About that light

This note is here to take a conclusion back.

On the audio-only pair we removed every light on the product. The argument was clean: the problem a recording light is meant to solve is letting the people nearby know they are being recorded, and that pair physically could not record the people nearby — the main mic a few centimetres from your mouth, the reference mic twelve centimetres away facing the sky, and somebody half a metre off never reaching storage. The problem did not exist, so the notification should not exist either.

Add a camera and that argument loses its premise.

A camera and a microphone are not the same kind of thing

A microphone's boundary can be settled by geometry: put the main mic close enough and sound from further away simply does not get in. That is physics, not a choice.

A camera has no such property. Wherever the lens points is what it takes. You cannot design a lens that photographs only the things you are looking at and never other people — because other people are part of what you are looking at.

So on the camera side the boundary can only be drawn by people and by rules, not by structure. And once a boundary has to be kept by people, letting the people nearby see the state becomes necessary again.

So the light is back

It is lit while a photograph is being taken and dark when one is not. It sits next to the camera, facing outward, not at your eye — the other two reasons for removing the light still hold (a flicker at the edge of your vision is a quiet annoyance all day, and low-lux light at night suppresses melatonin), so this one does not point at the wearer.

It is not a setting you can switch off.

Why this note exists

Because we made "no light anywhere" a selling point on the previous product, and we were rather proud of saying it. Now there is a camera and the light is back, and the easiest thing would be to say nothing and let the new pages quietly carry one more light.

But the worth of an argument is in its premise. When the premise changes the conclusion should change with it, and it should be said out loud. That pair was right to have no light and this pair is right to have one — we did not change our minds, the product became a different thing.