> The internal memo from Meta’s Reality Labs notes that the current situation in the U.S was good timing for the feature’s release.
> “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,” says the document.
I do photography as a hobby, especially street photography and related styles, and I constantly question myself on the ethics of photographing people in public without permission, even with my huge ass camera. Meanwhile, we have people running spy cameras in their glasses, and they view that as just a normal thing to do. What.
While they are a problem, they are a different problem from spy cameras capturing you up close for the benefit of a single person. Surveillance cameras are for shady governments and maybe "security", camera glasses are for straight up creeps.
The problem with photo since the birth of social media is that it's permanently stored in the internet, literally.
Photos used to be personal and (mostly) temporary. I may take a photo in public, develop, then share with the close ones and store in the photo book. Photo may be somehow passed onto others but likely thrown away eventually when I become less of importance to them, and it'll worn out.
With photos now uploaded to social media or the "cloud", they exist permanently as a means of backups, sold to 3rd party (knowingly or unknowingly) analyzed to "improve the experience of the platform".
That permanence is a bit of a myth. Bit rot is as real as physical one. At least four cloud storages (Bitcasa, hubiC, Ubuntu One, Cyphertite) I’ve used in the past are gone.
But it has potential to be permanent through the means of other people storing copies of it. If you send a photo via WhatsApp to someone, for example, that photo is by default saved automatically to their phone, and potentially synced to their Google Photos.
And we're already seeing a tonne of creepy bastards harassing women using the glasses and they have no recourse because "public place". They should be outright banned imo. I see no benefit to them and I genuinely cannot see the day everyone is running around wearing the same few brands of glasses because they provide that much value. I had to wear regular glasses for a few years and they were a pain in the ass. I'm not doing that voluntarily so I can see live ads and reviews as I walk past restaurants.
Hell, I (like anyone else) grab photos with my phone on vacation, and when I take a picture of a busy market, I do my best to avoid including people in my photographs.
People in places I visit are just trying to live their lives, they aren't some kind of human zoo for me.
Yeah, someone giving me even the slightest hint of being uncomfortable already makes me instantly delete their photo. Like, I want to photograph the public without ruining spontaneous moments, but I don't want to make others uncomfortable or mad at me because of my photographs.
Most people understand that the difference between your camera and your eyes is that one records an image, while the other records a very rough description of an image.
My point is, people point at the camera but have actual issues with some potential capabilities of a system that’s not the camera itself but way downstream of it.
Can we please learn to point at correct things? I honestly don’t know what wrong with everyone. It’s like when people have issues with building permits and utility pricing but blame “AI” or “data centers” instead.
They are not exactly potential capabilities, but real capabilities already being used by people like obnoxious TikTokers to record them harassing people in public places without the person realizing they are being recorded.
If you need to put a camera on glasses for a legitimate reason, such as a device purely for accessibility, then you should be able to get an exception, of course.
“Potential” in a sense wearer’s actions are necessary to cause harm. Or vendor’s, for other risk scenarios. One has to not just have a camera but have that camera recording to a persistent medium and - most importantly - be an asshole to publish that recording inappropriately. That’s a few active steps away from having a camera.
> then you should be able to get an exception, of course
Of course not. Not when everyone reacts to the cameras themselves instead of TikTok uploads and whatever people are doing.
I just want legislation to ban the latter (as the actual harmful thing) and not the former (then maybe allow it on some sort of permit). But I’m sure it’ll be the opposite.
Which pisses me off because as a person who has difficulty with faces, for almost my whole adult life I’ve dreamed about a wearable that could make me aware when I see a person I know as I pass by (my brain doesn’t do that on its own). Strictly on-device, zero retention, no transmission, sure - I won’t buy e.g. Meta glasses or whatever until I know I can hack them to do the right thing. But of course there’ll be an argument that others aren’t supposed to know what my devices are doing, so ban them just in case because they make people uncomfortable.
We’re literally saying the same thing, pointing that the issue is with something that happens with the images/videos (TikToks)…
There's a mad dash right now. Everyone is sprinting as fast as possible to invent and propagate the worst technology possible. Oh, you thought smart phones ruined society? Well good news, smart glasses are finally viable. You just won't believe what they'll come up with next, and everyone will buy it, and everyone will be worse off.
