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Comment by mschild | Hacker News Reader

The main complaint and law that HateAid, the organization that lodged the complaint, is using, is that recording devices have to be visible as such. Glasses are not a known and widely accepted video/photo device and therefore affected by that law.

Effectively, their complaint is that a specific model looks too much like normal sunglasses that other people are unable to distinguish them as such.

Article with a bit more detail:

https://www.heise.de/en/news/AI-glasses-Criminal-charges-aga...

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I imagine Meta and folks wearing these glasses would object to webcam like behavior where it tells you with a LED that it's consuming the video feed. Could be same for taking a picture.

But then probably fewer people would buy them.

These glasses have a LED. I haven't seen it for real, but I've heard it's not discernible at daylight.

Even so, it might still run afoul of German law. The German radio directive specifically forbids recording devices made to blend in and be surreptitious. The LED would have to be extremely obvious and hard to tamper with.

(It's not even a privacy directive; you're just not allowed to sell devices like that. Baby monitors have run afoul it.)

[German] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Datenportal/V...

Blue is "online offers actioned/removed", orange is "legal proceedings initiated against vendors & sellers". That's more than 7 legal actions per day in 2024.

The LEDs can be disabled with a hardware mod.

https://thenewthings.com/p/i-paid-someone-to-hack-my-meta-gl...

That's not an argument in this (legal) case since the regulation applies at the time the device is sold.

(It just means the applicable law is another one, i.e. the one against recording in secret, which applies regardless of what the recording device looks like.)

[Ed.: it could still be considered a design/manufacturing defect, I guess. It certainly would fail if it were intentionally made such that the LED is trivially disabled. The courts may have to decide if this is in the grey zone.]

You’re also not allowed to record anyone without their explicit consent if there is an expectation of privacy, even in public spaces. That makes the device use very likely to be illegal (assuming you use it to record videos in public spaces and it’s sensitive enough to record your surroundings)

Heads should be rolling at Ray-Ban, they've permanently tarnished an iconic American brand by aligning themselves with big tech.

Ray Ban has been an Italian brand for decades. They got bought by Luxottica in 1999.

That doesn't change the fact that its an iconic American brand, directly associated with American culture and design.

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