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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Not sure why you're being downvoted, except that you might be overgeneralizing on former military. Some people can kick your ass badly without a knife or gun, like military/ex-military.

It doesn’t seem like catastrophizing when discussing how people might react to a stranger attacking them. Hitting someone in the face hard enough to knock off their glasses isn’t exactly some silly little thing that people would be ridiculous to respond to. It is an attack and people would likely perceive it as such. Plenty of people would just be stunned and do nothing, but plenty of people carry and go to the range every weekend just waiting for someone to try something.

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.

I am sure there will be plenty of time for legal musings after the funeral. You could watch trial from above if afterlife exists and has good internet connection

Okay — but it’s effective:

Now the discussion is about how Facebook glasses are offensive and worn by murderous psychos who take creep shots of their neighbors.

> 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.

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.

Blind user here. Reality is, we are so disadvantaged in this world that we will gladly accept any tool that is useful. Almost nobody would ever read the TOS. Its a bit like with cars... Sure, there are some urban exceptions, but truth is, if you ask someone to give up their car, they will laugh you out the door.

I'm sorry that you are in this predicament. Many rely on these tools. When something finally works, few are going to walk away because of a long terms of service most of us will never read. That doesn't mean you don't care about privacy though, it just means you are forced into a tradeoff.

With AI glasses like the ones Meta is pushing, the device is not just helping you. It is recording. Photos and videos can be sent back to company servers. Reports show that human reviewers can see very private footage users never meant to share. That includes sensitive personal moments. The device is basically an always-on camera tied to a giant data company.

If you depend on that device to understand the world, that makes you more vulnerable, not less. If ads, errors, or AI hallucinations start shaping what you hear about your surroundings, that affects your only channel of perception. If your daily life is constantly captured and stored, that affects your autonomy.

So yes, many of us will still use the tech. But that is exactly why pushing for strong, clear privacy terms now matters. Accessibility should not mean giving up control over your own life.

Sure, every interaction in society is a tradeoff... However, I must destroy your dreams. Being disabled almost always means surrendering control over your own life to others. Or, better phrased, constantly fighting to keep control from being taken away from you by external, mostly well meaning, forces. But I get it, really. No need to ELI5. I hope the "you" in your explanation was rethorical... because if it wasn't, I definitely feel talked down to. I read the article we are commenting. I am well aware about the problem of hallucination, especially when image LLMs get used to describe the world. I have even done my own empirical tests to get a feel of the extent of the problem. All my comment was trying to say is, that when it comes to assistive technologies which actually provide value, idiology and privacy concerns pretty much go out the window very very fast, much faster then the average HN reader might assume. That is why Meta glasses are very popular amongst the visually impaired. Or do you seriously suggest they (we) are all so naiv as to not know what kind of deal we just struck with the devil?

Full disclosure: I don't own Meta glasses (yet), but I know some users and observe rollout amongst assistive technology resellers.

High end phones these days run smaller LLMs sorta fine.

And?

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.

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.

I don't have much of an objection to Blind people wearing these, but there are all kinds of things that are OK to do with a disability that aren't OK to do if you don't need special accomodation.

Accessibility never really prevented anyone to do shit which breaks it. Remember CAPTCHAs?

(and I am blind, I know what I am talking about)

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.

Lololol that's really good.

does your workplace allow recording coworkers without their permission?

In the office? No. But at lunch or outside of the office is not controlled by work place policy.

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.

Yeah, it ticks all of the boxes that HR loves to tick before firing you with cause

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.

I would acquit

Have you tried bringing it up with HR? If you explain why you try to avoid her while she's wearing them, they might ask her to stop wearing them to work.

Meta's own guidelines[1] say that you should "Power off in private spaces."

You can't always tell if you're being recorded since they can be tampered with to disable the LED. And from what I gather, the LED only serves to indicate of video recording, and not necessarily audio.

[1]: https://www.meta.com/ai-glasses/privacy/

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

It's also an assault, with intrinsic video evidence of the crime committed.

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.

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