But I'm a bit confused by the article because it describes things that seem really unlikely given how the glasses work. They shine a bright light whenever recording. Are people really going into bathrooms, having sex, sharing rooms with people undressed while this light is on? Or is this deliberate tampering, malfunctioning, or Meta capturing footage without activating the light (hard to believe even Meta would do this intentionally).
I feel like this article is either a bombshell, or totally confused.
"But for the AI assistant to function, voice, text, image and sometimes video must be processed and may be shared onwards. This data processing is done automatically and cannot be turned off."
The distinction here occurs wherever the data is processed, and it sounds as if the difference between using your video for labeling versus privately processing it through an AI is deliberately confusing and obscured to the user by the way the terms of service are written. Once the video is uploaded, which is necessary for the basic function, it's unclear how or whether it can be separated from other streams that do go through labeling. This confusion also seems to be an intentional dark pattern.
Are you referring to the same company that runs Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram? Meta has, for well over a decade, been caught multiple times -as recently as 2 years ago caught for the third time I know of- burrowing into areas of phones that their apps weren't directly given access to. Android phones have been highly susceptible to this kind of snooping.
https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/meta-halts-phone-and-...
And regardless of any privacy policy or the like, you still have to worry about Room 641A scenarios [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A].
Can you imaging a Stasi that has a large portion of the population also wearing pervasive surveillance tech? Amazing!
Hard to believe they would?
This is Mark Zuckerberg we are talking about.
It's hard to believe they wouldn't.
Hahahahahahahaha
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks
Actual quote, BTW [1].
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...
I’m sure you’ve never said anything callous or snarky, and were a bastion of morality as a teenager.
"The demand for this ‘Ray-Ban hack’ has been steadily increasing, with the hobbyist’s waiting list growing longer by the day. This demonstrates a clear desire among Ray-Ban owners to exercise more control over their privacy and mitigate concerns about unknowingly recording others."
https://bytetrending.com/2025/10/28/ray-ban-hack-disabling-t...
This is why WE have the GDPR. To outlaw and prevent exploitation such as this.
I wish this article (or Meta) were a bit clearer about the specific connection between the device settings and use and when humans get access to the images.
My settings are:
- [OFF] "Share additional data" - Share data about your Meta devices to help improve Meta products.
- [OFF] "Cloud media" - Allow your photos and videos to be sent to Meta's cloud for processing and temporary storage.
I'm not sure whether my settings would prevent my media from being used as described in the article.
Also, it's not clear which data is being used for training:
- random photos / videos taken
- only use of "Meta AI" (e.g., "Hey Meta, can you translate this sign")
As much as I've liked my Meta Ray Ban's I'm going to need clarity here before I continue using them.
TBH, if it were only use of Meta AI, I'd "get it" but probably turn that feature off (I barely use it as-is).
[OFF] "Share data about your Meta devices to help improve Meta products." doesn't preclude sharing data for other purposes.
[OFF] "Allow your photos and videos to be sent to Meta's cloud for processing and temporary storage." doesn't preclude sending them to Meta's cloud for permanent storage.
I turned the AI off and used them as headphones and taking videos while biking. After a couple rides, I couldn’t bring myself to put them on because people started to recognize them and I realized I didn’t want to be associated with them (people are right to assume Meta has access to what they see).
Meta Ray Bans, if kept simple, could have been a great product. They ruined them.
Just continues to prove that if you solve a bit of inconvenience for them, people will let you exploit them and their families.
Wearing these glasses is just as obnoxious as walking around putting your phone in people's faces while recording.
It's certainly possible that it's something much more surprising / sinister, but there is a fairly logical combination of settings that I could see a company could argue lets them use the data for training.
I'm also very certain that few users with these settings would expect the images to be shown to actual people, so I'm not defending Meta.
They are creepy as fuck.
I’m embarrassed to wear my non-Meta Raybans now. That logo is a liability.
There is (in general) no expectation of privacy in public in Europe. How you can use the material though, is a different matter ...
https://patch.com/illinois/lakezurich/il-student-punches-pro...
