Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week | Hacker News Reader

Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week

inquirer.com

416 pointsPhiladelphia210 comments

My local county is currently in a dispute with the local bar association because they want to upgrade the courthouse security cameras and the sheriff wants to add audio capabilities. This includes to parts of the building just outside the courtroom that counsel will frequently use for brief asides with their clients (due to lack of other private rooms). The county seems to favor adding the microphones and pinky swearing they won't use them and that public records requests won't be used to listen in on privileged communication, but it's obvious how difficult that would be to trust. They keep putting off a decision because they don't want to piss off the lawyers.

https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-judg...

There's no leadership to curtail asinine behavior. Instead of forces of nature to strengthen the status quo of freedom, we get lowly politicians. Judges end up having to do all the work.

Even if what they hear is inadmissible in court, parallel construction is a real thing and they will find a way to work backwards.

It is basically an unfair advantage, even if inadmissible in court. The state can find more facts even in illegal ways; and this assuming the government is fair rather than criminal. I have a hard time trusting governments who mistrust the public.

Are you in Iowa, by chance? A neighboring county where I live wants to do this exact thing. Last I read they had voted to go forward with it.

I assume the sheriff would be totally fine with putting up signs in that area saying "audio and video recording in progress" then right? That would somewhat address the issue, and should be entirely uncontroversial to both sides.

There is an asymmetric impact to the defense. In our adversarial legal system, we must not disadvantage one of the sides unilaterally.

There are times when I want to argue that the solution is to make the question one of truth rather than guilt or innocence, but any solution runs up against human nature, my first experience of which was when playing sports and being told by my team mates that I should state that the ball fell on the side of the line which was advantageous to the team, rather than where it actually fell.

Never willingly played a team sport again.

That doesn't sound like a good compromise at all. First practically speaking, you can't just leave the court building to discuss with your client if they're in chains, and it's super inconvenient based on the layout of many courts. Second, this becomes the excuse for adding audio and video surveillance everywhere, with the excuse that you know about it, so it's okay. Third, considering audio can pick up things like jokes, irrational things said in anger, or just one's mumblings to oneself, it very quickly becomes the excuse to haul in anyone you don't like by misconstruing their words. The fact that it was brought by law enforcement tells you they are looking to use it against people.

> If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

-- Structured to Cardinal Richelieu

* s/Structured/Attributed/ , not sure how that swipe-typo happened.

The whole point of contention is that one of the spaces is, effectively, the only convenient places to have a quick, heretofore private, conversation. No one is confused over where the things are.

There should be rooms assigned for these private conversations.

But I imagine even these rooms are cammed, and lip reading is a thing

It seems likely that if there were spaces that could (both physically and politically) be assigned for this, they already would have been.

Sure, it would be great if we could have nice things like that, but all too often we need to work with the infrastructure we have.

It's so fundamentally terrifying that someone would consider that "totally fine".

Prosecutors will take breaks in their offices within the same building while the defense has to leave the building in order to have a private conversation, that sounds totally fair and reasonable.

Well there are times when attorneys are part of a criminal organisation and are used as a communication link to the outside world.

Nobody considered that when the laws were written but we live in a world of billion dollar drug cartels.

What's the security reason they need this? How many times has a security camera failed to do its job because it didn't have audio? What crimes do they thing they are going to solve? Are people breaking into the courthouse wearing masks but screaming their own names?

I think one problem is, almost all security cameras are sold with audio these days. If the cameras have a mic, telling people "Oh, we turned the mic off in each camera" or "We don't record the audio" isn't very helpful.

Just cut the cable for the microphone?

It's often on the board as a MEMS microphone.

But yes I've done this with all my ring cameras, they were still the old type. One of them was a bitch to open up though (the indoor one IIRC)

There’s another problem with this because a camera with a mic cable cut would look from the outside exactly like a camera with mic cable intact, and maintenance is a thing, so eventually it’s bound to be replaced by a camera with a working mic either by mistake or “by mistake” on purpose. There’s a trust issue here since people who would be affected by the presence of a mic won’t be able to easily visually verify that it’s disabled.

Drill through it!

Don't most of those dome/bubble cameras come without mics?

I saw them advertised "With microphone" or something recently, which led me to assume that was a 'feature' of this model...but you know advertising

Surely as a compromise the police dept can put cameras with audio livestreaming from every room in police dept ?

Or a compromise where defendants also have the same access to the camera feeds and pinky swear not to use the audio.

Still asymmetric as the police have the resources to comb the feeds and individuals do not

I am confident a gofundme would provide enough tokens for this work.

True, but irrelevant because nobody’s listening. All parties with access have pinky swears not to listen.

CCTV with audio is a line that should not be crossed, but as there tech is there, they just can't resist

There should be no safety reason to require audio. The only reason for audio is later use for prosecution.

It's not just that they don't want to piss off the lawyers. If they don't provide a private location, then they may be forced to take continuances and recesses so those conversations can happen elsewhere as a condition of not infringing on the constitutional right to effective counsel.

