New privacy frontier: Europe eyes crackdown on smart glasses
politico.com
politico.com
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” says the document.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202602/meta-plans-launch-of-...
Zuckerberg: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuckerberg: Just ask
Zuckerberg: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuckerberg: People just submitted it.
Zuckerberg: I don't know why.
Zuckerberg: They "trust me"
Zuckerberg: Dumb fucks
Instant messages sent by Zuckerberg during Facebook's early days, reported by Business Insider (May 13, 2010)Close enough.
Couldn't agree more.
It will be explained very concisely to the next President how much soft power and security comes from having access to that Meta…data…and the train will be allowed to continue as-is for 15+ years.
Then they’ll make a big multi-year show of going after them on paper, the way that’s happening with Google.
The main problem is the interconnectedness.
They are realizing Hayden’s wet dream of total surveillance.
That strongly suggests me it’s not the cameras that are problematic, but something about what happens to the images.
Can we please learn to point at correct things? I honestly don’t know what wrong with everyone. It’s like when people have issues with building permits and utility pricing but blame “AI” or “data centers” instead.
If you need to put a camera on glasses for a legitimate reason, such as a device purely for accessibility, then you should be able to get an exception, of course.
> then you should be able to get an exception, of course
Of course not. Not when everyone reacts to the cameras themselves instead of TikTok uploads and whatever people are doing.
I just want legislation to ban the latter (as the actual harmful thing) and not the former (then maybe allow it on some sort of permit). But I’m sure it’ll be the opposite.
Which pisses me off because as a person who has difficulty with faces, for almost my whole adult life I’ve dreamed about a wearable that could make me aware when I see a person I know as I pass by (my brain doesn’t do that on its own). Strictly on-device, zero retention, no transmission, sure - I won’t buy e.g. Meta glasses or whatever until I know I can hack them to do the right thing. But of course there’ll be an argument that others aren’t supposed to know what my devices are doing, so ban them just in case because they make people uncomfortable.
We’re literally saying the same thing, pointing that the issue is with something that happens with the images/videos (TikToks)…
You can do that, just ask people for consent to be recorded/taken a picture
Taking a reference face image for vectorization - certainly. If I'll have a wearable device, I wouldn't mind asking, even explaining the setup, risk assessment, and so on. Right now I apologize that I would most likely not remember person's face anyway. Although I shouldn't have to because you don't have to do it for functionally 100% equivalent thing with your eyes.
Continuously scanning faces for matches against a private library, on device, zero transmissions and everything decent and respectful - how do you imagine consenting? A balloon above my head with a banner that goes like "sorry folks the meat in my head is wacky, so there's a machine that eyeballs y'all - no recordings, just some real-time processing that doesn't transmit or long-term store any results"? Even something like that probably won't cut it for a consent.
That said, I understand that people subconsciously flinch at even a sight of a camera. I've had a guest wearing Meta glasses just the other day, and I felt a little irk - despite having a pro-camera position (although to be precise my concern there was with Meta, not the glasses themselves). Worse, it turned out that guest was a victim of domestic abuse, so they have an arguably good reason to have a camera ready at a glance.
Weird world, weird times.
People in places I visit are just trying to live their lives, they aren't some kind of human zoo for me.
The problem with photo since the birth of social media is that it's permanently stored in the internet, literally.
Photos used to be personal and (mostly) temporary. I may take a photo in public, develop, then share with the close ones and store in the photo book. Photo may be somehow passed onto others but likely thrown away eventually when I become less of importance to them, and it'll worn out.
With photos now uploaded to social media or the "cloud", they exist permanently as a means of backups, sold to 3rd party (knowingly or unknowingly) analyzed to "improve the experience of the platform".
User agreements change constantly, engineers make mistake, firms get liquidated and data might get sold, and most importantly, as a former employee of social media firms, what the firms say about the user privacy publicly is very different inside.
This is important for other reasons, as it is the same law that allows you to film cops.
Anyway that sounds like a very specific view only in your country since it's completely fine in the North American country in which I live.
He also said it is US-centric view. Which it is. Americans tend to think all the other countries are just little worst America or enemies. And get real angry when EU countries dont just project simplified American politics, but have their own equally complex one.
Germans all think this way. What a German-centric view. Germans tend to think anything they don't do is just America-centric. And get real angry when other countries dont just have the same German views, but have ones that may be closer to America.