Different laws in different countries.
> before filming random people in the street?
That would make taking pictures impossible, so no, such a requirement cannot be reasonably() codified into law.
(
) By reasonably I mean in a way to be actually followed. Of course there are lots of impossible laws created by politicians to cater to their fan base.If you could not take photos of people in public places it would imply banning a lot of things that have been acceptable for a long time.
However, audio recording of conversations is prohibited.
Filming is legal. In public spaces (streets, parks), there is no "reasonable expectation of privacy." You do not need permission to point a camera. The exceptions are usually for offensive or harassing type of filming.
Publishing is regulated. In EU, once you share the footage , you are "processing personal data" under GDPR. There are also exceptions where publishing without permission is legal. Legitimate Interest (security footage or incidental background), Public Interest/Journalism, and Artistic Expression.
Generally you must ask permission to publish, not to film. Although asking permission to film is good ethical principle too.
I mean, otherwise countries couldn’t use security cameras
Meta aims to introduce facial recognition to its smart glasses while its biggest critics are distracted, according to a report from The New York Times. In an internal document reviewed by The Times, Meta says it will launch the feature “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”
I worked at a midsize financial company before and whenever there was something even approaching a legal or ethical grey area, we'd pick up the phone and say come to my office to talk, and then you'd close the door.
We weren't doing anything nearly as nefarious as Meta, yet everyone was always aware that email and phone conversations were recorded and archived.
Now, one wonders what constitutes "nefarious" or a grey zone worth hiding in their minds.
Do you believe these companies and individuals will ever see consequences for putting this in writing? I don't think they will, and I assume they believe the same based on their actions. Why waste time being "moral" when you don't lose anything for being immoral and stand to gain something if your gamble wins?
I mean, there's a whole philosophical outlook about being a good person and some people just want to do without needing enforcement, but those people also dont tend to become one of the largest corporations on the planet.
But still nefarious. Thats kinda messed up, to be honest.
Every day I understand more and more that I have something really priceless and rare, complete luxury of choice, and 99% of people don't. (as with all things, it has its downside: nothing matters!)
I refused to get "stuck" in my hometown, which motivated me from college dropout to FAANG. Once I got there, it was novel to me that even rich people get "stuck" due to inability to imagine losing status, and also responsiblities that come with obvious, healthy, lifestyle choices (i.e. marriage and kids)
I mean, they don’t. There isn’t a single decent person who has ever worked at Meta, and that started long before this nonsense. The entire company is about the social destruction of its users. Everything anyone there works on drives towards that goal.
Please don't respond with how you think people justify, I want to hear the actual reasons. I'm tired of speculative responses to questions like these.
Please do share if you've had to deal with similar situations too. And feel free to respond with green accounts.
I legitimately want to understand why this happens. Not why from management, why from engineers.
Most people are just trying to get through their day and not worry about ethical questions.
I'd say that's terrible, but I'm not confident I'd be a better person if my livelihood depended on doing that sort of work, though I hope I'd be better.
Who has been distracted from Facebook’s shenanigans? Who are they talking about? Is it me? Because I can tell you I have certainly not been distracted on that front. Am I supposed to feel guilty? Am I supposed to hold somebody accountable who should’ve been paying attention?
I do actually understand why it’s done, but I just find it very grating and if your goal is to actually raise awareness, shaming people is generally not the way to go about it.
Also the classic “we can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time” thing
It isn't really "rhetoric", they're talking like they believe this actually happens, this is strategy.
And I tend to agree with them that things like attention and political capital are ultimately finite resources.
I've found that the "we can do two things" and "we can walk and chew bubblegum" line of argument to be simplistic and just wrong (and pretty incredibly patronizing). I think the world works exactly the way Meta thinks that it does here.
It might blow up and turn into a Streisand effect, but more often than not this kind of strategy works.
Much like how people think they can multitask and talk on the phone and drive at the same time and every scientific measure of it shows that they really can't.
On September 11th 2001 a UK government department's press chief told their subordinates it was a "good day to bury bad news".
