A hidden workforce behind Meta’s new smart glasses

Why was the title changed from "The workers behind Meta’s smart glasses can see everything" to "A hidden workforce behind Meta’s new smart glasses"? It doesn't go against any guidelines:

> 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?

Has the submission title just been editorialized? I swear I’ve seen it mentioning data collection before, now it’s just bland.

Yes it has, in a way that goes directly against HN guidelines. The page title is "Meta’s AI Smart Glasses and Data Privacy Concerns: Workers Say “We See Everything”".

The workers behind Meta’s smart glasses can see everything (svd.se) 700 points by sandbach 5 hours ago | flag | hide | 402 comments

I'll confess that I like my Meta Ray Ban glasses: I love using them to listen to podcasts at the pool/beach, while riding my bike, and it's cool to snap a quick picture of my kids without pulling out my phone.

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).

A simple on/off toggle isn't going to prevent them from using your data. If your data is in their server then it's going to be used one way or another. Whether in an anonymous way or shipped to where there are no privacy laws.

Those settings are IMO likely not doing what you think they are. Or might be doing strictly, precisely what they say they are.

[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.

Last year they pushed out an update stating if any “Meta AI” is left on, they can access image data for training,

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.

I think the most likely case is: this company is labeling images from meta AI use from people who opted-in to share their data with Meta.

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.

Perhaps I'm ignorant.

I know some of the criticism of Meta: many people don't like the way their products are optimized for engagement. I've heard about their weird AI bots interacting on their platform as if they were people. And I know people of all political stripes have had complaints about content moderation and their algorithm.

But all of that is within the bounds of the law and their terms of service.

None of it would remotely approach something like: bypassing the well-advertised features in the glasses that show when the camera is in use and secretly recording things to train AI. It's hard to imagine any company's lawyers approving something like that. (this sounds like what many commenters believe is happening)

FWIW, I suspect this is the relevant section of the Privacy policy:

> "When you use the Meta AI service on your AI Glasses (if available for your device), we use your information, like Media and audio recordings of your voice to provide the service."

from: https://www.meta.com/legal/privacy-policy/

if so, "to provide the service" is doing a lot of work

Meta has consistently and repeatedly shown an absolute lack of respect for user privacy for basically as long as they’ve existed as a company. I’m honestly not certain there’s anything fully out of the question as far as things they might do, regardless of what their policies might say.

Two examples that are top of mind…

They exploited browser vulnerabilities not unlike malware to track users’ behavior across the web: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas...

They bought a “privacy” VPN app and used it to harvest data, then abused Apple’s enterprise app deployments to continue to ship the app after it was banned from the app store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

> there is a fairly logical combination of settings

I think it's anything but logical, if users (like yourself) have no idea what those settings are, as evident from your previous post.

You might enjoy these conveniences now, but this is just the pre-enshitification stage. Soon enough, to take advantage of those features you will have advertisements integrated into your view, and your data will be scraped for whatever its worth to Meta.

I do think it's completely unacceptable if Meta makes the glasses unable to be used for routine functions without (a) other humans reviewing your private content and (b) AI training on your content. There needs to be total transparency to people when this is happening - these are absolutes.

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).

Agreed. I'm confused trying to map what the article is saying to what's happening at a technical level. For example, obviously it's not doing on-device inference, so it's unsurprising that it won't work without a network connection, but this is totally distinct from your recordings ending up getting labeled. It talks about being able to opt into that, which is one thing. But I guess I don't understand if you don't opt in, if the data still gets sent out for labeling.

I feel like this article is either a bombshell, or totally confused.

>hard to believe even Meta would do this intentionally).

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...

As much as this is a damning quote, it is perhaps also damning that any time someone wants to smear zuck they have to reach 20 years into the past.

There's a big difference between "someone said something stupid as a kid"... "but now has changed and is a totally different person" and "is doing the same things but now knows how not to say the quiet part out loud"

>they have to reach 20 years into the past.

Well, they don't, but this is a particularly damning statement and it's age is more of a feature than a flaw because it shows a long history of anti-social disdain for humanity.

Learning to choose your words more wisely as you age does not necessarily indicate your underlying value system has evolved.

This is a very important window into how the industry, by and large, views users and the concept of privacy. It's not merely authoritarian and predatory, to them users are subhuman.

Is anyone here actually surprised Meta is recording and reviewing their content?

Vote with your dollars people.

I deleted my Facebook eleven years ago. I wish I could say it was for some cool reason about privacy concerns and whatnot, but honestly it's because I was spending way too much time arguing with people I barely knew, and I figured that that's not healthy.

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.

I don't actively use Facebook and I block most(?) of the tracking, but I do have an account simply because most of the information about my area is on there. This means events, safety updates, second hand shit.

Yeah, that's fair enough. My neighborhood doesn't have that so it's fairly easy to avoid the use of Facebook.

I still spend too much arguing on HN but not as much as I was on Facebook and the audience here is generally more educated and so the arguments aren't as mind-numbing.

My policy for years with facebook has been "post, don't scroll". I also use the brave broswer, ublock origin, and fb-purity extension. It's a tiny thing, and petty but it's better than being facebook's product for their advertising customers.

> 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.

Yes, I'm surprised at this. I would've never expected they would be doing this, and I didn't exactly have high expectations of Meta. This is incredibly invasive and not at all what people expect.

Am I so cynical, or does this sound hopelessly naive? This is exactly what I would expect. Certainly of Meta. Amazon had to go out of their way to reassure people that Siri wasn’t always recording. And I’m still not entirely sure I believe that.

I would have been the first to talk about meta being horrible for privacy and this goes even further than what I expected, which was:

- they have the opportunity to save the video feed at any time - they are probably storing some kind of metadata of the feed, maybe some kind of analysis output - someone could hypothetically watch it

I thought it was dangerous because I thought they could do what they're doing, but I didn't think that right now they actually were and so overtly

I am also surprised, but not because I believe Meta to care about the ethics of the whole thing. After all their privacy scandals, I’d assume they’d have policies in place to prevent something that can so easily be leaked. But here we are

The thing is it's not just surprising from a privacy standpoint but also from an engineering standpoint -- this sounds very data-, power-, and storage-intensive, in a device that's very constrained on all sides, so it wouldn't have even occurred to me this was a possibility. When are they even uploading all the videos without blowing through their power budget and internet data limits? Are they heavily compressing it to like one frame per second or something?

> data limits

The data required is small. Each embedding might be 1/2 kB per face.

> power budget

To process a video for biometric feature extraction, it might take 0.5% to 2% of the total power used to record a video. Video uses a lot of power (compression, screen, etc)

Assuming you've got a modern device (e.g. with Apple Neutral Engine). Disclosure: Googled info (Gemini).

> The data required is small. Each embedding might be 1/2 kB per face.

"Embedding"? This is what the article says:

"In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed. I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording."

You're saying this they're watching "embedding"s here?

I find it extremely naive too. I expect much worse than this from Meta and I am often amazed at just what it is going to take for people to realize what Meta is and does. I mean it is not like we have 11 million examples of what and who they are. In this story I would have expected additionally that Meta would notice little bit of cellulite in the woman that was changing and then having the employees call her husband to tell them to surprise her with amazing cream he should buy her for their upcoming anniversary (and if this was actually part of the story I would be able to continue on top of this and would not be surprised if true).

Yeah, this is something you 100% should have expected. This could not be more on brand for facebook. Even if someone told me facebook wasn't using their glasses to invade the privacy of their users I wouldn't believe them. Compromising people's privacy for profit is what facebook does. Violating the trust of their users is basically all facebook has ever done.

There's plenty of people that don't own these smart glasses, as far as i know it's still only early adopters using them but i guess i could be wrong. The nice thing is you actually can vote with your feet here because there's no network effects, whereas there's tons of people that are stuck being on facebook or instagram because of everyone else that's on there.

When you buy them and set them up you are told this many times. The onboarding screams at you that everything you do is used for training AI.

