
Help Us Bring Productivity Enhancing Smart Glasses to Market - HishamElHalabi
Hey everyone!<p>For around the last two years, my cofounder and I have been working on our own startup, trying to help people improve their focus and stop procrastinating. We&#x27;ve developed the Auctify Specs, a pair of smart glasses designed to track your productivity throughout the day and give you real time feedback to help you stay on task when you get distracted. They can detect your activity using computer vision and blood oximetry, and implement proven psychological methodologies to keep you motivated and focused on achieving your goals.<p>Today I&#x27;m excited to announce that our Indiegogo campaign has finally launched! Check out our campaign page to read all about our product and see Specs in action, and if you&#x27;d like to support us! We&#x27;d also appreciate any feedback you have to give us :)<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.indiegogo.com&#x2F;projects&#x2F;the-first-productivity-boosting-smart-glasses#&#x2F;
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Someone1234
Unethical product.

Large companies will be the primary purchaser for this product, and will use
it to "enforce" productivity metrics where employees get dinged for literally
glancing away for mere seconds. This is like an Amazon Warehouse handset but
now using "computer vision, blood oximetry, and psychological methodologies"
to monitor employees.

Even if you aren't marketing it that way _now_ , you have absolutely no
control over the market competitors once this has been proven viable (or if
you get purchased).

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giantg2
Using this mindset, we should ban all knife sales, processed foods, and cars.
Just because some people abuse a product doesn't make the product itself
unethical. The product adopts and amplifies the ethics of the user.

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matt_s
The website doesn't describe what specifically the glasses do to improve
focus. It doesn't state there is a camera so if I have to tap something in an
app that says I started task X, and veer off track and start browsing HN, how
do the glasses help?

I'll guess that everything happens in the companion app and the glasses are
just a couple sensors/mic/speakers. Isn't forcing the user to check their
phone to check their "productivity" counterproductive? Phones are the biggest
distraction people have.

What happens when the frame design you chose falls out of fashion like when
people like "frameless" glasses or something else?

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madamelic
This is a privacy nightmare, having a camera you don't control on your
glasses.

Imagine all of the things you don't want public, now watch all of those things
become public from streaming it all to a closed source app of unknown security
practices

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muzani
Sure, but my phone runs Android, which probably feeds everything to Google
anyway, which includes position, voice, camera, every message I send. I
probably bring my phone around more than my glasses.

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madamelic
Are you filming yourself in the bathroom, taking pictures of your credit card,
taking pictures of confidential work documents, taking videos of meetings and
then sending them all to an unknown person every day all day?

Also Android is open-source, gives more controls and isn't taking constant
video of your life without your consent of where that media is going, how it
is stored or for how long.

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muzani
I take pictures of personal identification because it's a legal requirement to
hail a car (now that taxis are going extinct). I need it to use ewallets,
contact tracing, all these things that are legal requirements because of
COVID. I'm fine with the government having this, but not with this going in
the hands of Google, Xiaomi, etc. I take photos of passwords sometimes, when
there's no way to copy paste them from a protected computer.

We've had meetings early in the morning on Skype, which sometimes I drop in
and Bluetooth in my car. We write meeting minutes and email them. Gmail is
blocked by the company, but some of the consultants use it. Word is used to
write them and now it syncs to a cloud. I can leave my phone on the table and
nothing prevents Xiaomi from secretly recording it.

These are all questionable security practices. Our main competitors are tech
giants, not some guys raising money on Indiegogo, and one of the clearance
requirements is blocking Google Drive on computers.

Open source is great and all, but it's still easy to obscure. WhatsApp stores
"no messages on their servers" but I don't buy that it's not reading my
messages and giving "analytics" to Facebook.

Glasses, I can take off.

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muzani
I'm skeptical that this isn't just an overpriced RescueTime. But what I'd love
to see is detection of pupil dilation over the day.

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Dksense
Sounds good! All the best.

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Dksense
Thank you.