The idea is pretty simple - you might be obligated to announce something that you know will be poorly received, like poor train performance figures, but you can decide the exact day you announce it, like on a day when thousands have died in a terror attack. What would otherwise be front-page news is relegated to a few paragraphs on page 14.
Facebook proposes a similar strategy: Get the feature ready to go, wait until there's some much bigger news story, and deploy it that day.
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
Is that a good enough explanation to reduce your feelings of being personally targeted?
I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.
To record a video on your phone you need to hold your phone up pointed at the other person, usually not in the same way you would normally use a phone. If you see someone holding his phone steady at face level and pointing at something without making finger movements, you know he is filming. If someone is pointing his phone down towards the ground and scrolling around with his thumb, you know he is probably not.
To record from a pair of smart glasses you just need to look at someone, as you would normally look at any other thing. Yes there will be an LED on, but the person being recorded probably couldn't see it if it is in a bright, busy environment and you are more than a few steps away, plus there will be aftermarket modifications to disable the LED. In short, there is no way you can reliably tell if someone's smart glasses are filming you. You have to assume that worst.
Then again, there may be some selection bias at play…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/nyregion/nyc-nightlife-no...
The world is not deterministic, and we can shape norms of how we interact with each other. We don't have to accept being constantly recorded just because the technology makes it possible.
Not perfect, but better than nothing I guess. I don't think I've noticed the glasses IRL anywhere, but if I start seeing them, I'm definitely installing the app and avoiding any interactions with those people.
And all of that is to ignore that neither gen1 or 2 of Google Glass attempted to look like regular glasses. The Meta frames are largely indistinguishable from regular glasses unless you are very up close.
[EDIT] I really shouldn't need to say this on Hacker News but don't shoot the messenger for messages you don't want to hear. Reporting a fact does not imply approval or disapproval of it.
No, we need to make this as socially radioactive as possible. We don't need to establish a permission structure to allow Facebook to continue doing this without repercussion.
Cameras on glasses will be normalized too. A few HNer types will scream. The rest of the "nothing to hide so nothing to fear" group will just wear them. (not saying I agree with "nothing to hide so nothing to fear". Rather, I'm saying that's common way of thinking. Common enough that it's likely people will wear these eventually.
How about this marketing approach: "College woman, tired of creepers trying to hit on you. Worried about getting roofied. Wear these glasses and turn the creeps in".
People widely accept mass surveilance and facial recognition, including by doorbells, phones, cameras on the street, etc. They post images and videos online to corporations that perform facial recognition. They accept government collecting data broadly by facial recognition.
People accept all sorts of horrors and nonsense, unrelated to and many times much worse than privacy violations, because (I think) they are normalized on social media, which is controlled editorially by Zuckerberg, Musk, Ellison, etc.
I'm not saying we're doomed. I'm saying nobody else will save us. We have to make it happen.
I’ve seen stories of people banned from gyms for taking selfies in the locker room as people were walking by.
It's difficult to draw a bright line between these activities:
- I told someone else something I saw the other day
- I painted a picture of the public square or wrote a book about specific activities that I witnessed
- I specifically remembered an individual based on their face, visible tattoos, location, license plate, or some other unique factor and voluntarily testified to that fact in a court of law
- I spent every day at the same corner making note of the various people/vehicles that I saw
- I stuck a camera at that same point (perhaps on my private properly directly abutting a public space) and recorded everything, posted it publicly on the internet, and used automated technology to identify people, text, vehicles, etc
- I paid a different person every day to follow someone around and record what they did
- I developed a drone system that could follow specific individuals/vehicles from airspace I'm allowed to occupy
Pretty much everything I described above is legal in most of the United States. Obviously it gets creepier and more uncomfortable going down the list (I don't really like it when I'm the subject of any of these activities) but how do you stop this?