Maybe this changed since I set mine up, but I felt so damn informed I was getting tired of tapping I understand.

  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.”

https://www.theverge.com/tech/878725/meta-facial-recognition...

I never understand why a company would put something like this in writing.

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.

Surely though there is some type of survival instinct still awake and alive in the hearts and minds of men and women. We are a very aggressive species. Surely something would awaken and tell you "you should be quiet now" and "your next and only words should be lawyer". Surely...

This could very well still be the case with the people at Meta. It's just that the things that still trigger this instinct in them are far worse than what's being discussed here, so they've become desensitized, this is on the tamer end of the spectrum, and this falls below the threshold that would trigger those instincts.

Same reason project 2025 was put in writing. When you have large organizations you need to distribute communication. It's really just about cooperation and logistics

>We weren't doing anything nearly as nefarious

But still nefarious. Thats kinda messed up, to be honest.

They better invest in frame designs too cause as soon as they're recognizable they're gonna get slapped off faces real quick

But the hand is composed of digits. You could start by pointing at them and laughing, then flipping them off, then holding your hand up to their face so they can talk to it.

The long term goal might indeed be unrecognizable designs. Perhaps augmented reality contact lens. It will take a long time but people tend to slowly get used to giving more and more of their privacy away. Mojo Vision made a prototype of this. It's more the display but you can imagine the camera being somewhere else and streaming to the lens in an unobstructed way.

Are there any less obviously aggressive tactics we can use? Wear something that is blinding to the cameras, or something else to obfuscate?

Slapping a pair of glasses that are recording you, processing your face, sending biometrics and images back to one of the worst privacy offenders on the planet off of the face of someone who is willingly doing all that without asking your permission is a perfectly appropriate reaction. Put your shoulder into it.

I'd rather we normalize that than adversarial fashion.. but that's probably what you were looking for.

Yeah sure you are going to start slapping people on the street mr badass guy. That’s all cool and fun until someone pulls a knife on you.

Look, the previous commenter has legitimate question how can we do it for real. Not just speed run to the gates of afterlife after touching the wrong person.

First wearers are more likely to have a concealed carry. They have the money, and are from the right demographics.

Yeah in any case it will end badly for you if not the first time then eventually. Who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

It just takes one unlucky time where the other person doesn’t subscribe to the idea of proportional response or has military training with muscle memory that takes over.

It’s weird how y’all are so desperate to catastrophize responses, and then want to call other people “internet badasses”. Look in the mirror next time you tell someone they’re going to get shot, bud. You’re the problem.

When stranger assaults you, every person with some practical military training is going to want to neutralise target as fast as possible because this is the survival strategy that is hammered into your muscle memory.

There is no thinking or musing whether they just want to slap you or I don’t know what. You don’t know your attacker and their intentions.

This is the real world. I don’t know why you would think this is some kind of stupid game to go around and slap people. It will cause problems.

Shooting someone for breaking your glasses would be an act of murder. Even shooting someone for slapping you in the face would be an act of murder. Clearly you don't have experience with firearms or the legislation around them, or you would be aware of this.

> Look, the previous commenter has legitimate question how can we do it for real.

I gave parent the term "adversarial fashion" as an answer to their query, they should look that up.

While I'd like to agree with you, and do in some cases, there are many cases where this just isn't a feasible approach. For example, a peer coworker has a pair of these. I just don't interact with her while she is wearing them. If my boss were to get a pair there is no way I can justify slapping them off his face.

It’s also at least simple assault, and quite possibly aggravated assault on someone that has a sophisticated camera pointed at your face that’s sending biometrics, images, and probably video back to one of the worst privacy offenders on the planet.

Feels great to say it. Would feel great to do it. Morally defensible to anyone that knows anything about privacy if the person isn’t low-vision or something. In reality, a terrifically stupid idea.

Completely spineless beta stance. For every person with Meta glasses, there's 100s of people without, if we normalize bitch slapping these people, then what is the police gonna do, arrest >99% of the adult population? The point is to keep doing it until it instills fear in the mind of these people that they should not wear these in public spaces or there may be consequences.

This is trolling at best. If you touch a wrong person, you will not live to tell the tale. People aren’t some NPC in a video game my friend. This isn’t a movie.

Even I, average looking girl, walk with a knife everywhere and I am trained how to use it to kill, it’s muscle memory. In US, a lot of people stroll around with guns.

> Even I, average looking girl, walk with a knife everywhere and I am trained how to use it to kill

I can guarantee you that if you ever end up getting sucker punched by an adult male, you will at best get dazed and not know what's going on, and at worst knocked out cold. The knife is giving you a false illusion of safety. It would only ever be really effective if you were the attacker that pulled out the knife on a victim with the intention to inflict harm. The first to strike usually comes out on top.

I don't think you could justify slapping them off of anybody's face unless you really just like to assault people.

Streaming someone live to Meta, potentially the most evil company in the world (not "per employee" but by "damage done per day") without their permission, especially in a place where this is not at a expected - like an office rather than a football stadium - is great justification. It ticks all the boxes.

They're incredibly popular in the blind community, and for good reason.

I think even the political activists will be extremely divided on this one. You have privacy on one hand, accessibility and a genuinely life-changing technology on the other.

Do blind people not care about data privacy? Most likely they do and should ask for good TOS now while still possible.

Yeah, this could be the "lost dog" approach that Ring was trying. I feel for the blind. But in weighing their concern against everyone else's... they should get a different supplier.

They shouldn't be divided, they should (wo)man up and say the thing they well know out loud: the harms to society are not worth it, the societal consequences of Meta being in control of this are severe and will, as always, hurt the weak and poor the most. Unfortunately the blind community will have to wait a few more years to get a local version, which is guaranteed to appear with how things are going.

You could always say you're not comfortable being processed and uploaded to Meta. If they wear the glasses at their desks replacing their screen , that's fair game.

Exactly, not only you agree to any sort of harm (potentially fatal) in return by any sort of weapons that person has you can’t see, they can just do nothing and record you and you have problems with police and serve short sentence even.

This is all children talk here. Seriously people stop being so edgy on the internet and what you wouldn’t do. Use your god damn brain

Yes, cops will jump right on someone getting slapped. That definitely sounds like reality. Good call.

Do you guys ever like, go outside?

Plenty of places in the US are not large dense urban cities, and the cops will absolutely respond to a battery call. Like every time.

Plenty of places this would be the most interesting call of the day for a police force and you'd have 5 squad cars show up.

Other places won't even bother responding to the call. Your mileage will greatly vary.

while noble, basically any western system will punish such behaviour as assault ... perhaps this point could be expressed as a prefererence for the law to change such that deprivation of privacy becomes a valid self defense argument ... in the meantime there do exist passive defenses such as face masks designed to interfere with facial recognition

Take out your phone, hold it up, and record them back. Get others to do it too for extra comical effect.

Honestly I’d love to hear from someone who actually owns one of these things how doing this is any different than using the glasses.

This seems like the most obvious, legal, and direct way to stigmatize use of these glasses. Put a phone up to their face and say “I might be recording you.”

Exactly. If you do this and the wearer says something like “I’m not even recording bro” the perfect response is “I’m not either”

I've always wanted to sew very bright IR LEDs into a hat that would blind a camera. Your face would naturally be shadowed by the bill of the hat as that's its intended purpose. The IR would hopefully make the camera want to adjust shutter speed and gain/ISO while assuming a fixed aperture lens.

There was a fictional version of this in the Artemis Fowl books. My old camcorder picked up a lot of IR outside of visible range, but I think newer sensors are much less susceptible to this.

Wasn't there something about how the LIDAR in self-driving cars destroys camera sensors?

Depends what your threat model is, but this will literally turn you into a glowing signal that says "hey, look at me!" Your face might be protected but anyone manually reviewing security footage will be paying way more attention.

> Are there any less obviously aggressive tactics we can use?