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
Meta: We created the portable Occular Torment Nexus. We believe you should always be present in the Nexus, even with others around you. And thanks to our partnership with Popular Glasses Company, you can be tormented in style!
This is the laziest possible implementation of smart glasses.
What I want is an overlay that gives you useful information about the world. Like you're looking at a store shelf and it tells you if the price is low or high compared to other stores in the area. Or you're fixing your car and it shows the steps you need to execute.
A camera recording is neither smart nor useful IMO.
I've long since given up on seeing thoughtful policy space discussion, here or anywhere, but I see drdaeman's 'I need assistance in recognizing faces' being downvoted here today, so briefly...
Europe and the US have had different legal perspectives on public photography, and each has had both costs and benefits. Perhaps those contrasts could help inform discussion.
As with any tech in its infancy, thought experiments might illuminate options. I suspect few here would object to a camera feeding only a chip which outputs only hand pose for gestural UI. What if that chip output a facial UID, for help with 'hey, that's someone I know', and that UID was transient and never left the glasses? What if that UID was sent to Meta for arbitrary monitization? If the last two drew different answers, then perhaps the downvoted suggestion to regulate the use, not the camera, might deserve discussion.
Notable elephants in the room include: Trust - with societal lying normalized, and misrepresentation pervasive in policy discourse, it's not unreasonable to suggest that we're societally incapable of regulating use, so broad prohibitions are the only policy tool available. Imperial conservative stagnation - as with drone's "yes it could be an economically transformative technology, and a militarily critical industry, but at every stage of its exploration, it must be perfectly safe(tm)!" (the emph bit heard here on HN) - turning your back on modernization and reform has consequences when you have rival states. Privilege - having done dementia caregiving, there are lots of people whose lives would be profoundly improved by having ride-along see-what-they-see AI companions - "Did I have dinner? Yes, 10 minutes ago. You had X. Maybe you'd like a snack of Y to get more protein?" - even a valid claim of "this tech would hurt me" deserves a pause for "but how might it help others?".
I wish we had some social tech to facilitate doing better at this kind of discussion.
Why are we even allowing this in Europe? These smart glasses are just plain data collection and surveillance in plain sight. When does the nightmare stop?
To you, sure. Meanwhile I have about 7 legitimate uses, almost all of them involving recording things down in mines while I need both hands free to keep myself from dying.
You stay in your bubble if it makes you uncomfortable. Real people have real uses for this tech, whether you like it nor not.
almost all of them involving recording things down in mines
How are the glasses more beneficial than the far, far more durable helmet-mounted cameras that construction workers use, or the industrial-grade chest-mounted cameras used in many other industries?
Also, how well do the glasses function underground? Are there pico cells down there to provide connectivity?
> The internal memo from Meta’s Reality Labs notes that the current situation in the U.S was good timing for the feature’s release.
> “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,” says the document.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202602/meta-plans-launch-of-...
That's so fucking cynical. I cannot imagine how bad the internal culture has to be for such a thing to be said so openly
I do photography as a hobby, especially street photography and related styles, and I constantly question myself on the ethics of photographing people in public without permission, even with my huge ass camera. Meanwhile, we have people running spy cameras in their glasses, and they view that as just a normal thing to do. What.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. It is completely legal to film someone on the street.
This is important for other reasons, as it is the same law that allows you to film cops.
In America. That is not true for all other countries.
And in even more countries it is legal to film, but it's not legal to send that footage back to Meta's servers for use in LLM training.
This seems like a US-centric view, because "it is NOT completely legal to film someone on the street" in the european country I live.
It's actually country specific, you don't have a universal rule that you can legally record people in public
law != ethics
"remember, we have a legal system, not a justice system"
As someone already said, I am not talking about legality, but about ethics.
I wonder how many surveillance cameras are currently in operation.
While they are a problem, they are a different problem from spy cameras capturing you up close for the benefit of a single person. Surveillance cameras are for shady governments and maybe "security", camera glasses are for straight up creeps.