I'll at least throw out some options
- Implement some form of right to forget
- Forbid individuals or organizations from doing any of these
- Enact actual "civil rights" level privacy protections (extend HIPAA? automatic copyright for human faces? new amendment?) that include protection of individual's DNA, unique facial features, and other "uniquely human" attributes
My friends always have a cheap shot when I wear them but are completely fine now and appreciate fun candid videos I send them
Amazing for vacations with the kids
I get why people are creeped out by them, but we get filmed or photographed hundreds of times a day in a big city when we are in public spaces. Gatekeeping a potentially useful technology for being filmed in public -- well, everyone is _already_ filmed in public. ATM cameras, stoplight cameras, drone cameras, smartphone cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras. You are on camera every time you step out of your house. You are on camera every time you open your work computer. Singling out cameras in eyeglasses as "creepy" is kind of worrying about a drop in the ocean. Cameras on self-driving cars. Nanny cams. Closed-circuit cameras. The things are everywhere, and they are always invasions of privacy. Why is the line the "creeper" glasses?
I'd be ok with it if we were for banning all non-consensual recordings in all spaces. But we're very much not.
And if we're not, then having a personal heads-up display that is contextual to your current surroundings or has augmented reality capability is too useful to not use (eventually). I'm bad with names, and good with faces. That use-case alone would be worth it for me, if it were available.
And we probably ought to regulate how all such footage is handled.
> banning all non-consensual recordings in all spaces
It's a false dichotomy. Even if recording is permitted that doesn't mean the systemic invasion of personal privacy needs to be.
Just FYI, they do heavily market this towards RX glasses wearers. So, you wouldn't quite be able to just as simply ask someone to take off their glasses and no longer be able to see.
Apparently they sold 7 million of these. So I think a whole lot of people don't care about this aspect.
I propose we just assume people with meta glasses are recording others in public and we call them creeps. Shaming works, we should use it more.
Doorbell cameras are also typically pointed toward public streets, where again, there is no expectation of privacy. Even then, many people have been removing Ring cameras after they were shown to automatically upload video without user's knowledge.
Body cam - used to protect the police and people being policed in a potentially hot conflict. Recording is scoped to these specific interactions that rarely occur for most people.
Doorbell cam - highly controversial. See response to dog-finding superbowl ad.
Body cam wore on face - Mass surveillance in potentially every conceivable social context. Data owned by Meta, a company known for building a profile on people that don't even use their products.
Not sure how it is where you live, but doorbell cameras are commonly criticized where I live. With many people claiming they don't feel comfortable walking around anymore knowing that the entire neighborhood is filming them.
Cops also announce their presence in uniforms and are operating as government agents. People already moderate their behavior around cops so being recorded isn’t as big a deal.
I think the difference is that these cameras are relatively concealed, and can be used to record every interaction, even in pretty intimate/private settings. Yes you could do this with a cell phone but it would be pretty obvious your recording if you're trying to get more than just the audio of an interaction.
People are more okay with cameras in public areas and less okay if it's in intimate, social, private situations, inside apartments, individual offices etc.
A face camera has no light or warnings (you just put tape over the small light), and is operated by a pervert.
There's very little sense to me in searching for meaning in any of this. It just is, people are that way. There are no lines and boundaries based on anything but just whims.
1. Debugging for troubleshooting.
2. Analytical for making product better.
3. Bugs that collects your info when it shouldn't.
4. Bugs from 3rd party vendor if company uses those.
5. Insecure process. Getting access to a private content within the company is trivial due to coarse permission model.
Source: I worked at two well known social media companies. Trust & Safety and data infra teams
The creepiness concern is real, but I think people misplace where the actual surveillance happens. The most consequential stores of personal data aren’t ad networks they’re things like banks, hospitals, insurers, and telecoms. These institutions hold information about your health, finances, movements, and relationships, indexed and searchable by employees you’ve never met, governed by policies you’ve never read.
Realistically, there’s very little an individual can do to completely opt out.
My take is: if the main outcomes are that I get shown ads for things I don’t need and my facecomputer knows the difference between a fork and a spoon… I… I can live with that.
Yes, but it's possible, at the cost of some minor inconvenience, to greatly limit data collected about you.