If you are in the US, and hopefully in a state that is open to blocking this sort of thing, be very vocal and persistent with your state reps about the issue. Get others to join. I am curious if this will be legal within the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act or a couple other states with similar laws

water to the face ?

Would that work ?

Seems benign enough that its not going to earn you a visit to the judge, but should disable most electronics, no?

Email corporate security and the chief privacy officer with logs of who is wearing spy glasses. Remind them Facebook controls where that data is stored and who has access to it. Ask how to respond to auditors inquiring about it leave off, "in the future audits".

- Or -

Walk around with a vlogger camera that has a large microphone. If anyone takes issue, say "I'm the 5th person here walking around recording everyone today. The others are using a spy camera in their glasses."

- Or -

Borrow a pair of them when in public at a restaurant and loudly say, "Oh my god! These AI smart glasses really do remove everyone's clothing, even on the children!" be ready to run.

_________________

Only do these things if you typically rock the boat regardless. i.e. often try and fail to get fired or arrested.

I'm not the kind of person to wear those, but if I was and someone tried to slap them off me I might feel really threatened if you catch my drift. And since I won't be able to see too well, it will take some extra effort... Was that remaining movement the next punch, or death throes? Can't see too well, better safe than sorry!

I really cannot comprehend how someone can work for a company like that and maintain possession of a soul. I feel like the older I’m getting, the further away I am from understanding.

Gen Z doesn’t seem to carry the millennial “making the world a better place” sensibility. They are all hustle culture, all the time. While I appreciate a lot of their culture this is the aspect that makes me nervous about the future.

The person responsible for high level corporate strategy at Meta is surely not Gen Z but boomer or millennial.

The soulless kids who used to go into finance joined tech and are inspired by the current crop of tech billionaires in the way that their predecessors were inspired by Gordon Gecko.

> The soulless kids who used to go into finance joined tech and are inspired by the current crop of tech billionaires in the way that their predecessors were inspired by Gordon Gecko.

Yep. Once a couple of nerds got rich, it's what that segment pointed their money finders at. Advertising / marketing went with them.

It was a much nicer place for everyone when it was just the nerds who "had love for the game" :(

I'm 37, single, no family or extended family b/c of an...interesting...childhood.

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)

Of course they have a choice, just like you do. You're making excuses for them that they don't need. They're actively choosing the "work at Meta and maintain lifestyle" rather than "don't work at Meta and maybe slightly change lifestyle". Every day, they make that choice.

Take all the people who get and got laid off. Their life goes on.

> responsiblities that come with obvious, healthy, lifestyle choices (i.e. marriage and kids)

99.9999% of people in the world who are married with kids, don't work at Meta.

Unfortunately, because 99.999% of people in the world are “customers” of Meta, making profit for Meta, the 0.001% of people who do work at Meta are paid like relative kings.

I think you're arguing with a point I didn't make. I'm not excusing anyone. I'm describing a mechanism in response to "I cannot comprehend why." Here, why people stay in situations they might privately find distasteful. That's a different project than assigning moral grades.

"They have a choice" is of course literally true. It's also not very interesting? Everyone always has a choice in the tautological sense. The question the parent raised was how do people live with it, and the answer is: the same way people live with all kinds of things. Incrementally, surrounded by context that makes it feel normal, with stakes that feel high relative to their baseline, not yours.

Your 99.9999% stat kind of makes my point for me. Those people also didn't get a $400k offer from Meta. The trap isn't marriage+kids, it's young + don't know better + land there + marriage + kids+a lifestyle calibrated to a specific income, plus the identity that comes with it. The golden handcuffs thing is a cliché because it's real.

None of this is a defense of working on things you find unconscionable. It's just that "they could simply choose not to" has never once in history been a sufficient explanation of human behavior.

Your phrasing just didn't match your point.

> I have something really priceless and rare, complete luxury of choice, and 99% of people don't

People working at Meta are almost without exception, people who have more luxury of choice than nearly anyone on the planet. It's very important to keep repeating this, and not say the direct opposite as you did. You can make your point without doing so.

You keep restating that Meta employees are enormously privileged as though that contradicts me. It doesn't - it's the premise. The entire phenomenon I'm describing, in response to "I cannot comprehend why", is that privilege and felt optionality are different things, and the gap between them is where people get stuck.

So what you have over them isn't freedom of choice, it's knowledge of your freedom of choice. That's a very important difference.

> how someone can work for a company like that and maintain possession of a soul

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.

The individuals making these decisions are 100% aware of what they are doing. Driving for and implementing stuff like this is for profits, bonuses, and internal recognition.

Suck has made his mind up about which side he’s on with his money. I recall a time when people on the Forbes list were quietly political.

What do you mean? They're fully aware this would be received poorly by "certain groups" and are applying all that highly-praised brain power to getting around that undesirable issue to keep their RSUs growing.

I'm curious how the engineers justify this. I'm generally interested.

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.

Probably a mix of naivety, ignorance, and apathy.

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.

That shouldn't be too difficult with the current US administration. Maybe another reason Bezos and Trump get along so well

Why is it always this accusatory “while you were distracted”-style rhetoric?

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

This is Meta claiming in their internal communications that they plan on doing it while people are distracted with other concerns.

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.

> 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

It's painfully obvious to me society cannot do two things at once. You focus on one shared goal as a culture or everything falls apart very rapidly - as we are seeing today. It's why a common external "enemy" (e.g competitor, nation state, culture, whatever) has historically been so important.

The shared goal can be complex in nature, which requires many disciplines to come together to achieve it via a series of many parallel activities that might look like they are all doing something random, but it's all in the service of that singular shared goal.

This holds true from my experience at the national level all the way down to small organizations.

If I were Meta's lawyer I would advise them to definitely put into writing how they are fully conscious that this is wrong.

> 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.

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.

The facebook execs literally plotted to relaunch their unpopular product while people were distracted by other bad news.

> “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.

American society has a finite aggregate supply of attention. Politicians and megacorporations often exploit this fact. This Verge article is a leak that verifies that Meta is actively and brazenly continuing to exploit it.

Is that a good enough explanation to reduce your feelings of being personally targeted?

interesting (respectfully!) take that the "while you were distracted" rhetoric is coming from investigative journalists/commenters - i read this more as Meta's admission that they're betting on critics being distracted than an admonition by outside observers. it's probably easier to sneak up on a person to rob them when it's foggy; that's not victim blaming.

I usually hate this kind of click bait, but I think in this case it's warranted, since their explicit policy was to do this "while they are distracted". Verbatim.

I was in engineering school back in ~2012 when Google Glass came out. One of my classmates got hold of a pair when they were still quite uncommon and wore them to an extracurricular club meeting. Within minutes someone made a comment about him wearing the "creeper" glasses and asked if he was filming. He never wore them to the club again.

I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.

An entire new generation of people have been born and raised into a world that is more accepting of always recording and being recorded since 14 years ago.

Even in an environment where filming (with phones) is common and acceptable, smart glasses can still come off as rude because others find it hard tell if you are recording or not.

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.

A common fear for younger people has become being recorded and becoming famous in some embarrassing video. I don't see the problem as having gone away.

Yes, I had noticed that Nazis and racists feel more comfortable speaking up. On the contrary, voices for peace and acceptance are shouted down and frequently defunded. The Overton window isn't larger, it's just more right.

My hunch is you would call me a Nazi for saying very mainstream things, but out loud and public in my blue city, such as “checking ID to vote is a good thing”. Very popular opinions were made “Nazi”

>voices for peace and acceptance..

context matters. Without understanding context and considering it, this can be quite stupid.

> defunded

That is not so bad, right? It is not like they are wiped off the face of the earth. They just lose free $$$. Free $$$ means they are asking for free work from the rest of the society.

If a government feels that they don't contribute positively to the society, then it is quite within their right to prevent the work of society going to them. Particularly when the society have voted for the same.

>Nazis and racists

Oh come on, that is just lazy. Every swing of the pendulum causes the previously oppressed opinions to surface. This will always include malicious ones too that were rightfully suppressed before. That does not mean every voice that is enabled is a "Nazi". If you start saying that, then you becomes part of the problem.