That has already been normalized. This is different. sigh.
Exactly.
The problem with photo since the birth of social media is that it's permanently stored in the internet, literally.
Photos used to be personal and (mostly) temporary. I may take a photo in public, develop, then share with the close ones and store in the photo book. Photo may be somehow passed onto others but likely thrown away eventually when I become less of importance to them, and it'll worn out.
With photos now uploaded to social media or the "cloud", they exist permanently as a means of backups, sold to 3rd party (knowingly or unknowingly) analyzed to "improve the experience of the platform".
That permanence is a bit of a myth. Bit rot is as real as physical one. At least four cloud storages (Bitcasa, hubiC, Ubuntu One, Cyphertite) I’ve used in the past are gone.
But it has potential to be permanent through the means of other people storing copies of it. If you send a photo via WhatsApp to someone, for example, that photo is by default saved automatically to their phone, and potentially synced to their Google Photos.
And we're already seeing a tonne of creepy bastards harassing women using the glasses and they have no recourse because "public place". They should be outright banned imo. I see no benefit to them and I genuinely cannot see the day everyone is running around wearing the same few brands of glasses because they provide that much value. I had to wear regular glasses for a few years and they were a pain in the ass. I'm not doing that voluntarily so I can see live ads and reviews as I walk past restaurants.
Hell, I (like anyone else) grab photos with my phone on vacation, and when I take a picture of a busy market, I do my best to avoid including people in my photographs.
People in places I visit are just trying to live their lives, they aren't some kind of human zoo for me.
Yeah, someone giving me even the slightest hint of being uncomfortable already makes me instantly delete their photo. Like, I want to photograph the public without ruining spontaneous moments, but I don't want to make others uncomfortable or mad at me because of my photographs.
Glasses’ camera [usually] sits right next to couple more cameras embedded in wearer’s skull. [Almost] nobody has any problem with those.
That strongly suggests me it’s not the cameras that are problematic, but something about what happens to the images.
Most people understand that the difference between your camera and your eyes is that one records an image, while the other records a very rough description of an image.
I don’t know how I could’ve made it even more obvious that cameras themselves don’t record anything.
I guess people wearing spy camera glasses won't do anything at all with the images! /s
My point is, people point at the camera but have actual issues with some potential capabilities of a system that’s not the camera itself but way downstream of it.
Can we please learn to point at correct things? I honestly don’t know what wrong with everyone. It’s like when people have issues with building permits and utility pricing but blame “AI” or “data centers” instead.
They are not exactly potential capabilities, but real capabilities already being used by people like obnoxious TikTokers to record them harassing people in public places without the person realizing they are being recorded.
If you need to put a camera on glasses for a legitimate reason, such as a device purely for accessibility, then you should be able to get an exception, of course.
“Potential” in a sense wearer’s actions are necessary to cause harm. Or vendor’s, for other risk scenarios. One has to not just have a camera but have that camera recording to a persistent medium and - most importantly - be an asshole to publish that recording inappropriately. That’s a few active steps away from having a camera.
> then you should be able to get an exception, of course
Of course not. Not when everyone reacts to the cameras themselves instead of TikTok uploads and whatever people are doing.
I just want legislation to ban the latter (as the actual harmful thing) and not the former (then maybe allow it on some sort of permit). But I’m sure it’ll be the opposite.
Which pisses me off because as a person who has difficulty with faces, for almost my whole adult life I’ve dreamed about a wearable that could make me aware when I see a person I know as I pass by (my brain doesn’t do that on its own). Strictly on-device, zero retention, no transmission, sure - I won’t buy e.g. Meta glasses or whatever until I know I can hack them to do the right thing. But of course there’ll be an argument that others aren’t supposed to know what my devices are doing, so ban them just in case because they make people uncomfortable.
We’re literally saying the same thing, pointing that the issue is with something that happens with the images/videos (TikToks)…
> a wearable that could make me aware when I see a person I know as I pass by (my brain doesn’t do that on its own)
You can do that, just ask people for consent to be recorded/taken a picture
There's a mad dash right now. Everyone is sprinting as fast as possible to invent and propagate the worst technology possible. Oh, you thought smart phones ruined society? Well good news, smart glasses are finally viable. You just won't believe what they'll come up with next, and everyone will buy it, and everyone will be worse off.