Might be quicker to detect disturbances using audio too rather than video only, think of ShotSpotter. Sounds made up though and probably either a way to spy or chill speech.

But ShotSpotter doesn't actually work (almost every alert is a false positive). So what value would this add?

No totally, I can't imagine it either, I was just trying to give it a charitable assumption.

Yeah, "we promise not to use it" is about the weakest possible control in a situation like that

The vibe around smart glasses is so weird: Governments and businesses can record in public, which is right and proper, but if an individual person records what they see, that's wrong and creepy.

The original assumption behind CCTV was that it's recorded but realistically never seen, or maybe seen by one person staring at a bunch of screens at once. That's what made it acceptable.

Of course this has changed drastically, but CCTV basically got grandfathered in in most people's minds.

CCTV also writes over itself over time.

For $650, I just purchased a consumer-level CCTV (writes locally, on a loop) which can auto-detect all humans, vehicles, and pets — creating montages of visitors (for later review). This is entirely offline, eight camera, just over two weeks retention at 12MP (configurable to months with dual SATA slots and video setting changes).

What cloud recording is capable of determining... is absolutely limitless. I think this is what makes Flock so scary / "different."

A fixed security camera is visible, scoped to a specific area, and (in theory) governed by policy, retention limits, audits, etc. Smart glasses are much harder to notice and can record anywhere

Yes in my country there are rules a about security cameras- not that anyone follows them but they exist and you can theoretically sue someone over them.

Glassholes are new. We can tell when someone is trying to film eleven year olds in a public swimming pool but this is the new frontier.

The reasonable suspicion around random people wearing secret face cameras is consistent with the idea that both more government and more corporate surveillance are bad.

It's because wrong and creepy people will use what they record for wrong and creepy things. Especially when it comes to women.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/18/disturbing-r...

Everything is effin' creepy, your rights end where my start and all that. And I will guard my and my family privacy with closed fist traveling at non-trivial speed to face of folks deliberately wearing such glasses and recording, pedophiles or not. Its also punishable by law to record people without prior consent where I live (Switzerland), and not just theoretically on paper.

Since fighting government is extremely hard, lets tackle lower hanging fruit above first and try for the best case scenario later. Also, government can claim its primarily for security, whether true or not depends on the case but private folks can hardly claim that.

To be fair cameras on every fn corner is also creepy. But cameras on uncle Ronny are creepier because they're closer and they're usually pointed at glutes.

Imagine all those video feeds and then you start to see the patterns especially with AI. Oh my god, they don't want to see those patterns emerging.

My dad wears smart glasses because he's nearly deaf and the classes show captions for the person he's talking to. They're great. He doesn't use or care at all about the camera. Having the captions would be very useful to him in a courtroom setting. Collateral damage I guess.

There are glasses that do only captions, no recording or camera.

The article says "any eyewear with video and audio recording capability" which makes sense. Although even that is unreasonably specific and should just say "recording or transmission device" to ban the activity and not the item.

Pretty sure any device which subtitles audio could be used to record that audio.

Then it's up to the company to make a compliant device if they want it to be used in a courtroom.

Which is not the problem when the device has no interface to get the data out and no storage media to store it.

This is a courthouse. Judges still have king-like powers in their rooms. Anyone with a real problem will certainly be able to request and be granted an exemption.

That said, get caught misusing such an exemption and you will be hauled in for direct contempt. No big trial. No witnesses. Just the judge ordering you into 30 days custody.

Courts also tend to have existing accessibility setups for these scenarios.

And they are all poorly maintained and/or not functioning. If anyone walks in with their own solution, they will be accomidated. (Metaphor approaching) No judge is going to yank away a blind man's walking stick because it isnt the approved walking stick.

A walking stick isn't the same as a recording device.

If your walking stick has a sword in it like the old spy movies, you won't be getting accommodated either. You'll be getting a loaner or a wheelchair.

Wow that's amazing. Which glasses can do this?

He can apply to the court for special permission - and probably use ADA to guide permission

Putting aside that judges can make exceptions when circumstances warrant, one would think that this function (providing live captioning of the proceedings) would be a reasonable accommodation that courts should be able to provide. Especially now that every courtroom is (or can be) equipped for sound and video to support remote operation, it shouldn't be too difficult to support a display with the captioning via the court IT system and alleviate any concerns about surreptitious recording.

There's already a stenographer recording the proceeding, right? I'd think you could project what they're recording onto a display somewhere.

You'd have to translate what the stenographer wrote, whichever system they used, into plaintext first. A layperson won't be able to understand that.

I'd imagine already if not soon we'll have small speech-to-text models that can run in realtime.

Yet I get why courts are nervous about anything with a hidden camera/mic

I don't see how these glasses are legal at all. While filming in public places is allowed in the US, commercial use of that material is not. For example, you cannot just use public material with recognizable people in advertisements without their consent.

Meta is likely to use material from these spy devices to build real world networks and use it commercially.