Communicate over private channels (Signal, own XMPP servers, NOT Whatsapp), pay in cash or crypto, runs free software on all your devices, and deny Internet access to devices across the board (this includes all TVs/monitors, all "smart" devices, cars, and other appliances).
The real issue is that (as these glasses exemplify), it is difficult to prevent others to intentionally or unintentionally provide data to surveillance companies. This happens when you walk in front of a Ring camera, when someone uploads a selfie to Facebook and you happen to be in the background, and in countless other situations.
One that bothers me a lot are all the apps that want people to share your contacts to find your friends. This is a quick way for them to get all the contact information, which may also include birthdays and other more sensitive details.
Even if I were to never make a Facebook account, I could almost guarantee they still have my name, address, phone number, DOB, and maybe more.
No. When your record a video on your phone, it is not being reviewed annotators. Generally companies only pay to get labeling done on data that is being used to train (or evaluate) ML models.
If you're blind, it's of course understandable but that's pretty much it in terms of cases in which I would consider the glasses acceptable to wear in public.
It’s possible that even if all your friends/family would stay far away, they could still end up in your proximity.
> Hey Meta, is it safe to cross the street
> You are absolutely correct to check whether it's safe to cross before crossing! (emoji). Let me check for you(emoji)
> ...10% ...40% ...80% ...100% DONE. (made up progress bar)
> It is perfectly safe to cross right now! (emoji)
> Thanks Meta! (user dies)
I care about the innocent people whose privacy is invaded by people who buy these glasses.
So the world can label them as Hentai glasses and move on
No one will read it, but even if you do, most of the time the FOMO or sunk cost fallacy effect will make you go on anyway. And then it is a free pass for them.
This is hugely concerning. We need more details. Why are the glasses recording when not being worn? Is the light on when it's recording?
Are the Meta employees able to turn on the streaming without people knowing? Are these videos only when someone says "Hey Meta..."? Are the Meta employees looking at every "Hey Meta..." video where someone asks AI a question?
These glasses are considered a luxury item and are worn by executives in office environments. They are worn by people in family situations. Someone could be a confidential or private moment and randomly ask AI a question; one of the primary purposes of the glasses. Are all of these being seen by Meta employees?
Tbh the only thing I really use the glasses for are listening to music or talking on the phone - so basically how you'd use airpods. I don't use airpods because I had an ear injury that prevents me from using them on my left ear, so these glasses were kinda nice for that. I really wish they didn't have a camera though because I do always feel compelled to remove them if I interact with people.
I also have to add that the quality is mediocre. They're a month old and the case has problems charging sometimes, and one of the screws is always coming loose at a hinge no matter how often I retighten that side.
Vote with your dollars people.
I missed Facebook for about a day, and after that I barely even thought about it. In 2021 I bought an Oculus Quest 2, which at the time required a Facebook account so I made a throwaway one, but other than that I haven't been on Facebook (and I haven't even touched my Quest 2 in three years).
Point being, it's really not hard to get off Facebook and to ditch Meta products. More people should delete it.
As another poster mentioned, it can in fact be more difficult. Almost all of my social clubs/groups over the years migrated away from websites/forums to FaceBook. I could give up an account, at the cost of losing effectively my entire social calendar.
I have a generic account with no real user data, but they still get all my content from the social groups so they still win I suppose.
My point ultimately I guess is that I have chosen the ability to continue to have a strong social life over my zuck hating principles.
Maybe this changed since I set mine up, but I felt so damn informed I was getting tired of tapping I understand.
https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists?tab=readme-ov-file#...
Among others, blocks Meta/Facebook/Google/Apple trackers and ads. Every router on the planet should run this.
Yesterday I saw a Instagram reel of a guy asking "what am I looking at" while between his girlfriend's legs. Congrats, some Indian guy saw her too.
The core piece of information that is missing or unclear is whether this collection happens also when not actively and knowingly sending data to the cloud.
The glasses let me record videos locally, can Facebook see any frames of them? This is the question that needs to be answered. Everything is else is nonsense like "omg Amazon hears what I tell Alexa"
> The workers in Kenya say that it feels uncomfortable to go to work. They tell us about deeply private video clips, which appear to come straight out of Western homes, from people who use the glasses in their everyday lives.
