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Comment by Octoth0rpe | Hacker News Reader

> I would use them because the company that makes it can’t be trusted.

I think this gets at only half of the problem. Not only can meta not be trusted, even if I trust _you_ if you were friend, I wouldn't trust any _other_ random user of such a product. As such, better to not have such a product around.

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I think I agree with this sentiment most. I am having trouble articulating it. I think wearing smart glasses in some situations is on a scale between rude, offensive, and wrong. I think that's what culture teaches us about what is and what isn't acceptable behavior, right? Like some places teach us it's rude to speak over each-other. Here in New England it is rude not to.

I am 100% on board with calling smart glasses "Pervert glasses" if worn in situations that call for it

What situations call for "Pervert glasses?"

Wearing them in a locker room or at a pool party or at the beach or really anywhere you might be likely to catch a recording of someone in a state of undress that they wouldn't want you to have a recording of?

it feels like theyre really designed for people that dont need glasses.

i dont want to have a camera stuck to my face that i dont really control in order to see

I think maybe I in-artfully wrote it - I mean: there are situations when wearing smart glasses should be labelled 'pervert glasses'. Not that there are situations that require wearing of the glasses

They're just being intentionally obtuse.

Active duty police officers. Anything that applies to bodycams should apply to other public recording devices.

The workers at Meta who watch their video feeds are the perverts.

I think eg police and military personnel should be required to wear cameras while on duty and interacting with people (So not during their whole shift, but whenever they're knowingly entering an interaction)

This may be a body camera or a camera built into glasses. That is a very legit usecase as far as I'm concerned.

There are other professions in which such a device would be a net benefit, that was just a simple example.

there are already laws in place requiring police body cameras -- why would they need to wear flimsy glasses instead?

what would these offer that can't already be done w/ their existing solutions, outside of streaming data to evil megacorps?

I understood this comment chain to be about the technology archetype of smart glasses with cameras in them, not about Meta glasses.

If it was about the latter then I'd agree that there is no usecase for them

I haven't seen anyone stop to ask why any situation period calls for wearing a secret recording device (other than police, military, etc.)? If you want to record something without your hands, there are GoPros or small devices you can wear on your head or clothing. Glasses are just the one socially acceptable accessory, other than hats, in which you can hide the fact that you're recording someone and people are less likely to call you out on it since, ostensibly, people wear glasses because they have a disability. If these glasses weren't built for perverts then they would loudly proclaim or indicate in some way that they're capable of recording people.

> I think wearing smart glasses in some situations is on a scale between rude, offensive, and wrong.

I think we should really make a distinction between products that do and do not have cameras. Most people would probably be fine with the 'smart' aspects of it if it didn't have any video recording capabilities. On the other hand, most of the average people specifically want these things to be able to record videos, so maybe hoping for such devices is a non-starter.

Correct the issue isn't Meta people just don't like the idea they could be being recorded at any time to get blasted out to the whole world. Yes, in theory you're always open to being recorded in public but the glasses make it far more subtle /and/ up close so more normal interactions become subject to the intrusion in a way that would normally be quite obvious.

It's basically the same backlash that hit Google Glass over a decade ago. Nothing has really changed about the product and the reason people reject is so viscerally when they're not the user.

At my kid's daycare, they sent home an authorization form to allow them to use your kid in pics that might be posted to the internet. Some parents declined out of privacy concerns. Now I guess we are just blasting past all of that. Kind of like AI and copyright.

10 years ago we had the same form with my kid’s daycare. They kinda got pissy about it tho as they didn’t want to have to scrub photos they posted to their Facebook and insinuated that your kid may not have as much fun if they have to “separate” them when it comes to photo time.

We told em tough don’t use our kid’s photo. So even if institutions implement this kinda thing almost non want to do it.

Phones already make people much more reserved and less "wild" eg at parties compared to pre-phone-cameras (that are always online and can upload to social media effortlessly).

It's true but phones are much more obvious that you have them out and probably filming where the glasses aren't so can be more controlled and at least reacted to. The glasses create more uncertainty about if the person is filming.

It's more obvious, but since people use their phones all the time anyway, you really have to look at the angle they hold the phone to be sure. So it's not super hard to be sneaky about it even with a phone.

Most people are pretty obvious about it if you're looking. It's still the fact they could be doing it right in front of you without you knowing that really makes people hate the subtle-camera-on-face-products.

True, though there's a lot of parties that now ban phones or put stickers on them.

I've found being over 40 has made me way less wild at parties.

Skill issue.

I'm really happy to see this turning out the same way as Glass.

It's rare we get serious wins over big tech. It's tough to think of something else that's been so roundly societally rejected, not so much as a bad product, but as something that's loathed so much it has no future.

I wish there was a way to do it without all the problems of having cameras on people's faces. The tech of AR glasses would be pretty neat to get working given I was raised on Sci-fi with visual overlays on people's vision being a pretty common piece of tech. You'd have to trust they couldn't get jailbroken to add recording though even if a company with enough trust made a set with cameras only able to be used by the inside out tracking system.

I wish there was a way to do it without all the problems of having cameras on people's faces.

Just make it obvious that they're not ordinary glasses, but recording devices.

Not just a tiny LED that can be covered, but something like the camera is on an arm that swings out in front of the wearer so there's no mistaking that a recording is in progress.

The fact that they're designed for stealth shows the nefarious intent.

For AR glasses the current best option for tracking is inside out tracking so the camera would basically always be deployed.

I don't think we have to go so far as assigning nefarious intent here, there are a lot of reasons they're designed as they are. For example your proposed solution is bulky, expensive and prone to damage, so there's plenty of non-nefarious reasons they don't have it operate that way.

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