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Comment by ifwinterco | Hacker News Reader

Either Mark Zuckerberg is playing an elaborate practical joke on everyone, or this is further proof that the West Coast tech scene has become such a bubble people have lost all sense of how ordinary people think.

There is just no way this was going to fly in 2026 given high and increasing negative sentiment globally towards tech, and I'm not sure what made them think otherwise

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Meanwhile, Tesla drivers are driving around with a dozen cameras mounted on their vehicle pointing in every direction.

Who would have thought that would be socially acceptable in 2026.

This isn’t specific to Tesla, both Rivian and Waymo have similar numbers of cameras. This seems essential for self-driving. Thankfully people find it socially acceptable outside of the tech bubble. I’d prefer to have self-driving rather than less cameras roving the roads.

Very different. Lots of cars other than Tesla have cameras. Cars record the surroundings on streets (and if Tesla, there’s no audio). Meta glasses are in your face and in very private social settings recording people in vulnerable situations, and as seen on TikTok vids, often used to get embarrassing reactions from people who don’t realize they are being recorded. Cameras on cars have a real purpose, self driving and to record accidents/vandalism

You can’t wear a Tesla into a bathroom or other private space.

Dash cams have been a thing for decades

and they are banned in Austria and prepare to pay hefty fine if police notice them

https://www.oeamtc.at/thema/vorschriften-strafen/zulaessigke...

That article doesn't say they are blanket banned in general.

Indiscriminate, permanent saving of recordings and distributing the footage is banned.

Using the dashcam to document incidents or accidents with saving a limited time span of video triggered by a sensor/timer is allowed.

TLDR pretty much all dashcams are banned, if police randomly stops you and find you have there recording without being in accident, it's illegal

I mean, there isn't even a practical use for this that isn't just non-consensual surveillance. Everyone carries a high-quality camera for making content and image searching already, and Siri and Alexa have already cornered the market (whatever that still exists) on voice assistants. There's a reason why we're not all wearing Google Glasses on our faces...

In the US, Meta sold 7 million glasses units last year and is projected to sell 25+ million next year. Waymos already record everything happening in most of the area of many cities, and use much more than just cameras. 6g standard has sensing built in. Perhaps it is not the West Coast that is in the bubble.

Waymos don’t precisely harass women and upload the footage to their instagram feed

They're not going to sell 25+ million more units when there's a very real threat of being assaulted while wearing them.

FWIW, I was one of the original 8,000 individuals who got Google Glass when they were first released in 2013.

I wore them for years whenever I was outside my home; only once did someone come up to me and say "Stop looking at me with those on."

As other people said, the difference is dashcams and Waymos need the cameras for practical purposes, as do Ring doorbells etc, so while the privacy implications aren't great people will continue to do that stuff.

Wearing a camera on your face during normal social interactions is a deeply weird thing to do, it's not the same thing at all

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