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Comment by soco | Hacker News Reader

When you film with a camera you are holding a camera and you're pointing it at people. When you film with your glasses, nothing of such happens. And the ridiculous defense "it has a light" is just that, ridiculous: you can't see a light if you're not looking directly at it and have convenient surrounding lighting.

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I'd say it's easier to covertly film someone with a smartphone than with glasses that have a lightup LED. With the smartphone you can just angle it to look as if you're casually holding it or using it normally.

Pretty easy to block the led too, though.

Are we arguing about what the creepiest way is to film people on the streets? Who would want that in the first place?? I don't need encouraging creeps... I didn't hear yet "filming the ICE" as a argument - probably the only one I could understand, but there the problem is not the glasses anyway (nor the solution).

> angle it to look as if you're casually holding it or using it normally.

So you film the ground?

Wide angle camera

That’s legal?

In places where covert recording is legal.

Such places should be illegal.

That would violate a different law, though, § 201 StGB (German penalty code) forbids recording if there is a reasonable assumption of privacy (which you can have even in public).

This complaint is about a different law (§ 8 TDDDG), that explicitly forbids selling and owning devices that are designed as every-day objects and that can record sound and/or video and that.

This is the relevant law: https://www.buzer.de/8_TDDDG.htm (It used to be §90 TKG.)

It's specifically about bug-like devices which transmit the recording. A typical consumer camera does not provide simultaneous uploading, I think. A device that is just recording for storage is not regulated this way.

The law has been applied to baby monitors disguised as toys, which makes some sense to me. Smart watches and phones where the microphone can be controlled remotely, with that capability being marketed specifically for monitoring purposes, have also been targeted.

> A typical consumer camera does not provide simultaneous uploading

I think most cameras these days include the ability to live stream?

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