These "glasses" should be outlawed. The only useful purpose is to immediately identify the wearer as an asshole.

Are all commercial uses illegal or only those that display your likeness?

A news broadcast for a commercially run news network does not need releases nor does it need to compensate people who walk through the background.

Likewise, journalistic photographs (for commercial use) are legal and don't require releases or compensation for people who are part of the scene.

https://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf (note the credentials in the lower right corner - and if you want to know more I'd suggest https://www.krages.com/bpkphoto.htm )

    The general rule in the United States is that anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place or places where they have permission to take photographs. Absent a specific legal prohibition such as a statute or ordinance, you are legally entitled to take photographs. Examples of places that are traditionally considered public are streets, sidewalks, and public parks.

Is it really true that commercial use of film taken from public places is not allowed without consent? Is there a case law or a specific statute on this? Would love to read more.

Are far as I can tell: people in the footage can collect damages as long as they're identifiable. Meaning that you could easily tell afterwards that the complainant is the one in the footage used. So a shot of a sports crowd is probably okay, though I imagine they have people sign off on some kind of T&C that covers that anyway. On the other hand walking-down-the-street footage you would need releases from those people.

Assuming you mean in the United Stares, can you cite a specific law or court case to support your position?

It occurs to me that the existence of paparazzi seems to be evidence against your position.

Paparazzi get sued for crossing lines all the time. Good ones know exactly how far they can push the boundary and are careful to stay close to it

Not federal, but this: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/civil-code/civ-sect-3344/ To be clear by 'commercial purposes', it's advertising/promotion/marketing. Paparazzi photos would be alright by that bar. I presume the idea is to avoid any implied endorsement by those photographed.

It's called the right of publicity. Basically the idea that you're entitled to compensation to for commercial use of your likeness. AFAIK, you always have to be recognizable to sue over it as you have to see your likeness, and damages would be pretty minor if you're not famous or an actor anyway. It depends on the state but generally it does have to be in advertising.

True, in California, for advertising or sales purposes. Probably other states too. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....

What if people are recognizable but more in the background? Isn't that fair use?

So should smartphone cameras be illegal as well? Or cameras of every kind?

Depends, would you walk around recording everyone with your phone out right onto their faces without their consent?

If you're a TikToker, absolutely

I'm surprised it took this long but two weeks ago I saw my first live streamer at a flea market. He was wearing some type of camera on his head (can't tell which one) and had his phone mounted like a wristwatch to read chat notifications. It was like that old Penny Arcade's strip about Glassholes come to life [1].

He was definitely filming everyone without our consent.

[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/14/glasshol

“Hey security, I think that guy was filming young girls. Please eject him.”

The link is missing an e: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/14/glasshole

TikTokers aren't exactly the gold standards of society nor is being a TikToker a free card to violate people's privacy though. What's to say if someone confronts and requests the TikToker to stop recording them without their permission?

They just... don't stop. What're you gonna do, take away the camera, hit them? Then they have great content and can sue you for assault. There's millions of people out there that are filming without consent every single day, for content.

> What're you gonna do, take away the camera, hit them?

A lot of people have done this, because at that point it's consciously making a decision to be an asshole and violating someone's privacy. The laws may not be on the side of the guy who hits the TikToker - and that's what they capitalize on, but morally, the guy throwing the punch would be in the right. It also depends on where you live, I guess. TikTokers don't normally do such stuff in Asia because you can go to the cops and file assault, but when they find out you were being the douche, they will not take any action.

Public photography is not a crime.

* a negative is: the opportunities to enjoy oneself have sadly diminished...do one 'strange' thing in public, and you're on the web.

Public photography isn't a crime, but then again it's very nuanced. If I'm taking a portrait of a park, where people are having picnics, it seems "less targeted", if you know what I mean. Whereas walking with a phone or camera in your hand pointing directly at people's faces feels not really right.

The best way to do this would be how Google solved this with street view. Capture your public photos, blur out people's faces - better yet, respect their privacy if someone requests to not film them. Eg. Google Street view will blur out complete homes if you decide to opt out.

It’s practically impossible to take pictures of a famous monument without having other people in the frame (usually they’re posing for photos themselves). AI can remove them, with varying degrees of success.

Ironically, it would probably be easier for the AI to generate the photo of the monument without the people. I mean, for famous monuments, whatever photo you're about to take, you could find 10 better ones already on-line, taken from the same point and perspective, and uploaded to Flickr or Instagram or wherenot.

Weren’t Samsung phones doing something like this? If you tried to take a picture with the moon in it, it would just generate an image of the moon?

So smartphone cameras should be banned nationwide depending on whether I personally record people without their consent or not?

> I don't see how these glasses are legal at all. While filming in public places is allowed in the US, commercial use of that material is not

As a general statement about the law this is not correct. And that’s even before we get to the next paragraph where you just wildly speculate and use that as buttressing the already false premise.