> That is not so bad, right? It is not like they are wiped off the face of the earth. They just lose free $$$.

I have no idea where you get the idea of "free money." The government invests in science, business, and developments that help the country; and decisions involving that investment should not be colored by adherence to the current administration's political agenda. I'm not concerned about the careers of the affected individuals, as unjust as that is; I'm concerned about the damage to the country, to our relationship with our allies, and to our standing in the world. Instead we get this: Businesses that flatter Trump get to have acquisitions, and those that don't get their contracts cancelled. The new "political correctness" is towing the line for Trumpian misinformation.

I'm also not just talking about investments, but employment. Think about the jobs of federal employees for daring to have an opinion that contradicts Dear Leader.

> If a government feels that they don't contribute positively to the society,

That's a disingenuous argument. No one believes that the Trump administration is making decisions about who to support based on what is good for the country. Paramount's acquisition of WBD will be allowed for no other reason than because it helps Trump. Universities are targeted not because they are doing bad work but because they are seen as popular among the opposition. The government is defunding research not because it isn't contributing positively, but because it contradicts the government's a priori talking points. The damage done to society as a result of the defunding is, for them, just collateral damage.

> That does not mean every voice that is enabled is a "Nazi"

I never said that every voice on the right is a Nazi, just that Nazis are among those voices. And that's enough for me: if the government is supporting any Nazis and racists, as they evidently are, that's too many. And if your argument is "Hey, not all of us are literal Nazis", then you are not doing anything to advance your position.

> And that's enough for me

So you ll start rejecting any argument that you supported before, as soon as a "Nazi" agrees with it?

And they will soon find out that world's make believe. No one I know, and I know hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of people would allow themselves in a room to be recorded surreptitiously.

I'm not sure if you have experience with teenagers, but you’ll quickly realize they are even more resistant to this technology than we ever were. For the vast majority of kids today, this is their worst nightmare. They will reject it even more forcefully than we have.

The teenagers I know willing put geo-tracking software on their phones to see where their friends are at any time.

Yes here in Europe too. I really love this.

You can keep your phone here but the cameras are taped off. Of course that can easily be undone but it avoids the "oh sorry I forgot it wasn't allowed" excuse.

Unfortunately, the Meta glasses look much more normal, and a person who isn't actively looking for them (and especially one who is unaware of them) isn't likely to notice them.

they look like big bulky ray-bans that no one would wear unless they were starring in a 50s remake or something . easy to spot

The Wayfarer style was always bulky, they have been a fashion staple for decades at this point. The Meta gen2 ones aren't really that noticeably larger than "normal" Wayfarers - probably why they latched on this style as it gives the most room to stuff electronics while remaining similar sized to the original Wayfarer design.

I still see folks wearing Wayfarers almost every single day, and have owned various (non-Meta) pairs of them for most of my adult life. It's literally one of the most popular sunglasses designs of all time.

As an aside, it’s crazy that Ray Ban would hitch their most valuable brand cachet to such a controversial wagon

A family member has one and I didn't notice until they had to charge their pair. The little circles are subtle giveaways otherwise they look like regular pair of glasses. When everything is always on, I'd like to keep my house "off" and those things are a direct violation of that.

10 years have elapsed, peoples expectations have changed a lot. Back around the time of the first iPhone, it was pretty common to see signs in gym changing rooms akin to 'no cameras permitted'... Now you'd have to physically separate people from their phones before entering the locker room if you are going to enforce that.

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.

I have a strict policy of no Meta glasses for guests in my house. Socially, they're poison.

Is it that they're privacy obsessed, or rather that most people have a passion for self destruction and exhibition?

If you think about it, the "dork" position was the one that was most normal, it's the status-quo. The people wanting to record in lockerooms and what not is not the status-quo. They win because most people are short-sighted, or even secretly love hurting themselves.

I don't even care about the privacy aspect, the real problem is that VR glasses are for geeks. This is the kind of thing bullying was designed for.

People don't care about privacy as long as a faceless corporation is doing the spying. People very much care if it has a plausible path to embarrassing or creepy situations involving actual people in your life. The chilling effect of ubiquitous phone cameras is well documented now this would amp it up by a 100. Many cool clubs already put stickers on phone cameras.

> People don't care about privacy as long as a faceless corporation is doing the spying.

This isn't true. Most everyone hates the fact they are being surveilled, but it is pervasive and people only can deal with so many complications in life.

Avoiding surveillance is not a decision or action, it is 1000 decisions and actions. Endless decisions and actions.

In my experience most people don't care at all. Even if you tell them about these topics, they find it weird, and tinfoil-hat adjacent. "If you have nothing to hide..." and "why would anyone care about my data in particular?"

You're already in that world. Phones have ubiqitous cameras and they are normalized at this point. It's a common scene in a movie where instead of helping someone who was hurt, people just pull out their phones and film.

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 who get shamed with a comment like that are usually not the "creepers" in public. You don't need social pressure. You need actual safeguards.

Safeguard?

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.

Unfortunately, "The French-Italian eyewear brand [EssilorLuxottica] said it sold over 7 million AI glasses last year, up from the 2 million that the company sold in 2023 and 2024 combined." from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/11/ray-ban-maker-essilorluxotti... . That's at least 9 million units in the field, probably 1000x more than Google Glass ever sold, and more than 3x growth in sales in one year.

[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.

Judging from the examples reported on in the article, Meta's smart glasses are either very easy to accidentally trigger or quite popular with actual creeps

There is a world, because when the displays are high quality and they're thinner and lighter, they're going to replace phones, and almost everyone will be wearing them.

Nah, I don't see it. They've been trying to make smart glasses a thing for over a decade and it's not working. Nobody wants them. I don't think it's necessarily a privacy thing, it's just that smart glasses don't solve a real problem. Same with VR.

i actually agree with this take; i dont see the problem that smart glasses solve. what, my phone screen isnt literally in front of my eyeballs 24/7? i have a need to be absolutely plugged into scrolling social media and consuming content so much that i just have to have the screen in my glasses? this feels much more like what tech companies want people to want rather than what people want.

Not to mention the input methods just suck major ass. They're extremely slow, error prone, and annoying. Hands are better.

And that's why I don't talk to Siri to drive my car.

I wouldn't be surprised if secured smart glasses were a useful tool in a corporate environment. By secured I mean the software stack fully controlled by corporate IT and only for use on premise. Most places will already have pervasive surveillance cameras and in a work context they might actually prove useful if used in conjunction with other computing devices.

Or maybe not. Tablets are impressively portable and the screen is probably good enough.

first let me say i agree its a solution looking for a problem

you can still take the glasses off. i dont own glasses but do use vr and the shift between putting on/taking off a headset feels more intentional than the glance at a phone. feels less addictive to me. maybe lightweight glasses and dark patterns will "fix" that eventually

to do what? We've already had this experiment in the form of phone calling and texting. And that's not technological because both are mature. People vastly prefer the latter. It's discrete, faster and asynchronous. In the same vein, does anyone actually use their Alexa?

To do work with your hands.

I was just in a datacenter deploying a bunch of infrastructure while coordinating with remote network operations and sysadmin teams. It was damn annoying having to constantly check my phone for new slack messages, or deal with Siri reading back messages in it's incompetent manner. I missed quite a few time sensitive messages like "move that fiber from port A to port B" due to noise or getting busy with another task and kept folks waiting for longer than needed.

In limited circumstances having a wearable "HUD" interface would be quite nice. Especially if it had great screen quality and I could do things like see a port mapping/network diagram/blueprints/whatever while doing the actual work. Would save considerable time vs. having to look down at a laptop or phone screen and lose my place in the physical wire loom or whatnot. Having an integrated crash cart (e.g. via wireless dongles) would be even more exciting.

That's just one recent task that comes to mind.

There are plenty of real world hands-on jobs where this would be quite helpful. So long as it's not connected to meta or the cloud or anything other than a local device or work network.