GP made some US-centric statements in, absolute form, in a thread about initiatives from the European legislature... make it make sense, please. As EU citizen I don't yearn for inspiration from the US legal system when it comes to matters of privacy. The rights to privacy of any individual shouldn't be waved aside just because they happen to be situated in public space.
And in even more countries it is legal to film, but it's not legal to send that footage back to Meta's servers for use in LLM training.
In before your definition of the world is a handful of tiny white countries
A country could very easily decide you do have the right to go outside without creeps recording you with spy glasses.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
Meta: We created the portable Occular Torment Nexus. We believe you should always be present in the Nexus, even with others around you. And thanks to our partnership with Popular Glasses Company, you can be tormented in style!
I certainly see the potential use of such - but the risks coming with such glasses at least in my opinion outweigh these uses..
Pleas, EU, ban this! Iirc there are already spy cams banned anyway in Germany, this should fall into the same category
Even without sharing the recording.
Lawmaker Cifrová Ostrihoňová said that, from a gender-based violence perspective, it is "simply unacceptable for any woman to worry about being filmed in public secretly and then worry about those images being shared online.”
What I want is an overlay that gives you useful information about the world. Like you're looking at a store shelf and it tells you if the price is low or high compared to other stores in the area. Or you're fixing your car and it shows the steps you need to execute.
A camera recording is neither smart nor useful IMO.
It's very useful for big brother Zuckerberg though.
This is so silly — they only record when you press a button, not continuously, and they can only record for like 3 mins max and there’s a light that indicates to everyone around you when they are recording.
Meanwhile there’s a bunch of people in line with their phones out, which do not indicate when the camera is on. But somehow that’s different.
It’s a bummer because they’re great for taking family photos/videos. Also great as an Airpods replacement. A little flimsy but the tech is 90% there.
I wish Apple made them instead of Meta — I think they’d do a better job of bringing them to the market while maintaining public trust.
Banray.eu
You stay in your bubble if it makes you uncomfortable. Real people have real uses for this tech, whether you like it nor not.
How are the glasses more beneficial than the far, far more durable helmet-mounted cameras that construction workers use, or the industrial-grade chest-mounted cameras used in many other industries?
Also, how well do the glasses function underground? Are there pico cells down there to provide connectivity?
Helmets add lots of head space - not usable in very tight areas, especially the ones I'm in where you have to breathe out to get through a gap.
"Also, how well do the glasses function underground? Are there pico cells down there to provide connectivity?"
They work fine. Typical 4k action glasses actually have decent low-light performance (mine work great with the fluorescent reaction of rocks from a ~200mW output UVC lamp) and I just upload once I'm above-ground and have the memory card put into my laptop.
(a) Have a camera (b) Are recording?
It's just like AI, people discount the positives and magnify the negatives.
Europe and the US have had different legal perspectives on public photography, and each has had both costs and benefits. Perhaps those contrasts could help inform discussion.
As with any tech in its infancy, thought experiments might illuminate options. I suspect few here would object to a camera feeding only a chip which outputs only hand pose for gestural UI. What if that chip output a facial UID, for help with 'hey, that's someone I know', and that UID was transient and never left the glasses? What if that UID was sent to Meta for arbitrary monitization? If the last two drew different answers, then perhaps the downvoted suggestion to regulate the use, not the camera, might deserve discussion.
Notable elephants in the room include: Trust - with societal lying normalized, and misrepresentation pervasive in policy discourse, it's not unreasonable to suggest that we're societally incapable of regulating use, so broad prohibitions are the only policy tool available. Imperial conservative stagnation - as with drone's "yes it could be an economically transformative technology, and a militarily critical industry, but at every stage of its exploration, it must be perfectly safe(tm)!" (the emph bit heard here on HN) - turning your back on modernization and reform has consequences when you have rival states. Privilege - having done dementia caregiving, there are lots of people whose lives would be profoundly improved by having ride-along see-what-they-see AI companions - "Did I have dinner? Yes, 10 minutes ago. You had X. Maybe you'd like a snack of Y to get more protein?" - even a valid claim of "this tech would hurt me" deserves a pause for "but how might it help others?".
I wish we had some social tech to facilitate doing better at this kind of discussion.
what if i don't want to be recognized by you? or by anyone else? the problem is not that it allows some people to recognize me. the problem is that it allows everyone to identify everyone else at scale.
if this tool can help someone because they have a medical condition then we can make these devices specifically available for them. that's just like allowing support animals in places where animals are not usually allowed to be.