Serious question: what will happen when people start getting implants? They’ll probably require some sort of off mode, but not sure how that would be enforced.

sounds like an expensive way to get disqualified from jury duty.

The easiest way to get out of jury duty is to ask about jury nullification during voir dire.

But the bigger thing is: why would you want to get disqualified from one of your biggest civic duties?

Or you could just write to the court and ask to be excused, so you don't even have to show up. Most judges will excuse you for any reason if you ask.

In Miami, writing "No English" on the summons does the trick. Or, tell them that you do not consent to be searched (courthouse searches are deemed to be "consent" searches) so please have someone escort you inside without being searched. A quick note saying, "only God can judge" gets you off the hook. They'll hustle you right out of there if you mention jury nullification. Announcing that "the defendant must be guilty because the police arrested him," or "plaintiff lawyers exaggerate injuries to get more money" usually work. "I'm prejudiced against [fill in the blank] people" works too. If this doesn't work immediately, serve up a stereotype in response to the judge's question. "Everyone knows that most crimes are committed by black people" will earn you an a quick excusal. I could go on. "I can't pay attention because I'm worried about..." "Maybe this case is important to these people but I've got my own problems and I can't concentrate on their while I'm worried about my own."

"Your honor, it is my ethical framework that I first must determine if the law should even be the law, and secondly if the defendant did it if the law is worthy. I will find the defendant not guilty even if they claim in open court they did it, but the law is bad."

(Basis and justification of jury nullification.)

Edit: Seriously, -1's? Given how many bad laws there are, judging the law first, then the defendant should be a given.

You're getting downvotes because openly stating it like this is gonna get you contempt of court.

Imagine if everyone did this. Then when you’re in court for a crime you didn’t commit the only people on the jury would be those too stupid to have failed to be dismissed from jury duty.

The last time I was on jury duty in New York, any time someone tried any of these, the judge just reassigned the person to the jury pool for civil cases which, he claimed, are usually longer trials and likely to be more of an inconvenience.

Not on my last summons! I had to go to a side room with the judge and show him that I already had personal, not work-sponsored, travel during the scheduled dates. He was clear with our instructions that work travel was not an excuse; that was the employer’s problem, not the employee’s. I showed him my airfare receipts and he thanked me for coming, and sent me home. I was one of like 5 people who got to leave.

We had a 2 or 3 month old and my wife didn’t get dismissed due needing to breastfeed the baby every couple hours. They gave her a room to feed in, so I also had to take time off to take the baby to her.

I’m a bit surprised that they didn’t just let you reschedule. As I recall when I got a grand jury summons I kicked the can down the road as far as I could and then avoided being empaneled.

It was some big federal case that was scheduled for like 3 weeks. There were 60 or so of us in that batch of juror candidates, and they weren’t letting anyone go without a short list of excuses. That was a first for me, too.

>But the bigger thing is: why would you want to get disqualified from one of your biggest civic duties?

Because jury duty does not pay enough to put a roof over one’s head and food on the table?

Supposedly, for what amounts to an "extremely important civic duty", pays to what amounts illegal under-minimum wage for compelled work. Its usually $60/day which is barely $7.50/hr. Then you have to pay for parking and overly expensive food downtown.

And the only reason people even care about being on a jury is because we are threatened with state violence if we dont. Its not like they have to pay people fairly - they just threaten you with contempt of court and jail.

Money wouldn't solve everything, sure. But being paid $50/hr would greatly alleviate many problems.

That's only relevant if you would lose out on your income from work, which most people won't as they are paid salary. So yes, for people paid hourly it's legitimate to want out of jury duty, but that's also not the typical situation. Most people just don't feel like doing it.

>But the bigger thing is: why would you want to get disqualified from one of your biggest civic duties?

because jury duty pays like 2 dollars an hour and I gotta eat. I know lots of folks on this website are relatively well off, but the entire country doesn't make 6 figures

Meanwhile you’re probably paying for parking, gas, etc.

Also grand jury duty can be something like six months (may not be every day depending on jurisdiction. Federal may be even longer. Probably no company will keep paying you for that length of time even if you squeeze in some work nights and weekends.

The company doesn't get the choice. If they fire you or cut your pay over jury service, or even just threaten to to do so, and you can prove it, they can be arrested immediately. I have personally witnessed a judge issue a bench warrant for the arrest of a retail manager who told an employee that if she failed to get out of jury duty before her shift started that she would be fired. When the manager was brought in and questioned by the judge he tried to argue that it was his right to deny jury service by his employees. He was given 90 days in jail for contempt of court.

I don’t know. Maybe I could worked with HR for more but our employee manual said they would pay for two weeks and this was a company that was generally pretty understanding about personal matters. Certainly an hourly employee or someone self employed is probably not getting any sort of a deal.

I wouldn’t have been fired (which seems a different case) but being largely unable to, say, make sales calls or other external activities for 6 months I would expect to have consequences even if just as simple as underforming my peers. Maybe a manager would understand and take it into account but I wouldn’t count on it. It doesn’t have to be blatant as in your example.

