance Jio becomes an even more important candidate for such businesses since it already has a giant platform, integrated data system and users locked-in, and people in the future can be imagined watching JioTV using Jio Glass, connected to their Jio Android Phone via Jio Telecom, waiting for the grocery they ordered via JioMart-WhatsApp, with the entire process being stored in Jio-Azure Cloud. Such capture of the information flow by a company could prove unimaginably complete, with everything in its reach.
Commuters are reflected on an advertisement of Reliance Industries’ Jio telecoms unit, at a bus stop in Mumbai, India, February 21, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Shailesh Andrade
Whatever scant legal framework exists in India for citizens due to the recent Personal Data Protection Bill 2019, only makes things worse – it gives a blanket exemption to the State or any of its agencies from the Bill in the interest of the ‘security of the state, or nation’, to access data however they want, with only a written order needed by the Executive.
Lastly, data created by wearable computing, and most importantly smart glasses, have a lot of value for the company itself, providing services such as targeted advertising, or directly to the companies who need this data. Oliver Stokes, principal design innovator at PDD, speaking to the Guardian on the issue says that these companies “already know where you are and what you’re looking for, now it’s going to be able to compute what it is you’re looking at.” He goes on to say that supermarket and packaging companies spend a lot of money to design and figure out which packages people look first in the shelf, and thus data procured by smart glasses could be extremely lucrative for the tech companies – whether you are aware or not.
The wearables and surveillance systems are still in their early stages in India, but the examples above from outside, and the already possible collusion of the State and Corporates, provide a glimpse of what is very possible to happen in the future.
Ananya Kumar is a student at the University of Hyderabad.