Is anyone at meta going to be bald accountable?
An absolute privacy nightmare especially in places like Switzerland or Germany where recording people (subject focus) even in public is not permitted without consent but you have tourists now showing up everywhere wearing these.
The LED is barely visible during the day and some have modified their glasses to disable/remove it.
That's the prime example of a law that can't be enforced and thus shouldn't exist. You go in town, you can be recorded inadvertantly, as long as it's not some creep stalking you, I say it's fine.
If you post a video online of someone's worst day which you decided to film for entertainment, they can legally go after you.
They haven't yet. Don't see why now.
-Mark Zuckerberg, 2004
https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/22/facebook-says-it-fixed-a-b...
Supposedly it was a bug, but with Facebook, who knows.
Have you been alive for the past decade?
That image always felt dystopian to me
Vote with your dollars people.
The data required is small. Each embedding might be 1/2 kB per face.
> power budget
To process a video for biometric feature extraction, it might take 0.5% to 2% of the total power used to record a video. Video uses a lot of power (compression, screen, etc)
Assuming you've got a modern device (e.g. with Apple Neutral Engine). Disclosure: Googled info (Gemini).
I missed Facebook for about a day, and after that I barely even thought about it. In 2021 I bought an Oculus Quest 2, which at the time required a Facebook account so I made a throwaway one, but other than that I haven't been on Facebook (and I haven't even touched my Quest 2 in three years).
Point being, it's really not hard to get off Facebook and to ditch Meta products. More people should delete it.
I still spend too much arguing on HN but not as much as I was on Facebook and the audience here is generally more educated and so the arguments aren't as mind-numbing.
Maybe this changed since I set mine up, but I felt so damn informed I was getting tired of tapping I understand.
https://japandaily.jp/why-you-cant-turn-off-the-camera-shutt...
That's just nonsense. Your feeds seem to be polluted by what you are seeking out, as I've never seen a video on any service that shows humiliation of anyone.
I watch a lot of 1st ammendment audit videos, and that is never about humiliation, though many people end up looking very ignorant of the laws concerning recording in public which is in the 1st ammendment.
This is why paparazzi exist and how they operate. It's the dirty, dingy cost of having a free press, freedom of travel, freedom to hold public officials accountable, subject to the same laws you are; you can't waffle or restrict or grant exceptions, because those inevitably, invariably get abused by those in power.
A cultural convention that lets people make honest mistakes, but turn it off when someone says "hey, you're recording" seems like a good solution. Just need to make it easily visible and obvious to others - you can run around in public with a big news camera on your shoulder or a tripod and you usually won't get hassled. It's just the idea of being covertly recorded, even while in public, that gets creepy.
In private settings, as with public, you are typically free to leave a setting where people are recording.
The law has no specifications for what type of device can do the recording, pr for how long a recording can be.
And you're still forced to carry a smartphone anyway with these glasses since they require internet connection.
Is this fashion, or something I'm not aware of ? They look horrendous to me.
>since they require internet connection.
Only the AI features require internet. You can technically take pictures and video without carrying around your phone, but realistically people are going to carry there phone with them.
Stop thinking like an end user and think like a Meta shareholder.
Meta don't own smartphone hardware or operating systems. Apple and Android locked that market up. But if they can create a new market and own that, then imagine all the data they can harvest!
I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.
Not perfect, but better than nothing I guess. I don't think I've noticed the glasses IRL anywhere, but if I start seeing them, I'm definitely installing the app and avoiding any interactions with those people.
I still see folks wearing Wayfarers almost every single day, and have owned various (non-Meta) pairs of them for most of my adult life. It's literally one of the most popular sunglasses designs of all time.
Can you elaborate on this?
This isn't true. Most everyone hates the fact they are being surveilled, but it is pervasive and people only can deal with so many complications in life.
Avoiding surveillance is not a decision or action, it is 1000 decisions and actions. Endless decisions and actions.
