Although its even more disheartening that most people's reactions to just about anything these days is dread about how it'll make their lives worse without fail.

The users secretly videotape and share what happens when they try to pick up women. Now, a growing number of people are worried they could be covertly recorded at the gym..."

Observation: The same technology could be used to record business deals, job interviews and other negotiations with consent of the counterparty... In fact, both parties in such transactions could record this way (legally and ethically!) if each has consent of the other...

It needs a "recording" light when it is recording. But creeps will just disable the recording light with e.g. a sticker.

Idea: What if the recording light embeds a little IR signal, and if the camera recording doesn't pick up that signal, it stops working

Edit: I see they tried that already.

I know personally I'd love to see a private/local/wide distribution division or something like that where simply going outside to get groceries or whatever doesn't count as consent to be plastered across the net. There are real harms to being a public figure and the net rarely understands context.

I do have one note on all this though. I think there are some real benefits to being able to record people in public re corruption, criminality etc so I don't think any changes should be about public recording but about distribution instead.

(Repost from the thread earlier today on the same subject)

"I see you're looking at a car. How about this new Toyota RAV4?" "I see you're looking at a mobile phone. How about this new Samsung Galaxy Fold which is on sale." "I see you're looking at a cup of coffee. How about this new Latte from Starbucks down the road just a mile from here."

Just thinking about it drives me nuts with rage!

AFAICT the main use case for camera glasses is very similar to the "gopro on your helmet" use case for cyclists:

- to record cool first-person video to upload to TikTok et al

- to warn cars / creeps "I'm recording this and will send footage to the cops"

AFAICT, influencers generally want people to know they're influencers. They're using meta glasses not because the glasses let them go incognito, they're wearing them because a gopro on a helmet is dorky.

And obviously an incognito camera is going to be much less useful staving off harassment than an obvious one.

Goddamn this wild. Maybe tell people you’re recording and later plan to upload to YouTube?

With a GoPro, everyone knows there's a camera. With these, most people won't.

Google Glass looked quite different. Everyone knew how you were wearing it. Wear it long enough and people might have questions, try it out, and learn.

Hiding a camera in glasses doesn't allow for those kinds of interactions, its media going into an unknown bucket. It's also very one sided and to the benefit or decision of one person. If the person being recorded had full access to what was being recorded, maybe that might mean something to some folks.

It's too bad because there's probably cases where the form factor of meta's smart glasses are genuinely helpful for today. Instead of finding and rolling them out there first, by trying to push to the general public, the results can vary.

There's no shortage of folks and devices surreptitiously recording people with devices, or during meetings in person. Once that gets figured out socially these kinds of devices may have better reception.

The only thing that made this strategy fail the regular Meta playbook was the glasses became too popular too quickly, and rather that people slowly sinking into acceptance and complacency, they decided to speak up and shit on the glasses and call out the wearers for being creeps

They should be banned from the market immediately.

Understatement of the year. That would be true maybe 10 years ago, during the Cambridge Analytics era. We are way, way past that point, and a so called tech analyst talking about "preserving the positive sentiment" is truly bizarre

Meta and everyone else with experience knows that, for disruptive technologies, backlash is the stage before adoption. In a sense, the backlash means you're achieving market momentum.

Not all backlashes lead to adoption, but if you want to implement regulations (blur all faces in recordings, no identification, etc.), now is the time to move. At the adoption stage it seems to become normalized and people lose interest, like with other mass surveillance - obviously horrific and dangerous, but few will think about doing anything.

It just seems like a no-brainer that these things will invite violence upon you once a critical mass of the population understands what they are, and thus people will eventually stop wearing them in public.

It's also marvelous for taking videos of your children playing at the park. Here's my daughter at Port Moody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcLAByw6ZYc

Very ergonomic and you get your hands free to catch them if something is about to happen. In the end, we didn't end up using them that much because the whole charging thing makes it kind of annoying, but that's about the only reason. I can't imagine I'd use it in a context where I wouldn't wear a GoPro, but it's a cool form factor.