Absolutely crazy that a Meta employee saying not to buy them. Everyone should know this right now.
“I saw a video where a man puts the glasses on the bedside table and leaves the room.”
“Shortly afterwards his wife comes in and changes her clothes”, one of them says.
I don't agree that responsibility to comply with Swedish law is on the wearer. This should motivate prosecutors to immediately order raids to secure any data relating to the processing of the data.
I also think the Swedish camera surveillance law is also applicable and there's a deceptive element since the cameras are disguised as glasses.
We will shame hard anyone who uses this sh1t.
The sooner we collectively stop trusting them (and maybe even actively campaign to have the U.S. government meaningfully regulate them), the better.
Personally, I would like to see the company stop existing and its executive board destitute.
You can still record stuff without spyglasses. People do that on youtube too, e. g. first amendment audits. It's not that different to the spyglasses, except that you can cut off Meta from the process (admittedly youtube creates another problem which is called Google; it would be nice if we could have platforms without corporate overlord, but the financial aspect may still be an issue that requires solving. I don't have a good way to solve that, as I am also having a 100% zero ads policy aka using ublock origin mandatorily. And Google declared total war againts ublock origin, we all know that.)
And despite this, there is no strong will to detach from what they produce - in the beginning or later when it is considered like cultural fabric. That’s how good their tactics is.
And for the pay one gets working for them - screw the world! I won’t use it anywhere near my loved ones - but will build it
Because I didn't think that the data was uploaded to meta by default, when you take a video with the raybans.
More over, I didn't think that those glasses could record more than 2.5 minutes.
The point still remains, the devil in detail of the "privacy" policy.
> “The algorithms sometimes miss. Especially in difficult lighting conditions, certain faces and bodies become visible”.
Right, “difficult lighting conditions,” not sure when we’d run into those in situations where we might be concerned with privacy. A 97% success rate looks good on paper.
That's my default assumption.
Actual title is “She Came Out of the Bathroom Naked, [Meta] Employee Says” and subtitle begins with “Bank details, sex and naked people who seem unaware they are being recorded”
Suspicious moderation behaviors on this one
And you're still forced to carry a smartphone anyway with these glasses since they require internet connection.
Is this fashion, or something I'm not aware of ? They look horrendous to me.
>since they require internet connection.
Only the AI features require internet. You can technically take pictures and video without carrying around your phone, but realistically people are going to carry there phone with them.
Stop thinking like an end user and think like a Meta shareholder.
Meta don't own smartphone hardware or operating systems. Apple and Android locked that market up. But if they can create a new market and own that, then imagine all the data they can harvest!
Those videos can also be a used to track people. IMHO each Tesla owner sending video data to Tesla's data centers is violating privacy laws!
[1] (in German) https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000215526/aktueller-fal...
EDIT: Wait, is this when you use the "ask Meta" feature? I do expect that to send all the clips to a server for an LLM to process, it's not done on-device. It's not clear to me whether it's that or just all videos/photos you record with the glasses.
For many more reasons than pervert behaviour, I agree that this kind of tool cannot coexist with healthy society. "Glassholes" was a delightful portmanteau, but I suspect normalising a term like "pedo glasses" will probably put people off them way sooner and faster. At the very least it identifies the product and not the person as the problem.
In private settings, as with public, you are typically free to leave a setting where people are recording.
The law has no specifications for what type of device can do the recording, pr for how long a recording can be.
Shouldn't there be a discussion about what that means? What _is_ privacy? Is it completely black or white, all or nothing? Are some kinds of privacy breaches more acceptable than others?
I feel that the "you can have no expectation of privacy in public" discussion is some times used as if it's some sort of fundamental truth that must not be challenged. If people _want_ to have more privacy in public, whatever that means, then let's make it happen.
This is why paparazzi exist and how they operate. It's the dirty, dingy cost of having a free press, freedom of travel, freedom to hold public officials accountable, subject to the same laws you are; you can't waffle or restrict or grant exceptions, because those inevitably, invariably get abused by those in power.
