Apparently the future of clothing is "smart fabric": shirts that act like computer displays, microphones stitched into single strands of fabric, clothing full of sensors and semiconductors. All I can think of is how this will be abused. #privacy https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/03/smart-fabric-future-of-clothing/
Given that classic story of Target knowing a teen was pregnant before her father did, which Big Tech companies would you trust with smart underpants that could track a woman's cycle?
@kyle I'm thinking "will we have clean water at the time".
@kyle good thing I know how to make my own yarn and knit my own fabric I guess.
@kyle given track record of all smart things, there is only one way to approach smart anything, making it local(only on the network you own) or offline, but then they loose their hyper profitable business and will quickly lose interest in doing anything with it.
@kyle spy underwear 🤢🤮
@kyle you get advertisements on your shirt that you got for free. I am sure this'll lead to some disturbing, funny, and really problematic situations
@nocturnalfilth This is one reason why I resisted the (well-meaning) idea of people donating branded conference swag t-shirts to the homeless--it could easily become an exploitative situation with homeless folks turning into walking billboards.
@kyle Anything with "smart" in front of it seems to be at least consistent: it's stupid ;)
Like from the article, "imagine if your seat can tell that you’re cold, and automatically start to warm up" .. I'm imagining this and already hate it. If I want my seat-heater on I'll turn it on.
@kyle I can also think of how awesome it would be to be able to flash that and have AGPL’led dev tools.
No, sir, I did not intentionally disturb your tracking AI with those laughing Snowden faces giving the camera the finger. As you can see, that tentacle monster your AI recognized above the seam is totally not me. You should really have Cthulhu Fhtagn. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. Oh, sorry, you were recording this with speech-to-text, right?
@kyle
You had me at RGB shirt but lost me at another microphone on everyone.
@kyle create your own smart clothing using something like lilypad https://www.arduino.cc/en/pmwiki.php?n=Main/ArduinoBoardLilyPad . smart clothing could make sense for personal safety, but you don't need to share personal data to achieve that goal :-)
While I'm sure this clothing will be more expensive (to start) than non-smart alternatives, I wonder who will be the first to follow the "smart TV" route and subsidize the cost by selling your data.