For a more general use-case I have what amounts to minor facial blindness/forgetfulness of names. I need to study your face for a long time over many interactions to actually remember you. Something as simple as wearing glasses vs. not can mean I will not recognize someone I've spent months interacting with multiple times a week.

I've long wished I had some way to implant something in my brain that would give the equivalent of video game name avatars superimposed over someone's head. For totally non-nefarious reasons, just names of folks I previously have met pulled from my contacts list. Obviously this is unlikely to ever be a socially acceptable thing due to recording and other potential abuses - but I have thought this for at least 25 years now - before the privacy concerns became obvious. Wishful thinking, but I can imagine myriad of uses for such technology if it didn't enable such a wide-spread number of potential abuses.

Wasn't the point of smart watches to have something even more readily accessible than a phone? I'd never want one of those dorky things, but they sell

VR most definitely solves a real problem, but the issue with VR is the absolute setup complexity to get it performing 'correctly'. I spent 3 years tweaking mine and writing OpenXR layers to get it functioning how I wanted it to in iRacing. It's nearly a full-time job. VR right now is like if you went to buy eggs but instead of eggs they're grenades and opening the box pulled all the pins. Out of the box experience is beyond dog shit and impossible for casual users, leaving a very small avenue for VR enjoyment for regulars (PSVR and the like). I cannot think of a technology more diametric to 'plug n play' than VR, which is very unfortunate.

> I cannot think of a technology more diametric to 'plug n play' than VR, which is very unfortunate.

Ironically that's exactly what the Quest solved with SLAM, it really is plug and play, otherwise I would not have bought one... and it sucks that Meta now owns it, but it really is still the best "just works" VR.

I also don't think VR has much potential to solve real world problems for enough people, but it doesn't have to because it's pretty good entertainment as a gaming device (albeit still fairly niche).

Come on, it's obviously a hardware problem. If phones weighed ten pounds I wouldn't carry that around either.

Great glasses would solve a problem, I could take my stupid phone out of my hand.

And glasses will get replaced by contacts, which get replaced with brainwave tech.

> Great glasses would solve a problem, I could take my stupid phone out of my hand.

And do what? For calls you've long been able to use a wireless headset. Otherwise most tasks involve frequent user input. Do you really want to be constantly waving your hands around in the air in front of your face? That sounds tiring at best.

I think that since the input modalities are (seemingly) restricted to eye movement and sound, that it is impractical to replace a phone, where someone can engage privately.

I think you have missed the wristband input device then. It gives the user fairly subtle finger gestures to interact with the device. I wonder how far that input tech can be pushed, not necessarily (only) in comination with glasses.

The point isn't to allow people to do more with the glasses, the point is to interpose between the user and the physical world so you can control what they see and hear and so you can see what they see. You could see the same thing with Apple's VR headset -- if you can hide certain things from your own view in the headset, then Apple can hide things they don't want you to see too.

There isn't really a counter to that because most people will buy these things to watch movies on the airplane or the train, and they won't see the yoke until it's too late.

It doesn't matter how high quality, convenient, or light they are, as long as wearing glasses isn't inherently cool, normal people aren't going to choose to wear them.

Remember those dorky Bluetooth earpieces? The ones only MBA nerds wore? They were uncool until the AirPods came along.

The tail wags the dog. Wearing glasses may become inherently cool if all the cool people in your insta feeds are wearing them.

The parent was talking about people choosing to wear these. Today there might be reluctance to wear them because they're creepy or uncool. But that mirrors the reluctance for cool kids to wear bluetooth earpieces back when they were those chunky Borg-looking things. Then they got shrunk down. They got "high quality, convenient, [and] light".

When these types of glasses are virtually indistinguishable from regular sunglasses, and a critical mass of cool people wear them all the time, the reluctance from the rest of us will melt away.

I hope I'm wrong. Really.

I don't know. I clearly remember a time when phones first got cameras and there were debates on whether or not we should prohibit phones in public bathrooms. Perceptions changed. Fast.

I think the social contract is still such that your phone’s camera should not be used in the bathroom.

I’ve seen stories of people banned from gyms for taking selfies in the locker room as people were walking by.

Yeah sometimes the younger gym bros are in the dressing room at my gym taking pictures of themselves in the mirror. If they accidentally include my ~60 year old ass cheeks in the background, IDGAF. Probably ruins the photo for them.

I’ve had meta ray bans since the week they came out

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

As much as I disagree with the cameras, you should not have been downvoted. If anything, people who are against the cameras need to see your anecdotal experience so that they can see how easy it will be for these cameras to proliferate.

These glasses are doing incredibly well from a sales perspective. Social norms have shifted, user generated content is huge, being a video influencer is a real job - so seeing people filming is more accepted than 12 yea ago. It doesn’t mean I like it but these are not going away. I do think they lack a killer app, but there’s a part there with conversational AI that can act on your behalf

> I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.

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.

Unfortunately the frog is boiling and some people already think that "in public" means "it's okay to record people and post it on the Internet."

In the US, at least, it's pretty much legal to record the public as long as people have no expectation of privacy (IANAL, exclusions apply, non-commercial use, etc)

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

Legal doesn't mean socially acceptable. Neither does it mean good.

The last two items on your list (person, drone) likely constitute stalking outside of specific limited situations.

> Implement some form of right to forget

The passive voice here is deceptive. When rephrased as the right to make others forget it suddenly seems quite nefarious (at least to me).

The google glasses deliberately looked distinct from normal glasses. The facebook glasses don't. That has a massive impact.

>>I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.

Apparently they sold 7 million of these. So I think a whole lot of people don't care about this aspect.

It seems like a more polite way of handling this in private spaces is just to ask that people take them off - just like we do when a pig farmer walks into our house with their boots on.

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.

"It seems like a more polite way of handling this in private spaces is just to ask that people take them off - just like we do when a pig farmer walks into our house with their boots on."

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.

I'm going to guess that someone who can afford smart glasses can afford to have another pair of unsmart glasses. What is it about the _glasses_ that people find creepier than a smartphone that can literally do even more invasive things than the current glasses technology?

> well, everyone is _already_ filmed in public. ATM cameras, stoplight cameras, drone cameras, smartphone cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras.

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.

Great, let's regulate it! And why are glasses more offensive than cell phone cameras, or go pros, or drones? I genuinely do not understand why people don't worry about the other form factors, but draw the line at the glasses, so help me here. To be clear - I understand why people find being recorded creepy. I don't understand why the glasses form factor is creepy but random cell phone recordings that are shared on the internet all the time without the consent of the recorded people aren't.

It’s just going to be accepted. Or there is going to be some sort of Japanesque requirement that there be some light on when the camera is filming.

You're right, it's much worse and we should be doing everything we can to turn it around.

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.

Anecdotal screeching aside, they’re objectively selling far better than any headgear ever made. The sales figures show they’re pretty popular as far as wearables go. That leads me to believe we’re not in the same world as Google glass especially when back then folks were far more trusting of tech (let alone the fact that it’s meta).

The times I do I see folks wearing them the normie reaction is typically “oh cool” and not some libertarian allergic reaction to technology.

I don’t know what the downvote is about. I’ve not said anything for or against this tech or the company that makes it. I just don’t think it’s valuable to inform your world view on tech takes that are old enough to be taking the practice SAT.

It's strange to me that that's the line society seems to have drawn in the sand. Body cam, no problem. Doorbell cam, practically universal. Body cam worn on the face? No way. I wonder why.

Police body cams are typically only used while on-duty and in public, where there is no expectation of privacy. They also don't automatically send video into the cloud to be analyzed by a human for AI training, as mentioned in this article. Video is usually only retrieved if needed on a case-by-case basis.

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.

> They also don't automatically send video into the cloud to be analyzed by a human for AI training,

Yet.

They almost certainly already do. If you just look into Axon you'll see they have tons of cloud-based and AI products. Axon is the major player in police body cameras in the US.