If you think about it, the "dork" position was the one that was most normal, it's the status-quo. The people wanting to record in lockerooms and what not is not the status-quo. They win because most people are short-sighted, or even secretly love hurting themselves.
The times I do I see folks wearing them the normie reaction is typically “oh cool” and not some libertarian allergic reaction to technology.
I propose we just assume people with meta glasses are recording others in public and we call them creeps. Shaming works, we should use it more.
Cops also announce their presence in uniforms and are operating as government agents. People already moderate their behavior around cops so being recorded isn’t as big a deal.
Cops control when the cameras are filming, if footage is retained and what/when/if footage is released. Body cams are just yet another surveillance tool against the population.
[1]https://www.aclu-wa.org/news/will-body-cameras-help-end-poli...
Doorbell cameras are also typically pointed toward public streets, where again, there is no expectation of privacy. Even then, many people have been removing Ring cameras after they were shown to automatically upload video without user's knowledge.
Yet.
A face camera has no light or warnings (you just put tape over the small light), and is operated by a pervert.
Not sure how it is where you live, but doorbell cameras are commonly criticized where I live. With many people claiming they don't feel comfortable walking around anymore knowing that the entire neighborhood is filming them.
People are more okay with cameras in public areas and less okay if it's in intimate, social, private situations, inside apartments, individual offices etc.
Body cam - used to protect the police and people being policed in a potentially hot conflict. Recording is scoped to these specific interactions that rarely occur for most people.
Doorbell cam - highly controversial. See response to dog-finding superbowl ad.
Body cam wore on face - Mass surveillance in potentially every conceivable social context. Data owned by Meta, a company known for building a profile on people that don't even use their products.
They’re controversial on hacker news but I don’t think people in the “real world” care all that much.
How that connects to the meta glasses is certainly up for debate —- the doorbells provide a lot of value to the user (know who is at the door remotely!), the glasses are more of a mixed bag.
I think the difference is that these cameras are relatively concealed, and can be used to record every interaction, even in pretty intimate/private settings. Yes you could do this with a cell phone but it would be pretty obvious your recording if you're trying to get more than just the audio of an interaction.
There's very little sense to me in searching for meaning in any of this. It just is, people are that way. There are no lines and boundaries based on anything but just whims.
Apparently they sold 7 million of these. So I think a whole lot of people don't care about this aspect.
And that's why I don't talk to Siri to drive my car.
you can still take the glasses off. i dont own glasses but do use vr and the shift between putting on/taking off a headset feels more intentional than the glance at a phone. feels less addictive to me. maybe lightweight glasses and dark patterns will "fix" that eventually
Great glasses would solve a problem, I could take my stupid phone out of my hand.
And glasses will get replaced by contacts, which get replaced with brainwave tech.
The tail wags the dog. Wearing glasses may become inherently cool if all the cool people in your insta feeds are wearing them.
When these types of glasses are virtually indistinguishable from regular sunglasses, and a critical mass of cool people wear them all the time, the reluctance from the rest of us will melt away.
I hope I'm wrong. Really.
There isn't really a counter to that because most people will buy these things to watch movies on the airplane or the train, and they won't see the yoke until it's too late.
My friends always have a cheap shot when I wear them but are completely fine now and appreciate fun candid videos I send them
Amazing for vacations with the kids
And all of that is to ignore that neither gen1 or 2 of Google Glass attempted to look like regular glasses. The Meta frames are largely indistinguishable from regular glasses unless you are very up close.