If you perform nearly any work at all in a given week you're entitled to your salary, and they can't fire you. They might be able to take away the $15/day stipend from your pay, and there are obvious additional negatives (6 months with limited context and practice of your craft will reduce your performance when you get back too), but that 2-week cap is a lawsuit waiting to happen unless they also forbid you from doing any work while on jury duty.

As I say grand jury duty is often not every day, you can always take your PTO, and there are always nights and weekends. A company can always keep paying your base salary but, as you say, there could be longer term consequences.

And the case upthread is obviously a retail manager being stupid but I also assume there is no obligation to pay hourly employees for hours they don’t work or for tips they didn’t collect.

> not every day

Yep

> can take your PTO

You can, but if salaried you usually shouldn't, ignoring any particularly malicious employers and social contracts around the outskirts of the law.

> No obligation to pay hourly employees, tips, etc

Yeah, if you're not salaried you're screwed. PTO might cover a few days, but if you have a month-long trial and need money for rent then my understanding of the law is that serving as a juror will make you homeless unless the courtroom is willing to extend some compassion for your hardship.

That's the only legitimate reason to not want jury duty, but you also just need to explain to the judge that you get paid by the hour for work and can't afford to not be paid for several days. The judge will let you go.

That's also not the typical reason people want out of jury duty. Most people are just lazy, not actually at risk of economic hardship from it.

It's already impossible to stop someone from recording if they are really determined. Pen cameras, button cameras and all sorts of miniature devices exist and can be snuck through very easily. You enforce the restriction by prosecuting people who upload the footage.

The problem is punishing the uploader doesn't remove the upload. Once the public has it, it has it forever. It doesn't un-contaminate a jury pool, and there's no later retraction if whatever that was uploaded is found to be lacking context, false, or outright fabricated. Once that kind of damage is done, it can't be un-done.

Yeah, that's unfortunate. But the same is true of lots of other crimes. No way to unstab someone. Usually we account for that by setting a higher punishment

> You enforce the restriction by prosecuting people who upload the footage.

but this is impossible to guarantee as well

It sure changes the incentives though. It’s much less attractive to leak recordings as a PR move—or realize any benefit that cranky humorless judges can trace back to the recording—if that, in and of itself, constitutes a whole new crime (and effectively confessing to it too).

It's turtles all the way down. If we had a way to perfectly prevent people from doing undesirable things, we wouldn't need courthouses to begin with. The system doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough that reliably circumventing it isn't worth the effort.

>It's already impossible to stop someone from recording if they are really determined.

I'm no expert, but I believe national security SCIFs use technology that blocks recording.

That's so far into the future that we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

On the audio side, it's not a stretch to imagine cochlear implants (or hearing aids) having an undetectable recording ability.

AFAIK some wireless buds can work as better hearing aids, they just don't have the medical device label to officially perform that function.

Some even have that label: https://support.apple.com/en-us/120992

> so far into the future

Idk, I think this is like, maybe 5 years in the future

You really need to look into what people are doing with prosthetic eyes.

Here's a dude from 3 years ago adding a flashlight: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/yblzi4/g...

And I'm pretty sure I saw one who added a laser to theirs for raves, but can't find the link :)

You can buy very very tiny cameras today off the shelf, the main problem would be just packaging either a storage medium or wireless transfer capability + power inside the eye. With government-level budgets it's doable, possibly even by a skilled maker with resources.

AirPods knockoffs are mass-produced. They contain power and RF comms in a package that's significantly smaller than an eye. The only problem with prosthetic eye camera I as a half-skilled home-lab owner would have is how to not ruin the source prostetic. Which is trivial - just buy a dozen and practice.

It's so far into the future that it overflows the temporal coordinates and is actually a few years into the past now.

EMP wave.

For ex. in a lot factorys, is is forbidden to make pictures (and movies). So maybe you just don't have access to such areas. In Switzerland pen cameras etc. are just forbidden.

In fact, pre smartphones more or less, bringing cameras into even an office workplace was generally pretty controlled. Still is under some circumstances.

I banned them from our office and while using work-issued computers. There’s no circumstance here in which someone should be working with a personal camera aimed at their screen.

Recently someone showd me a cellphone picture from something he saw in our company. He was not brave enought to make a screenshot (with the companys computer), so he made just a photo with his cellphone from the screen. So, this is a thing.

On-board NN moderates all interactions. Moral NN core must be updated montlhy to support latest moral and legal checks by NN. This core reports when you are doing something suspicious. State, municipal, border and patrol random checks for proper attestation of implants. Of course manufacture and installation of such implants is licensed and tightly regulated. Think of children.

It's not very different from smartphone. But now instead of modem you have nn "firmware" with broad capabilities to warn privacy and ethics police when you are out of line. Recording in the wrong place, or looking at a crime and not reporting. "Off mode" won't fly for a gun, and your implant threatens children, so I don't believe this could be delegated to the user.

