I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.
To record a video on your phone you need to hold your phone up pointed at the other person, usually not in the same way you would normally use a phone. If you see someone holding his phone steady at face level and pointing at something without making finger movements, you know he is filming. If someone is pointing his phone down towards the ground and scrolling around with his thumb, you know he is probably not.
To record from a pair of smart glasses you just need to look at someone, as you would normally look at any other thing. Yes there will be an LED on, but the person being recorded probably couldn't see it if it is in a bright, busy environment and you are more than a few steps away, plus there will be aftermarket modifications to disable the LED. In short, there is no way you can reliably tell if someone's smart glasses are filming you. You have to assume that worst.
Then again, there may be some selection bias at play…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/nyregion/nyc-nightlife-no...
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.
The world is not deterministic, and we can shape norms of how we interact with each other. We don't have to accept being constantly recorded just because the technology makes it possible.
Not perfect, but better than nothing I guess. I don't think I've noticed the glasses IRL anywhere, but if I start seeing them, I'm definitely installing the app and avoiding any interactions with those people.
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.
> https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/meta-takes-around-3-sta...
And all of that is to ignore that neither gen1 or 2 of Google Glass attempted to look like regular glasses. The Meta frames are largely indistinguishable from regular glasses unless you are very up close.
[EDIT] I really shouldn't need to say this on Hacker News but don't shoot the messenger for messages you don't want to hear. Reporting a fact does not imply approval or disapproval of it.
No, we need to make this as socially radioactive as possible. We don't need to establish a permission structure to allow Facebook to continue doing this without repercussion.
Cameras on glasses will be normalized too. A few HNer types will scream. The rest of the "nothing to hide so nothing to fear" group will just wear them. (not saying I agree with "nothing to hide so nothing to fear". Rather, I'm saying that's common way of thinking. Common enough that it's likely people will wear these eventually.
How about this marketing approach: "College woman, tired of creepers trying to hit on you. Worried about getting roofied. Wear these glasses and turn the creeps in".
People widely accept mass surveilance and facial recognition, including by doorbells, phones, cameras on the street, etc. They post images and videos online to corporations that perform facial recognition. They accept government collecting data broadly by facial recognition.
People accept all sorts of horrors and nonsense, unrelated to and many times much worse than privacy violations, because (I think) they are normalized on social media, which is controlled editorially by Zuckerberg, Musk, Ellison, etc.
I'm not saying we're doomed. I'm saying nobody else will save us. We have to make it happen.
I’ve seen stories of people banned from gyms for taking selfies in the locker room as people were walking by.
It's difficult to draw a bright line between these activities:
- I told someone else something I saw the other day
- I painted a picture of the public square or wrote a book about specific activities that I witnessed
- I specifically remembered an individual based on their face, visible tattoos, location, license plate, or some other unique factor and voluntarily testified to that fact in a court of law
- I spent every day at the same corner making note of the various people/vehicles that I saw
- I stuck a camera at that same point (perhaps on my private properly directly abutting a public space) and recorded everything, posted it publicly on the internet, and used automated technology to identify people, text, vehicles, etc
- I paid a different person every day to follow someone around and record what they did
- I developed a drone system that could follow specific individuals/vehicles from airspace I'm allowed to occupy
Pretty much everything I described above is legal in most of the United States. Obviously it gets creepier and more uncomfortable going down the list (I don't really like it when I'm the subject of any of these activities) but how do you stop this?
I'll at least throw out some options
- Implement some form of right to forget
- Forbid individuals or organizations from doing any of these
- Enact actual "civil rights" level privacy protections (extend HIPAA? automatic copyright for human faces? new amendment?) that include protection of individual's DNA, unique facial features, and other "uniquely human" attributes
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).
My last two bullets intentionally walked the line on stalking and spoke to some of the arguments law enforcement have attempted to use to nefariously surveil the public without a warrant [0].
I also have a difficult time jamming 'right to forget' through the first amendment protections in the United States but it does provide some protection/agency to individuals to protect their identity.
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/warrantless-pol...
Smartphones and social media apps made it frictionless to post public videos on the Internet. The only legislation that could be effective would be to forbid social media from hosting videos of public places somehow, and I'm not sure how effective or practical would that even be.
We live in a world where people have a literal phone in their hands and they would rather make a video call than a simple phone call. Something needs to happen to fundamentally change people's habits or it will only get worse in the future.
The problem is that our courts have utterly failed to stand up for civil rights. This is especially true of the Supreme Court, who quite literally define how the law is interpreted.
And that's why I don't talk to Siri to drive my car.
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.
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
Or maybe not. Tablets are impressively portable and the screen is probably good enough.
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).
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.
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.
The tail wags the dog. Wearing glasses may become inherently cool if all the cool people in your insta feeds are wearing them.
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.
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.
My friends always have a cheap shot when I wear them but are completely fine now and appreciate fun candid videos I send them
Amazing for vacations with the kids
I get why people are creeped out by them, but we get filmed or photographed hundreds of times a day in a big city when we are in public spaces. Gatekeeping a potentially useful technology for being filmed in public -- well, everyone is _already_ filmed in public. ATM cameras, stoplight cameras, drone cameras, smartphone cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras. You are on camera every time you step out of your house. You are on camera every time you open your work computer. Singling out cameras in eyeglasses as "creepy" is kind of worrying about a drop in the ocean. Cameras on self-driving cars. Nanny cams. Closed-circuit cameras. The things are everywhere, and they are always invasions of privacy. Why is the line the "creeper" glasses?
I'd be ok with it if we were for banning all non-consensual recordings in all spaces. But we're very much not.
And if we're not, then having a personal heads-up display that is contextual to your current surroundings or has augmented reality capability is too useful to not use (eventually). I'm bad with names, and good with faces. That use-case alone would be worth it for me, if it were available.
And we probably ought to regulate how all such footage is handled.
> banning all non-consensual recordings in all spaces
It's a false dichotomy. Even if recording is permitted that doesn't mean the systemic invasion of personal privacy needs to be.
Think about the practical aspect of it. I have to point my phone at you to record you. It's really quite conspicuous. It's also mildly inconvenient for me so I won't be doing it the vast majority of the time.
Whereas the glasses point wherever you're looking, are expected to be recording constantly, and are expected to do things with the data involving third parties. It's the same as a VR headset except in that case the expectation is that the footage is neither sent anywhere nor even retained, merely presented live to the user as if he were looking at you (and his face is already point in your direction).
Just FYI, they do heavily market this towards RX glasses wearers. So, you wouldn't quite be able to just as simply ask someone to take off their glasses and no longer be able to see.
Apparently they sold 7 million of these. So I think a whole lot of people don't care about this aspect.
The times I do I see folks wearing them the normie reaction is typically “oh cool” and not some libertarian allergic reaction to technology.
> screeching
> libertarian allergic reaction to technology
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.
It def is much worse if your concern is privacy, but with all the CCTV around I am not sure its the top of my list.
I'm probably going smart glasses+cellular watch the moment a better company makes that pairing happen. I am growing very tired of the screen being present in everything.
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.
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...
And the biggest fix there is you need to not let them control it.
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.
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.
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.
Yet.
That said I'm not sure how much of that is merely department policy versus local law.
A face camera has no light or warnings (you just put tape over the small light), and is operated by a pervert.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.