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If you want to build the AR glasses product everyone thinks is the next big thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy.
Patel concludes that the cloud-dependent architecture required for mainstream AR glasses inherently means invading users' privacy. ✦ AI generated
Nilay Patel · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-10 · original ↗
And it means if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy.
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- ·Mainstream AR glasses need cloud-dependent architecture
- ·This architecture is not optional for the product to work
- ·Building the 'next big thing' requires invading user privacy
- ·Cloud reliance is the mechanism that forces this trade-off
- ·Patel frames this as an inherent, not incidental, cost
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Mechanism · 2
To make augmented reality glasses, you need a camera next to your eyes continuously recording everything you see and processing it to overlay information — there is no other way around it.Nilay Patel · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 80%No chip exists that can fit in the stem of a pair of glasses while being both powerful enough and power-efficient enough to process that data locally in real time, so the data has to be sent to a cloud.Nilay Patel · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 75%