> On-board NN moderates all interactions. Moral NN core must be updated montlhy to support latest moral and legal checks by NN. This core reports when you are doing something suspicious.

This module is formally called "conscience" and fortunately, at this time, is securely sandboxed to not directly communicate with any device or service outside of the body.

Look how that worked out for whatever‘s your favorite mass genocide in history.

I don't think networking it with powers-that-be will help, though.

Thankfully Silicon Valley discovered you can be so much more productive by removing the conscience as well as the soul.

This is dangerous terrorist version you are talking about. People can not be trusted with choosing their own conscience, that's how you get terrorists and pedophiles. Remotely attested module is trusted by democratic authority, not using it is basically admiting intention to hurt fellow citizens.

Drop the democratic, and you just invented crypto-church.

what will happen is people will get away with it, unfettered, until someday someone ends up in a courtroom for it. they'll be punished, then if it happens frequently enough more people will chime in on wanting a way to inhibit it, maybe people would start wearing those anti-paparazzi-clothes that somehow ruin the footage

You can ask someone to take off glasses or power down a phone, but you can't really "check" an implant in the same way

I don't remember the book, but some scifi novel had an idea where each visitor to some country needed software installed on their implant. This software allowed any one to be opted out of visitor to see their face and clothing style. Basically, on demand anonymity in real life.

I am not into Facebook/Meta nowadays, bet the technology is so lovely freaking magnificent... Back in the days, these were in Sci-Fi and dreams only...

// https://www.ifixit.com/News/113543/theres-groundbreaking-wav...

It can be simultaneously true that smart glasses are a technological marvel and a privacy nightmare.

It's also important to consider that while many places have some legal framework along the lines of "no reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces," there's a social-psychological gap between that and the presumption of being constantly recorded, be it by other private individuals or governments.

Because of this, my view on this technology is that it's a net negative in society, and generally unhealthy.

I also feel for the unfortunate Kenyan annotators drawing and tagging rectangles of people using the toilet -

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/workers-report-watch...

As a full-time glasses-wearer and sci-fi nerd, I want smart glasses SO BAD. Just running the equivalent of YOLOv8 on your glasses identifying objects in your view real time would be very very cool.

But as a privacy-conscious developer, I want exactly zero connection to any FAANG cloud service in my smart classes.

So until someone releases a pair of smart glasses I can get with my prescription and, for example, use my phone for "local" compute with no forced cloud access, I'm going to skip the whole category.

It’s worse than this. A company offering “private” smart glasses could slip into FB mode on its own or get acquired. So it’s a hard no from any company really.

A company offering private smart glasses would have to offer them with an unlocked bootloader.

I'm thinking of it more like the Raspberry Pi of smart glasses.

Something with open-ish hardware running Linux without any specific blocks on installing your own software on it.

IMO much of the "no reasonable expectation" stuff is simply wrong, or treats things as an unreasonable binary.

For example, there's no reasonable expectation that singing to myself in public won't be recorded.

But almost everyone in public does reasonably-assume that their every step isn't being permanently logged by a stalking drone swarm.

Right, that's actually a fair framing. I get to enjoy a walking commute in my city, and or the most part, I feel very anonymous on my walk into the office.

Blending into rush hour foot traffic is easy, and I never feel like I stand out enough to attract attention... though in the back of my head, I know that most commercial and government properties have some form of video surveillance, probably backed by some kind of (hopefully coarse) AI subject tagging.

That genie's out of the bottle, couple cheap cameras with cheap AI recognition and tracking, and every network getting pwned by somebody the result is, public spaces become obscenely public. The worst is private spaces, like when a technician or tradesman comes to one's house to do work wearing smart glasses. If they're Rx, what do you do? Refuse service? live with the broken pipe/modem?

No opinion on the decision from OP's post, just noting that, privacy is getting 86'd six ways to Sunday. All that's left are truly owned homes and natural spaces, and Orwell laid the pattern for both.

> That genie's out of the bottle [...] public spaces become obscenely public

A bit "meta" here, but this was never about surrendering to advancing capability, humans have been capable of eavesdropping ever since eaves were invented, people could bring hidden microphones and cameras in "private" spaces for decades, etc.

The "reasonable expectation" doesn't come from our fears of the worst, or else it would be meaninglessly permissive. Rather, it's an attempt to judge individual situations based on some kind of collective agreement about normality. Just because we can't preemptively block something doesn't mean it cannot be a crime.

In other words, we (should) have a lot more power to decide what they become than that. Supposing--and I'm not endorsing this--anyone caught recording in public typically gets their stuff smashed by an angry mob, then the "reasonable expectation" is that you're not being recorded.

Thanks for the nuance. I guess my issue is that pervasive recording has already been normalized, db hacks are effectively normalized (if illegal) so the public spaces are super public, as of yesterday not tomorrow.

They were better off being left in dreams, because there you never have to actually think of the consequences.