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
Meta: We created the portable Occular Torment Nexus. We believe you should always be present in the Nexus, even with others around you. And thanks to our partnership with Popular Glasses Company, you can be tormented in style!
I hope Europe does this for real. I’m wondering how this privacy nightmare is eroding our standards so easily.
I certainly see the potential use of such - but the risks coming with such glasses at least in my opinion outweigh these uses..
Pleas, EU, ban this! Iirc there are already spy cams banned anyway in Germany, this should fall into the same category
The EU (i.e some EU politicians) is considering regulating them, not a full ban
Assuming they are recording strangers speaking in public, that's illegal in Germany without explicit consent: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
Even without sharing the recording.
This is the laziest possible implementation of smart glasses.
What I want is an overlay that gives you useful information about the world. Like you're looking at a store shelf and it tells you if the price is low or high compared to other stores in the area. Or you're fixing your car and it shows the steps you need to execute.
A camera recording is neither smart nor useful IMO.
> A camera recording is neither smart nor useful IMO.
It's very useful for big brother Zuckerberg though.
The EU's tech laws have some good parts and some bad parts. If this goes through, I personally will consider it a very good part.
I've long since given up on seeing thoughtful policy space discussion, here or anywhere, but I see drdaeman's 'I need assistance in recognizing faces' being downvoted here today, so briefly...
Europe and the US have had different legal perspectives on public photography, and each has had both costs and benefits. Perhaps those contrasts could help inform discussion.
As with any tech in its infancy, thought experiments might illuminate options. I suspect few here would object to a camera feeding only a chip which outputs only hand pose for gestural UI. What if that chip output a facial UID, for help with 'hey, that's someone I know', and that UID was transient and never left the glasses? What if that UID was sent to Meta for arbitrary monitization? If the last two drew different answers, then perhaps the downvoted suggestion to regulate the use, not the camera, might deserve discussion.
Notable elephants in the room include: Trust - with societal lying normalized, and misrepresentation pervasive in policy discourse, it's not unreasonable to suggest that we're societally incapable of regulating use, so broad prohibitions are the only policy tool available. Imperial conservative stagnation - as with drone's "yes it could be an economically transformative technology, and a militarily critical industry, but at every stage of its exploration, it must be perfectly safe(tm)!" (the emph bit heard here on HN) - turning your back on modernization and reform has consequences when you have rival states. Privilege - having done dementia caregiving, there are lots of people whose lives would be profoundly improved by having ride-along see-what-they-see AI companions - "Did I have dinner? Yes, 10 minutes ago. You had X. Maybe you'd like a snack of Y to get more protein?" - even a valid claim of "this tech would hurt me" deserves a pause for "but how might it help others?".
I wish we had some social tech to facilitate doing better at this kind of discussion.
Why are we even allowing this in Europe? These smart glasses are just plain data collection and surveillance in plain sight. When does the nightmare stop?
Good. Finally. These never should have even been prototyped. Fool of an idea.
To you, sure. Meanwhile I have about 7 legitimate uses, almost all of them involving recording things down in mines while I need both hands free to keep myself from dying.
You stay in your bubble if it makes you uncomfortable. Real people have real uses for this tech, whether you like it nor not.
I agree, I think people are being far too cynical.
It's just like AI, people discount the positives and magnify the negatives.
You can't use a GoPro or one of the many body cameras where it is clearly obvious to everyone who sees you that you:
(a) Have a camera (b) Are recording?
almost all of them involving recording things down in mines
How are the glasses more beneficial than the far, far more durable helmet-mounted cameras that construction workers use, or the industrial-grade chest-mounted cameras used in many other industries?
Also, how well do the glasses function underground? Are there pico cells down there to provide connectivity?
Related:
Banray.eu
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47650022
Smart glasses are for citizens, not subjects.
Citizens have responsibilities to their society, not just the right to be assholes.
The one thing I appreciate about smart glasses is that it broadcasts the wearer's terrible personality loud and clear and I can thus avoid them.