That's just nonsense. Your feeds seem to be polluted by what you are seeking out, as I've never seen a video on any service that shows humiliation of anyone.
I watch a lot of 1st ammendment audit videos, and that is never about humiliation, though many people end up looking very ignorant of the laws concerning recording in public which is in the 1st ammendment.
A cultural convention that lets people make honest mistakes, but turn it off when someone says "hey, you're recording" seems like a good solution. Just need to make it easily visible and obvious to others - you can run around in public with a big news camera on your shoulder or a tripod and you usually won't get hassled. It's just the idea of being covertly recorded, even while in public, that gets creepy.
Like we could have navigational AR-glasses. The wearer sees arrows on the floor where to walk. And we could choose to not let anyone wear them in public even though what they do is useful, and there aren't any real privacy issues. But people around the wearer don't know that. That's the privacy concern.
If my biometrics or a recording of my voice is sent to a different continent and then used to change which ad shows on the phone of the person next to me on the subway, then that's less privacy than I expected and wanted.
https://japandaily.jp/why-you-cant-turn-off-the-camera-shutt...
When you use Meta's products and services you are tagged, tracked, and commodified like an animal. You are cattle.
The question isn't whether or not Meta's AI smart glasses raise data privacy concerns.
The question is why use anything from Meta in the first place?
For some reason they keep asking aggressively for permission for the whole thing. I wonder why...
It's not that complicated. Most people just go where the other users are. They "have nothing to hide". Their thoughtless decisions actively make society worse for everyone else, one user at a time. Even tech people who know the scam throw up their hands and express how impossible it would be to get their kids' soccer parents or PTA groups to abandon WhatsApp groups or FB Messenger for something privacy-respecting. The tyranny of the installed base.
Go to a place that didn't have deliberate large scale society-wide anti-smoking programs. Basically everyone starts smoking at age 15 and never stops. People regularly and typically, en masse, work against their own interests in ways that seem like "not a big deal".
Suddenly, you can't make a doctor's appointment in Europe without a WhatsApp account (and agreeing to the Meta ToS in the process). (Why Europe casually ceded the basic day to day communications of many of its b2c sectors to an American company without so much as a fight is another matter.)
Would be really interesting to create a completely new account, use the glasses with all upload settings off for a month, and then SAR request and see what they have...
I asked 2 cops in a patrol car if I could install cameras on my own and how I should go about it. They said they don't mind them. Officially it's illegal unless you have a permit, but it's so widespread and the law is so unenforced that it's practically 99.99% legal.
I can point a few cameras to the street and record everything 24/7. When I'm on a bus I'm being recorded by a few cameras. On most bus/tram/subway stops there are cameras. In stores and public buildings there are cameras. Most cars have cameras for insurance or general safety concerns. Self-driving cars would have to have cameras, as well as delivery robots.
If we accept this shitty reality, why shouldn't I wear a camera and a mic, too?
Smart glasses record in private settings and the biggest point of contention is that they "stealth" record. If someone recorded you with their phone, you'd immediately notice whereas it's hardly noticeable with smart glasses. Worse, people at Facebook are able to visualize scenes from people's home unbeknownst to them.
Basicially it is a peeping tom.
-Mark Zuckerberg, 2004
That image always felt dystopian to me
If they think this surveillance tech is going to push the company forward, it means leadership is even more disconnected from reality than the Amazon people who greenlit the superbowl ad. It means the company is dying. Huzzah!
Perhaps the old ideas that "you have no privacy in public" or "if you can be seen then you can be recorded" and so on just need to be revised? Should we reconsider what it means to be "in public"? Perhaps people should be granted some form of privacy protection also when "in public"?
Workers annotating data for AI might see sensitive content captured by smart glasses. But the leap from that to “we see everything” and framing it like some dystopian panopticon mirrors the early Google Glass panic, where the concerns often outran what the device actually could do.