No experience w/ Axon, but I work adjacent their major competitor. I don't know about the whole "training AI" angle, but Motorola Watchguard body and in-car cameras absolutely upload to a hosted service.

Uploading to a hosted service is not even remotely the same thing. In one of the jurisdictions I'm familiar with the Axon cams don't record until manually activated and the footage is treated as secured evidence. Other than being subject to FOIA or analyzed for a case it isn't generally accessible.

That said I'm not sure how much of that is merely department policy versus local law.

I'm amazed you can't see the difference.

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.

Door bells also had a popular movie made that revolved around their use: Weapons.

And that didn’t raise an uproar of suspicion even as one character went door to door asking if he could look at his neighbors recordings.

People are comfortable with the idea of being recorded, so long as accessing many recordings is a drawn out and manual process.

Eh, doorbell cams aren’t that controversial (ad aside). A lot of people have them already, both from ring (with the concomitant privacy issues) or from other providers (with different but similar issues).

They’re controversial on hacker news but I don’t think people in the “real world” care all that much.

How that connects to the meta glasses is certainly up for debate —- the doorbells provide a lot of value to the user (know who is at the door remotely!), the glasses are more of a mixed bag.

I would say that people outside of tech aren't aware of the implications and potential use of the data.

Once people realize, they begin to reject. This is why I mentioned the superbowl ad and it shouldn't be waved away as an outlier.

Body cameras aren't hidden and are worn by public officials while on duty, doorbell cameras are no more invasive than an CCTV camera a home owner might have installed on their premise.

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.

Body cams are directly visible, and are there to add accountability to the actions of law enforcement. These glasses are covert cameras. Someone that doesn't know what they look like isn't going to know someone might be filming. That's a big difference.

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.

Cop body cam footage is more likely to help you vs a cop than get you into trouble because a cop is already there watching what you’re doing. IE: Thank god the cop’s camera was off when I was buying crack, I might have gotten in trouble otherwise… fails because a cop was already watching you.

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.

> body cameras had no statistically significant impact on officer use of force, civilian complaints, or arrests for disorderly conduct by officers. In other words, body cameras did not reduce police misconduct . . . 92.6 percent of prosecutors’ offices in jurisdictions with body cameras have used that footage as evidence to prosecute civilians, while just 8.3 percent have used it to prosecute police officers[1]

Cops control when the cameras are filming, if footage is retained and what/when/if footage is released. Body cams are just yet another surveillance tool against the population.

[1]https://www.aclu-wa.org/news/will-body-cameras-help-end-poli...

That means far less than you might think.

100% percent of prosecutors’ offices in jurisdictions with body cameras have used officer testimony as evidence to prosecute civilians. Meanwhile I suspect the use of officer testimony is even more lopsided in favor of cops.

Cops forget the cameras are on etc which is why that 8% isn’t even lower.

> 92.6 percent of prosecutors’ offices in jurisdictions with body cameras have used that footage as evidence to prosecute civilians

I'd suggest browsing body cam footage on youtube for a bit. If you see the sort of stuff being prosecuted it might not bother you.

If it hasn't reduced police use of force or misconduct (I find this claim questionable) I think that's unfortunate but regardless it's important to implement systems that document that to the greatest extent possible. If we do that today then maybe it can be reduced tomorrow.

Evidence against them improving behavior isn't evidence they're a significant surveillance tool.

And the biggest fix there is you need to not let them control it.

What do you mean bodycam isn't a problem? Do people wear body cams to normal social occasions?

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.

I also don't like having doorbell cams everywhere, at least not the ones that upload all their footage to the ~great mass surveillance network in the sky~ Cloud(TM). I don't think that's an uncommon point of view. And body cams are only worn by cops and at least provide some concrete benefits in terms of increasing police accountability.

A body cam is worn by a trained police officer and lights up with a big red flashing light and audible warnings. It is used to record serious crimes.

A face camera has no light or warnings (you just put tape over the small light), and is operated by a pervert.

Lines were and are always weird, all the time. Americans killing 150 girls yesterday in a school, just a footnote in the news, already gone today. Some rando killing 10 people in a university in my country, endless discussion, politicians, punduits all up in arms spewing their opinions for months, discussing it to no end. Only difference? I don't know. I don't know almost anyone in my country, they're all as foreign to me as some girls in Iran. There's no difference to me.

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.

My concern was whether the glasses might record or transmit data while switched off or in standby mode. From what I can tell, they don’t do this intentionally. So the risk is broadly similar to other modern electronic devices.

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.

> Realistically, there’s very little an individual can do to completely opt out.

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.

> it is difficult to prevent others to intentionally or unintentionally provide data to surveillance companies

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.

I am so far removed from the type of person who might consider buying something like that. You'd have to be exceptionally impervious to social cues to even think of wearing that in public.

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.

I hired some people to come do some work at my house. One of them was wearing Meta glasses. He said he got them so he could keep both his hands free while crawling around in an attic or wherever, and getting video of what they were inspecting to document the work to be done.

It’s possible that even if all your friends/family would stay far away, they could still end up in your proximity.

How so? I'd expect the opposite

> 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)

There is an app called Be My Eyes where blind people can use the app to be connected to someone who can see and ask questions. An example might be, “is this a red or brown sweater.”

It actually looks like it added AI functionality, so not every question goes out to a live helper, but they still do have that option.

Something like the Meta glasses could mean a lot less reliance on app that reach out to actual people, or looking for the phone all the time, for day-to-day help with things like this.

This kind of tech could be used for a lot of really good and useful things, but it's facebook so it will mainly be used to screw over blind people and anyone else who uses them by violating their privacy, the privacy of everyone in view of them, and all while shoving ads at the users. Facebook is toxic.

I do not care about the privacy of people who buy these glasses nor their families.

I care about the innocent people whose privacy is invaded by people who buy these glasses.

I’ve always been curious if they violate GDPR, HIPPA or similar, given they actively record everything you see, including European nationals and health records.

At a friend's party recently, I met someone who told me that they had worked in data for Meta's glasses division and warned me never to get Meta glasses for this very reason—that the workers can see everything. They told me of a comical case where a guy pulled down his pants to look at his penis, asked "Meta, what is this?", and the AI responded that it was a thumb. XD

This means actual Meta/Facebook employees are seeing or at least hearing about actual footage. Not just third-world contractor employees.

Absolutely crazy that a Meta employee saying not to buy them. Everyone should know this right now.

Privacy policies and usage terms are like the magic wand of the industry. Whatever totally bad they want to do and however they want to abuse of you and of your data, they just have to add a few unreadable lines in a 40 pages document and that's it.

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.

I got a pair as a gift and didn't look much into them but I have to be honest, I assumed any data I captured - voice, video, etc. - would be sent to their servers (to use their models) and they'd be using it for training with humans in the loop.

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.

I won't even walk into a house with Alexa devices around, there is no way I'm going to let Meta glasses be in the same room as me.

Don you carry a cell phone? Do you walk into rooms where other people have smartphones with Siri or Google Assistant? Those are literally no different from Alexa.

My dad has an Alexa and told me about a couple situations that were very creepy. He somehow laughed it off instead of throwing it in the trash. I will never understand that.

Despite the historical misadventures of Meta, if people still use their products with an expectation of privacy, it's on the people.

I sincerely hope someone in Japan or Korea get caught using those to peek under trousers on the train so it get the forced camera sound treatment of smartphones over there.

So the world can label them as Hentai glasses and move on

Workers can see everything" means this isn't an AI privacy problem. It's a surveillance-as-a-service problem with extra steps.

Ah yes, while everyone was focused on Flock cameras...

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.

How does this not fall afoul of states with two party consent laws around recording conversations? Particularly since California is one of the strictest states.

How does your phone's camera? Ultimately, it's up to users to obey laws with their recording devices.

While it may be legal for an individual to film something, it is certainly not permissible to process video data of this sort at scale.

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.

All sorts of industries are capital intensive where labor is relatively cheap. A fancy roller coaster costs $50M, but you pay college students $15 per hour to run it. Airlines spend a few thousand per day on pilots for a $300M plane.