It's difficult to draw a bright line between these activities:
- I told someone else something I saw the other day
- I painted a picture of the public square or wrote a book about specific activities that I witnessed
- I specifically remembered an individual based on their face, visible tattoos, location, license plate, or some other unique factor and voluntarily testified to that fact in a court of law
- I spent every day at the same corner making note of the various people/vehicles that I saw
- I stuck a camera at that same point (perhaps on my private properly directly abutting a public space) and recorded everything, posted it publicly on the internet, and used automated technology to identify people, text, vehicles, etc
- I paid a different person every day to follow someone around and record what they did
- I developed a drone system that could follow specific individuals/vehicles from airspace I'm allowed to occupy
Pretty much everything I described above is legal in most of the United States. Obviously it gets creepier and more uncomfortable going down the list (I don't really like it when I'm the subject of any of these activities) but how do you stop this?
I'll at least throw out some options
- Implement some form of right to forget
- Forbid individuals or organizations from doing any of these
- Enact actual "civil rights" level privacy protections (extend HIPAA? automatic copyright for human faces? new amendment?) that include protection of individual's DNA, unique facial features, and other "uniquely human" attributes
I get why people are creeped out by them, but we get filmed or photographed hundreds of times a day in a big city when we are in public spaces. Gatekeeping a potentially useful technology for being filmed in public -- well, everyone is _already_ filmed in public. ATM cameras, stoplight cameras, drone cameras, smartphone cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras. You are on camera every time you step out of your house. You are on camera every time you open your work computer. Singling out cameras in eyeglasses as "creepy" is kind of worrying about a drop in the ocean. Cameras on self-driving cars. Nanny cams. Closed-circuit cameras. The things are everywhere, and they are always invasions of privacy. Why is the line the "creeper" glasses?
I'd be ok with it if we were for banning all non-consensual recordings in all spaces. But we're very much not.
And if we're not, then having a personal heads-up display that is contextual to your current surroundings or has augmented reality capability is too useful to not use (eventually). I'm bad with names, and good with faces. That use-case alone would be worth it for me, if it were available.
different companies 'launder' it differently: with voice, it was done by "accidental" voice assistant activations. i guess with glasses, maybe there will be less window dressing this time. after all, it is clearly pitched to see what you see, at all times of the day.
similar controversy happened with the various roomba products, although arguably that was a combination of data harvesting + lazy engineering.
The root cause is that meta didn’t want to pay the fair market value for those videos and just stole them from its users by burying it in TOS.
If they were honest about their intentions most people would say no or demand payment for providing something of value.
Meta aims to introduce facial recognition to its smart glasses while its biggest critics are distracted, according to a report from The New York Times. In an internal document reviewed by The Times, Meta says it will launch the feature “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.”
I'd rather we normalize that than adversarial fashion.. but that's probably what you were looking for.
I think even the political activists will be extremely divided on this one. You have privacy on one hand, accessibility and a genuinely life-changing technology on the other.
Who has been distracted from Facebook’s shenanigans? Who are they talking about? Is it me? Because I can tell you I have certainly not been distracted on that front. Am I supposed to feel guilty? Am I supposed to hold somebody accountable who should’ve been paying attention?
I do actually understand why it’s done, but I just find it very grating and if your goal is to actually raise awareness, shaming people is generally not the way to go about it.
Also the classic “we can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time” thing
It isn't really "rhetoric", they're talking like they believe this actually happens, this is strategy.
And I tend to agree with them that things like attention and political capital are ultimately finite resources.
I've found that the "we can do two things" and "we can walk and chew bubblegum" line of argument to be simplistic and just wrong (and pretty incredibly patronizing). I think the world works exactly the way Meta thinks that it does here.
It might blow up and turn into a Streisand effect, but more often than not this kind of strategy works.
Much like how people think they can multitask and talk on the phone and drive at the same time and every scientific measure of it shows that they really can't.
Is that a good enough explanation to reduce your feelings of being personally targeted?
On September 11th 2001 a UK government department's press chief told their subordinates it was a "good day to bury bad news".
The idea is pretty simple - you might be obligated to announce something that you know will be poorly received, like poor train performance figures, but you can decide the exact day you announce it, like on a day when thousands have died in a terror attack. What would otherwise be front-page news is relegated to a few paragraphs on page 14.