Like Star Trek holodecks. They seem amazing at first, but only because the weirdest it ever got was a sweaty Lt. Barclay, a creepy Cmdr. LaForge, and a safe-for-TV sleazeball named Quark.

In reality, if you could "jack in" to a self-controlled Matrix, or walk onto a holodeck and make anything you wanted feel real, it would be 24/7, 100% the unhealthiest invention since the nuclear weapon.

One thing people don't get right about Star Trek is that the Federation is not supposed to be "us but with a post scarcity economy".

The entire society in Star Trek has moved beyond greed and sadism.

Also Starfleet is the hypercompetent overachieving side of the Federation, and the show itself is aspirational to the core of its DNA, so this kind of biases the sample. It's not supposed to be us today, but rather what we could plausibly become as people (even subtracting the post-scarcity / scifi bits).

Nearby Glasses for Android [0] tries to detect smart glasses.

Before the court makes you shut off your Android device.

An ios BT detector might also work.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.pocketpc.ne...

Never managed to make it work in background.

Oh, I thought it was in all of Philadelphia, but it's just inside courtrooms :(

There's hardly a worse advertisement for those than Zuckerberg wearing them. The idea was always that Google glass failed because it made you look like a dork because the glasses looked weird, so if the glasses looked normal they'd sell. But now you have a creep with a camera always pointed at you, so it'll go the same way.

Smart eyeglasses are illegal in my state, unquestionably.

The law mandates that any "secret" recording is illegal. This is different from the usual standard, which is whether someone is recording people who are in a place where they have an expectation of privacy or not.

It doesn't matter if you're on the street, in someone's home, a courtroom. A tiny little LED doesn't rectify that. Nobody expects someone's eyeglasses to be recording them.

Which state bans photography in public? I'm sure quite a few 1a auditors would be interested in travelling there.

I suspect you're referring to Massachusetts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#...

    Massachusetts (only "secret" recordings are banned, but is the only state without a "public location" exception. Despite having a 1968 law imposing general bans on taping wire and oral communications, it was later ruled to violate the First Amendment in the conditions espoused in a case filed by Project Veritas in 2018.)

The case mentioned was https://web.archive.org/web/20211110033315/https://apnews.co...

This also be more related to recording phone calls and specific conversations.

https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/massachusetts-recording-law

It appears to be more nuanced than "you can't walk around with a camera recording in Massachusetts."

I had my first interaction with someone wearing Meta(I assume) glasses and it was very disconcerting. Ironically I was collecting my new (non-smart) glasses and it was the employee I was interacting with. I really wanted to ask for someone else to deal with me but since there has been no furore this time around (my how times have changed since Goggle Glass) I decided not to risk a scene

When I need to get new glasses my first requirement is that the store doesn't sell Meta Creep Glasses

> I really wanted to ask for someone else to deal with me but since there has been no furore this time around (my how times have changed since Goggle Glass) I decided not to risk a scene

Isn't it fair to stand to your own principles even if others are moving in a different direction?

I think social pressure is the best weapon we have against these. The people who use them want to seem cool, so make it seem like these are weird, dorky, and creepy and they won’t take off.

This is a great rule and I hope to hear about other courts implement it. Smart eyeglasses are an invasion of privacy and inside a courtroom they're certainly a threat. Especially because the tech monopolies and their surveillance technologies have proven to be incredible privacy liabilities.

Florida allows cameras in the courtroom, as do other, but not all, States. You have no expectation of privacy in a Florida courtroom during a public trial. Trials are supposed to be public. Thanks to Doc Shepherd (Ohio, 1954) cameras are banned in federal courts, but the trials themselves are public. There's nothing stopping you from entering and memorializing a proceeding using a court reporter.

I would think that most people in a courtroom (defendants, jurors, lawyers, members of the public) would be prohibitied from filming most court proceedings with any sort of audio/video recording device. So this "ban" is really just a clarification.

It's why I use the classic camera-in-the-pen-in-the-shirt-pocket.

4k 144fps?

Phones exist, tho.

Curious how they'll handle accessibility/prescription edge cases (especially if someone relies on assistive features built into these devices)

The ruling makes an exception for assistive devices that are designed not to persist data. And if you need a prescription, you should have a pair of dumb glasses

Side note: OP's account is named "Philadelphia" and this appears to be the first Philly related thing they've posted since 2013.

Philadelphia is a cheese brand in Germany, maybe they just like that. Or the movie.

Philadelphia cheese brand is from New York. Presumably, the German market licenses the brand but produces locally in Europe and doesn't import from the US (New York and Wisconsin).

This is most likely true. I can confirm that Canadian Philadelphia cheese is made in Canada.

The problem is when people wear "smart" aka dumb privacy glasses in public restrooms. Should be banned or geofenced

https://archive.is/XMmas

We really need a disability exception for things like this.

Meta Glasses are a hit in the blind community (for obvious reasons). Things will really come to a head when we finally get working face recognition tech.

I wonder if this law could be challenged on ADA reasonable accommodation grounds.