Legitimate concerns shouldn’t be dismissed, but neither should they be inflated to create a new “Glass-forked-into-Big-Brother” narrative unless the evidence genuinely supports that level of risk ...
> Privacy
Pick one.
To be illegal, it would either have to be focused on the genitals or of sexual content. Nudity is not automatically sexual.
It would be a surveillance and privacy dystopian nightmare.
Or do you think that those cameras are less secure because the leadership is not good with their people?
I'm not sure I follow the criticism here.
> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.
> If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.
> If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids."
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
The literal URL slug is
> metas-ai-smart-glasses-and-data-privacy-concerns-workers-say-we-see-everything
The page title is
> Meta’s AI Smart Glasses and Data Privacy Concerns: Workers Say “We See Everything”
The new title goes against the guidelines by editorializing. I've never seen HN do this before, what's going on here?
I've changed it again to match the article's original title, removing the clickbait part.
Parent and another comment reacting to this change have also been (artificially, I must assume) sunk from top to below gems like ’Too funny that the subcontractor working for meta is “sama”’.
What's going on?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/mark-zuck...
I 3d printed a flap for my webcam.
The manufacturer might access it, Apple states they don't, Google and Samsung I'm not sure. A bad actor with 0days might too.
It does seem harder to tape the phone camera since the in/out motion into your pocket I imagine would remove the tape.
Original HN title - The workers behind Meta’s smart glasses can see everything
Editorialized HN title v1, 7 hours after post - A hidden workforce behind Meta’s new smart glasses
Editorialized HN title v2 - Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns
I find v2 title okay-ish: it’s derived from the page title, and you can see what it’s about (as compared to v1). It doesn’t capture the degree of what Meta can see, though.
This product cannot be allowed to exist in the type of world I want to live in.
The power structure wants these to succeed in the market for so many horrific reasons and it will require some serious societal muscle to reject them.
A) they believe in the idea
and / or
B) how much money there is to be made having people wear them.
Smart wearables as a general category of hardware have an awful rate of success, and hardware is much more expensive to get into than software. So, there's got to be a lot of money in the data consumers will be producing.
That's the part that scares me much more so than the random perverts using them in public for unsavory candid photos.
Larry Page on Robert Scoble’s Google Glass stunt: ‘I really didn’t appreciate the shower photo’:
https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases...
Scoble: an utterly tone deaf response to harassment allegations:
https://onemanandhisblog.com/2017/10/scoble-utterly-tone-dea...
>The Verge‘s Adi Robertson sums it us thus:
>>But his latest defense puts forward an absurd definition of sexual harassment and effectively accuses women of reporting it to fit in with the cool crowd, while claiming he’s writing in “a spirit of healing.” There’s even a tasteless plug for his latest business venture. It’s one of the most disappointing responses we’ve seen to a sexual harassment complaint, which, after the past few weeks, is a fairly remarkable achievement.
different companies 'launder' it differently: with voice, it was done by "accidental" voice assistant activations. i guess with glasses, maybe there will be less window dressing this time. after all, it is clearly pitched to see what you see, at all times of the day.
similar controversy happened with the various roomba products, although arguably that was a combination of data harvesting + lazy engineering.
The root cause is that meta didn’t want to pay the fair market value for those videos and just stole them from its users by burying it in TOS.
If they were honest about their intentions most people would say no or demand payment for providing something of value.
Really it should just be in the UI. Click Upload this and get 10c/minute or whatever for the video. Choose what you upload. That'd be closer in effect to using social media.
Is anyone at meta going to be bald accountable?
An absolute privacy nightmare especially in places like Switzerland or Germany where recording people (subject focus) even in public is not permitted without consent but you have tourists now showing up everywhere wearing these.
The LED is barely visible during the day and some have modified their glasses to disable/remove it.
They haven't yet. Don't see why now.
That's the prime example of a law that can't be enforced and thus shouldn't exist. You go in town, you can be recorded inadvertantly, as long as it's not some creep stalking you, I say it's fine.
If you post a video online of someone's worst day which you decided to film for entertainment, they can legally go after you.