Fun fact: all advertiser chat support agents at Meta used to (still might) have full super-read on FB. When you read "workers" in this headline, don't think "devs", think "legions of contracted-out T1 support staff"

It is worse:

> 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.

Everything else in this article is horrific, but this stuck out to me:

> “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.

I'm not sure if there is any use case that could convince me to mount an internet connected device to my head at all times.

Is it paranoid to assume every device with a camera/mic can see/hear everything?

That's my default assumption.

Of course they can, why would one expect anything else? However if you look through their processes I am sure they are covered by some legal jargon to do the bare minimum in terms of security. They will have every knob available to debug to the lowest level possible and view everything

Surely this is already happening with our other devices? Not that it isn't a problem but that the game is already lost...?

Hopefully this causes Meta to be more transparent about what data is sent to their annotators. It seems like even the annotators didn't know whether the person explicitly hit recorded (whether accidentally or not) or if it's samples from a constant stream. This kind of makes it impossible for anyone to consent to the purchase agreements.

Beside the privacy part, I fail to see what value these glasses bring that a smartphone with a camera can't do already ?

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.

POV camera footage without holding your phone out in front of you distracting you from having to look down at your phone instead of up at the thing you're filming? Imagine you want to capture your POV but also want to be present and in the moment, not looking at a 6 inch rectangle screen to check your framing of what you're capturing.

Go-Pro on forehead? Thats what outdoor enthusiasts do. If you need to make room for a headlamp then pin it to your jacket maybe.

You can seamlessly take a photos without having to pull your phone out of your pockets and dedicate and arm to filming and you can listen to music without having to touch your phone. The audio recording of videos is 3D and when you play them back it's realistic where the audio is coming from.

>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.

> I fail to see what value these glasses bring that a smartphone with a camera can't do already ?

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!

What the hell? I thought the videos went to the phone directly, they're all getting uploaded to Meta? I don't know why I let my guard down against that company for one second.

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.

I'm against surveillance in general and I see many people being against these glasses, yet not caring at all about surveillance cameras. Flock in the USA is a bit of an outlier in that it got some people riled up, but where I live in Europe there are private cameras looking out of at least half of the buildings, maybe more. So if you're walking down the street for 15 minutes, you'd be caught by tens or hundreds of cameras from various manufacturers, installed by various business and homes. Who knows how many have microphones, which server they store their feed in, what security each cam has and so on.

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?

I think there is a wide gap between public surveillance and private surveillance.

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.

You would have to have been hiding under an extremely large rock not to assume this given the technology involved and Meta's overtly and consistently anti-privacy stances and history.

While true, that doesn't make it acceptable. In a functioning society, companies would be punished harshly for this behaviour.

It's because they never have been meaningfully punished and won't be that this happens and will continue to happen. Act accordingly.

[inserts image of a smiling Mark Zuckerberg walking in the middle of unsuspecting attendees wearing VR headsets]

That image always felt dystopian to me

I really hope these flop and don’t become mainstream.

It would be a surveillance and privacy dystopian nightmare.

I already personally refuse to be around anyone who wears them. And I think establishments should just outright ban them.

Good reporting, but this has always been Meta's M.O. so I'm really not surprised.

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.

FTA > "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." "The workers describe videos where people’s bank cards are visible by mistake."

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?

The annoying thing is that even if you yourself don't use these glasses, as long as people around you do, you are still affected by it. We really need laws to limit always-on recording devices in places where we have an expectation of privacy.

Actually useful AR needs cameras, of course, so the technology has legitimate use cases, but you'd have to be a real asshole to wear them to a bar, or a restaurant, etc. Maybe we mandate that the glasses have to have a base station dongle, and if they're more than 10 feet from the dongle, recording doesn't work without incredibly obvious annoying lights indicating that recording is on?

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.

We need laws and social norms where filming a stranger and uploading it online is considered a serious unacceptable offense regardless of the device. I find it absurd that today is completely acceptable to just film an unaware stranger and put the video online, especially since that the majority of the videos are about making fun of them or humiliate them.

You shouldn't expect privacy in public spaces. That's the nature of public spaces. In the US, freedom of press means anywhere public means you have no expectation of privacy, and should comport yourself as such; don't do anything or wear anything in public you wouldn't want to be recorded.

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.

The difference is public vs. private spaces. The supreme court in the US has defended the right to record videos in public. But if someone walks into my home, or my 3rd space, etc. with one of these on actively recording that should absolutely be criminalized and enforced.

>the majority of the videos are about making fun of them or humiliate them

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.

I heard that in Japan phones have an audible shutter sound. Not mandated by law. Though I think that having this in the law is very reasonable. Maybe EU can step up. Taking photos is more fun with the sound too.

There are very few places you can expect privacy in public. Restrooms, changing rooms, etc. But in most places in public you should have zero expectation of privacy (in the US).

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.

"But it's the public space you can't expect any kind of privacy there, if you don't want private companies to do biometrics on your face from a rando glasses just don't go out :)" The open air panopticon, where every inmate is also the warden, gov salivates at the idea. (yes, yes, you're very smart, you, the reader: smartphones are already tracking and recording us everywhere. One more device, one more case isn't an issue anymore. So let's just keep adding them instead of trying to address them.)

Those glasses have a tiny white led when the camera is on. It really needs to be more obvious. This might be something we'll need legislation for since Meta is an evil-ish immoral company.

    “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.

based on this and other context in the article, it seems like there's a very realistic chance that Meta is in possession of and actively distributing (internally and to contractors) video content of minors. i wonder if any contractors have confirmed this or have been unwillingly (or worse) exposed to this.

Just think of the children. Changing a soiled garment, transmitting video of the whole ordeal, isn't that super illegal?

Not in the U.S.

To be illegal, it would either have to be focused on the genitals or of sexual content. Nudity is not automatically sexual.

oh come on, who of us didn't go through a power-tripping edge lord phase? i too had a community game server once...

Remember when facebook was busted playing silent audio so the app could stay active in the background? I honestly don't think there's a company I trust less than facebook/meta. And it's because the rot is at the top, and has always been there.

Holy shit! This is absolutely despicable and probably the worst tech news I've read all year. Why do people still support Meta/Facebook?!?!

I love the Facebook glasses, they seem to be the swan song of a shitty company. Young people have abandoned Facebook when their parents started hanging out, now it's all boomers and bots posting conspiracy theories.

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!

On an unrelated note, the FT reported today [1] that Israel was able to track Iranian leadership by hacking "nearly all" of the traffic cameras in Tehran. Anyways, I think we should continue to put as many networked cameras, microphones, and other sensors in as many products as possible. There are no downsides!

[1] https://archive.is/QSCjf

This is a little like how congress feels differently about things like email privacy when they're the ones under the microscope. These ideas seem fine in a world of honest actors, but when there's an adversarial element in the mix, what you thought brought security can be used against you.

I overall agree with your point, but I don’t think “tracking leadership of a country that murders tens of thousands of its own citizens” is a strong supporting argument…

Because you think that "being able to track leadership of a country that knows that other countries may want to target them" does not mean "being able to track pretty much anyone"?

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.

I thought I stated my position pretty clearly. This is like saying, “We should ban guns!” And then use a successful self-defense case as a supporting argument. Whether you agree or disagree with the thesis, I think we can all agree that’s a stupid way to make the point. But perhaps you just aren’t willing to have a genuine discussion.

Anyone who has a mobile phone has been tracked by their phone provider forever, with the accuracy of a couple blocks. Smartphones only bring more trackers to the equation in the form of apps.

What's the material concern to tracking that glasses add?

Surely the difference between location tracking (that still requires a warrant for the government to get access to, thus Stingrays) and the intimate visual processing and tagging that is derived from the likes of smart glasses is self explanatory, right?

To that point, the difference between geolocation and video tracking and analysis (like Flock) seems pretty obvious to me.

It's invasively panopticon.