Is this from the standpoint if a defendant in a court case being allowed to wear smartglasses or in general any visitor having that privilege. Because in general it seems that the restrictions on video cameras imposed in court rooms should simply extend to smartglasses as well. Just because it is in the form of glasses shouldn't suddenly make taking video cameras everywhere acceptable. And I fear to think that there could be a backdoor added to the software that shares all the videos with Meta.

No, we really need blind assistance devices that don't store data and process it locally.

Those devices are already not banned.

Local models just aren't good enough for this. Not in a device that has to be energy-efficient, fit in a pocket and conserve its storage for other things the user may want to do with it.

Unless you have a homelab (which is just cloud under a different name), there's no way of doing a reasonable job here without sending your data to a third party.

In this case, preserving privacy and anti-discrimination are goals that you just can't reconcile.

What use case can't be accomplished by a local model. They can read things out loud and identify what you're about to walk into.

I wonder if these items could be banned from college/lecture halls

All public transit and workplaces next.

Cool. Now do all government offices / properties of any kind please (and also go national with the policy).

Absolutely fuck these things and anyone who advocates for them. No exceptions.

> reasonably affordable and available smart glasses have finally begun catching on within the last year.

Also, no they haven't.

Once the glasses become popular, so will jammers. By jammers I mean audio and visual disruption to make the recordings unusable, or nearly so.

Heck, I'd buy a jammer now if one were available at a reasonable price.

What are you jamming here? The wireless connection? Wouldn't the recorded data just be cached on device until out of the jamming range?

You would be jamming the audio and video, not the wireless (that is generally illegal). They have some devices to do this already with different noise generators and overloading the camera sensors to cause unidentifiable images (especially with IR night vision).

I couldn't read the article but am curious what the definition of "smart" is. Because if that is the exact wording then it seems to be extremely broad and probably capture some unintended cases.

These kind of blanket bans are going to pose some real problems for the tech because people who wear prescription glasses will often get their prescription built in. So you can't take them off - you need them to see. And then there is another subset of blind and deaf users who are even more dependent on them. What are these people going to do once there are a non-trivial amount of places banning you from wearing them at all?

I think the tech industry is far behind the eight ball on this. To their credit Meta actually did a half decent job out of the gate designing sensor-gated recording lights into the Raybans. But it's not enough. There needs to be an industry wide agreement on a standard where something like a bluetooth beacon can shut off recording. Then maybe you have a chance of this category not becoming Google Glass 2.0. Otherwise I'm struggling to see how this ship won't sink.

I think it's a very bad idea for a prescription glasses wearer to have only a single pair of glasses where that single pair has a built in camera.

It sounds like OP is talking about having this extra pair with them where they go, not just having a pair in general.

Which is a fair expectation IMO. There are plenty of places where it's not appropriate to record that they might encounter in the course of a normal day.

I’ve thought about that before. On one hand: “I need these to see.” Other: “No, you need some glasses to see. Picking these as your only pair was bad decision making.”

It's not just "having" them though, it's carrying them everywhere and constantly swapping over to your dumb glasses as you walk in and out of places that don't like the smart ones.

Which is sort of my point: when main purpose is convenience, if you have to do something inconvenient to use it then you killed the thing altogether. So if manufacturers want this to fly, they need to sort out the privacy question before there's a sign on every public place saying "no recording glasses". If I was in Meta's position, i'd be going to regulators to ban glasses without an externally controlled hard shutoff mechanism.

It might seem a trivial thing currently, but some of these factors will be the ultimate determinants of exactly how much utility humans can get out of AI. If it can't see what you can see, it can't help you with that.

> [W]hen main purpose is convenience, if you have to do something inconvenient to use it then you killed the thing altogether.

Funny. Because UV-activated darkening lenses inevitably fail in a half-darkened state, I have a pair of always-dark prescription sunglasses and prescription -er- clearglasses. I can tell you from personal experience that it's inconvenient to carry both and swap between the two as my location and the time of day changes, and yet... somehow there's still a solid market for always-dark prescription eyeglasses.

Weird, innit?

The important part of the article:

> From then on, any eyewear with video and audio recording capability will be forbidden in all of the First Judicial District buildings, courthouses, or offices, even for people who have a prescription. Other devices with recording capabilities like cell phones and laptops continue to be allowed inside courtrooms but must be powered off and stowed away.

It's defined as having recording capability, which is quite a reasonable restriction to make, IMO.

That's actually not too bad - it leaves space for devices that do have cameras or microphones for other reasons, as long as they don't persist the output. So you could do real time recognition for assistive devices etc.

What about facial recognition? Even without persistence that’s a big deal for juries.

If they can afford stupid "smart" glasses they can afford dumb glasses.

> There needs to be an industry wide agreement on a standard where something like a bluetooth beacon can shut off recording.

Yes, this is a great idea. Hardware hackers can then quickly clone these beacons and spam $5 glass hole blockers everywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com