Facebook proposes a similar strategy: Get the feature ready to go, wait until there's some much bigger news story, and deploy it that day.
If you're blind, it's of course understandable but that's pretty much it in terms of cases in which I would consider the glasses acceptable to wear in public.
> Hey Meta, is it safe to cross the street
> You are absolutely correct to check whether it's safe to cross before crossing! (emoji). Let me check for you(emoji)
> ...10% ...40% ...80% ...100% DONE. (made up progress bar)
> It is perfectly safe to cross right now! (emoji)
> Thanks Meta! (user dies)
“I saw a video where a man puts the glasses on the bedside table and leaves the room.”
“Shortly afterwards his wife comes in and changes her clothes”, one of them says.
I asked 2 cops in a patrol car if I could install cameras on my own and how I should go about it. They said they don't mind them. Officially it's illegal unless you have a permit, but it's so widespread and the law is so unenforced that it's practically 99.99% legal.
I can point a few cameras to the street and record everything 24/7. When I'm on a bus I'm being recorded by a few cameras. On most bus/tram/subway stops there are cameras. In stores and public buildings there are cameras. Most cars have cameras for insurance or general safety concerns. Self-driving cars would have to have cameras, as well as delivery robots.
If we accept this shitty reality, why shouldn't I wear a camera and a mic, too?
Or do you think that those cameras are less secure because the leadership is not good with their people?
I'm not sure I follow the criticism here.
What's the material concern to tracking that glasses add?
To be illegal, it would either have to be focused on the genitals or of sexual content. Nudity is not automatically sexual.
That's my default assumption.
I don't agree that responsibility to comply with Swedish law is on the wearer. This should motivate prosecutors to immediately order raids to secure any data relating to the processing of the data.
I also think the Swedish camera surveillance law is also applicable and there's a deceptive element since the cameras are disguised as glasses.
So the world can label them as Hentai glasses and move on
The creepiness concern is real, but I think people misplace where the actual surveillance happens. The most consequential stores of personal data aren’t ad networks they’re things like banks, hospitals, insurers, and telecoms. These institutions hold information about your health, finances, movements, and relationships, indexed and searchable by employees you’ve never met, governed by policies you’ve never read.
Realistically, there’s very little an individual can do to completely opt out.
My take is: if the main outcomes are that I get shown ads for things I don’t need and my facecomputer knows the difference between a fork and a spoon… I… I can live with that.
> “The algorithms sometimes miss. Especially in difficult lighting conditions, certain faces and bodies become visible”.
Right, “difficult lighting conditions,” not sure when we’d run into those in situations where we might be concerned with privacy. A 97% success rate looks good on paper.
But I'm a bit confused by the article because it describes things that seem really unlikely given how the glasses work. They shine a bright light whenever recording. Are people really going into bathrooms, having sex, sharing rooms with people undressed while this light is on? Or is this deliberate tampering, malfunctioning, or Meta capturing footage without activating the light (hard to believe even Meta would do this intentionally).
I feel like this article is either a bombshell, or totally confused.
Havoc•2h ago
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/22/mark-zuck...
bigyabai•2h ago
ge96•1h ago
It does seem harder to tape the phone camera since the in/out motion into your pocket I imagine would remove the tape.
wongarsu•1h ago
For the front camera that's a lot more difficult. You could probably modify one of those flexible screen protectors to black out the camera, but it'd be very inconvenient to take off.
Maybe there is some niche android phone that offers physical shutters, similar to the ones on Lenovo laptop webcams
lnrd•1h ago
The manufacturer might access it, Apple states they don't, Google and Samsung I'm not sure. A bad actor with 0days might too.
jiggawatts•1h ago
bigyabai•1h ago
reorder9695•57m ago
numpad0•1h ago
rationalist•18m ago
pimlottc•1h ago
xoxxala•1h ago
I 3d printed a flap for my webcam.