You can recognize a threat to national security without supporting the ideology behind it. It sounds like you are trying to to spread FUD around stronger privacy regulations. It would be a lot less funny when the shoe is on the other foot and it's not Iranian networks that's being compromised. Are you perhaps a vendor of mass surveillance systems like your username's namesake?

Well, I personally don’t think the answer to, “Our enemies might use the same tactics,” is to avoid entering into what I believe is a justified conflict. Besides, if you think China could push over the US without lighting the entire world on fire then I don’t know what to tell you. Nobody wants that, and they’re not stupid or religiously radical enough to pull something like that. Obviously Iran is, since they woke up yesterday at war with 2 counties and ended up at war with 7 by the end of the day. Imagine if they had nukes.

Anyway, I can be against domestic surveillance while also being willing to take advantage of my enemies’ surveillance of their own citizens.

Being "against" domestic surveillance doesn't mean shit. It's a done deal, America is surveilled by it's own government and China is actively exploiting it as an attack vector.

Get it out of your system now, these double-standards won't be funny when Taiwan is blockaded.

I’m not sure what your point is, but this doesn’t seem like a genuine attempt to engage anymore, so I guess we’re done talking.

I overall agree with your point, but I don’t think defending a country engaged in a genocide is a strong supporting argument…

Where did I defend anyone in my comment?

Edit: no, seriously, you having some personal axe to grind is no excuse for directing it at me or my comments. This is a sign of a person having a skewed perspective.

i mean theres kind of no way around it. how else are you gonna get the training data you need? the only way to bootstrap ai is to tag the data with bio-ai first (humans).

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.

There are lots of ways around it, like adding a transparent “training mode” that a user can enable with consent, legitimately purchasing training data, etc.

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.

That would be good. A YC company is paying people to do just this. You know the data is being uploaded, so you can avoid e.g. your kids coming into frame.

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.

To be clear, he /puts tape over/ his webcam, that's very different from /taping/ (recording) the output of his webcam.

Cameras in phones are pretty much locked up today, assuming you have an updated version of the OS from a respectable manufacturer. Apps will not be able to access the camera feed (or the microphone) without explicit consent and a visual warning.

The manufacturer might access it, Apple states they don't, Google and Samsung I'm not sure. A bad actor with 0days might too.

Funny enough it's the OS and manufacturer I don't trust with my phone, with my PC I trust them a lot more as they're much more open and I can choose the OS.

For reference, Samsung screenshots everything shown on their televisions at regular intervals and sends these to their South Korean data centres for advertisers to use. It's called Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which any sane country should be outright banning under international espionage laws.

I give no screen a network connection.

Screens are for playing what I send to them. Not for running their own apps or network traffic.

I would pay more for dumb screen TVs.

It is funny since I wonder when you're looking through say the Google Feed (swipe left on Android devices on home screen) does the camera track your eyes, what you're looking at

It does seem harder to tape the phone camera since the in/out motion into your pocket I imagine would remove the tape.

For the main camera there are cases with sliding covers for many phone models. Marketed for protecting the lens from scratches, but quite effective for privacy as well

For the front camera that's a lot more difficult. You could probably modify one of those flexible screen protectors to black out the camera, but it'd be very inconvenient to take off.

Maybe there is some niche android phone that offers physical shutters, similar to the ones on Lenovo laptop webcams

Can I get a pair of camera glasses that uses AI to identify other camera glasses, and controls a moveable laser to blast the cameras on the other glasses?

I really want to make a fake PSA that suggests anyone wearing the Meta glasses is probably a pervert and should be proactively avoided/shunned.

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.

At this point Meta has probably the largest collection of illegal videos of underage kids in private situations on the planet. Maybe followed closely by Google with their cams that record everything even if you think they're not. If there was any concern for kids, the FBI should be stopping them right now and taking the executives to jail.

Will we be in the same up in arms once Apple releases their AI Glasses?

How about if their glasses either...

1. Can not take pics or videos but its camera is just for AI vision?

or

2. All pics and videos taken through Apple's smart glasses the pics/vids of anyone not in your network (Apple already automatically list faces & sometimes names in your network under "People & Pets," and has done so for years & they are the privacy company) show as anonymous/randomized faces.

I own two pairs of Meta Glasses since 10/2023 and find them very useful to capture or record my own life experiences only. Tho I share hate for them because Meta makes trashy non-durable smart glasses that quickly become dumb glasses. A software update killed my 1st pair in March 2025 and then my next pair couldn't handle water splashes in June 2025.

Look, they’re only keeping those videos to train their model to identify CSAM and definitely not accidentally generate it.

That seems a bit like accusing the post office of letting you send and receive banned books?

I remember people with the Google glasses being called glassholes. The fact that companies are trying again and apparently succeeding tells you just how much

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.

It's sad that the gap between a "glasshole" and meta glasses is just a branded frame. If anything Meta has significantly worse public reputation now than Google during Google Glass time.

> It's sad that the gap between a "glasshole" and meta glasses is just a branded frame.

You might say they reframed the issue.

> B) how much money there is to be made having people wear them.

Meta have been desperately searching for “the next big walled garden” for like a decade.

The prize is clear: whatever the next big mass-consumer hardware device is with an app store attached will leech hundreds of billions in fees and enjoy absolute control over everyone building on it.

Your reaction appears to be ignorant of the real use cases for these. A friend of mine is totally blind, and uses meta glasses. He finds them incredibly useful, as do others.

That's the only way this can be fixed. Socially shaming everyone isn't going to beat facebook. Laws banning them from doing evil things with the data will.

The use case for these glasses are to record everything, everywhere. That it's also helpful for people with vision impairment is a, positive, coincidence.

4chan once tricked a number of people into microwaving their iPhones by claiming it was a new feature for fast charging. This probably isn't too hard if you've got enough friends or fans in on the joke.

If this really bugs you, get involved in your local politics and get a city ordinance passed banning the use of surreptitious video recording devices including smart glasses. No reason we can’t keep these off the streets.

As a regular glasses wearer, I really do dread the years ahead when I get mistaken for a glasshole. I suspect it won't be pretty.

These are amazing for vacations and recording any event where you want to be truly present without looking at the event through a phone screen.

Where is Robert Scoble, the King of the Glassholes, the AR PR Torpedo, the Patron Taint of Making Everyone Disgusted to Use Google Glass, the Sexually Harassing Victim Blaming Shameless New Venture Plugging Non Apology Apologist, posting nude photos of himself in the shower, when we need him?

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.

Of course, why wouldn't they? They do not work without a meta account. /s

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.

I suspect what'll kill these is the same thing that kill google glass - social ostracisation. It's so, so wildly adversarial to effectively shove a recording device in the face of everyone you're interacting with you might as well wear a emergency orange t-shirt with 'verified asshole' written on it.

They look like any other pair of sunglasses. No piece of glass over one eye reminding everyone you meet that you’re wearing a camera. They’re incredibly stealthy

Have you seen them in the wild? They're notably chunky and have an obvious hole where the lens is. You might not notice it in passing but if someone's talking to you it's hard not to notice. I wonder how many of their owners realise how much they're affecting every interaction they have with another human.

Unlike google glass they don't look weird. Unless you know what to look for you will probably just think they are ray bans.

If they are held accountable they'll get a slap on the wrist and pay a fine to the government or maybe throw a few more pennies at a class action, but none of it will come close to the amount they made in profit and it won't prevent meta or Kenyan contractors from having gotten off on your nudes.

> An absolute privacy nightmare especially in places like Switzerland or Germany where recording people (subject focus) even in public is not permitted

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.

It can and is enforced. Again it's if the person is the focus of your video.

If you post a video online of someone's worst day which you decided to film for entertainment, they can legally go after you.

TLDR the recorded media isn’t end-to-end encrypted and they aren’t selling it but instead using it to train their own systems. What is new here?

Mark Zuckerberg is a Jewish supremacist and will share everything with Israel and other Israeli agencies. Tell me what would stop him.