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Discussion (157 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
I am 100% on board with calling smart glasses "Pervert glasses" if worn in situations that call for it
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.
Different stokes, though.
It can be less intrusive than using a phone, I believe. That makes it a step closer to being present. (I don't know specifics, but I'm assuming that the display can be turned off when not in use.)
Also, if someone already wears glasses, why not have glasses that can do more?
You can simply talk to people, we don't have to enable your perversions because you refuse to interact with humans.
(didn't work out that way in practice, but that was the idea)
The core problem of solitude is curiosity and sonder.
When I smell fennel on a hike, I want to know what it is - yeah, this is dog fennel.
When I see a strange symbol on a taxi car, I want to know why it is 3 arrows on bow and what that is.
Seeing a strange dog and wondering what kind of dog that is (a whippet?). A glimpse of a black bird with red shoulder patches.
Hearing someone's ringtone (not these days anymore) and wonder why it is familiar ("ah, it is spelled fa9la, who'd have guessed").
There is a twinge of "This is why we can't have nice things" about the whole article for someone who can't get enough of the world you can see through your eyes.
I mean, the real answer is that we have the technology to be tech wizards. You could conjure spatially anchored widgets and screens and gauges.
You could put a cooking show screen above the stove, where a physical screen wouldn't work. You could put a synced calendar on the wall. Notes app on the fridge, weather reminders by the door. ...a million mundane conveniences in the house alone.
But still, its too heavy and to do the spatial anchoring you need a device with a constant camera feed and the only folks who make that at the moment have questionable morals.
It's like people obsessing over window managers. 99% of the time, the amount of windows you have showing is not the problem, you can't really focus on more than one at a time anyway.
Consider as a demonstrative example, race car drivers. They have had options to have extremely detailed Heads Up Displays with all sorts of absurd data available at a glance for decades. But they largely do not use tons of data like that, because it's just not compatible with the human brain. They already are looking at things more often and processing more info than a "normal" person while racing, but that heads up display would not benefit them.
Similarly, the Heads Up Display for modern fighter jets is very lightweight, focusing on allowing you to see around it and provide you the very basics of flight instrumentation and a standard orientation instrument.
People just have wild ideas about how to "optimize" their lives that are just not supported by reality.
You would be better off making flash cards about those things you want to "know" in that moment and drilling them.
I too used to be drawn to this idea. Back in 2016ish, I got an ODBII dongle for my car and app for my phone and was so excited about all the data I was going to have at a glance, just like some sort of pro! But the data was pointless and meaningless. Oh, timing advance is at 20 degrees in this throttle regime. Cool I guess.
Eventually I gave up and only have my car showing instantaneous fuel efficiency, which is the only valuable data point for my needs.
Some of the attitudes on this website, especially ones like yours, are the literal reason we are in this mess today.
Please, please, if you have the power, push back on this nonsense from the inside. We need more people talking to other people like real humans, not like notes in a digital diary.
The wrapper is hard/impossible to remove, only the company can trigger the self-release mechanism, and customers have to sign that they owe you a lot of money when they remove or damage it (which is risky, so they have to be careful or it's their problem). You basically just rent it to them, for lots of money per month, so they can show off their Good Guy Glasses (hey that's actually a name! can I have 10% please if anyone does this, I'll also help out if you want, maybe with the tiny sledge hammer. thanks!).
"Oh, you can afford Meta glasses to be a perv? Well, I can't afford the equivalent of a bunch of them every year, but I still do it because I'm a good person."
The ad could be some street kid in the rain with some guy (Morgan Freeman maybe) offering to sell it these glasses, saying "you can pay in tiny rates" and whatnot, and the kid just sadly shakes its head.. so the guy goes down on one knee, eye to eye with the kid and says... "When I was your age, I thought everything is about money, too. But some things are about being a good person. If you had a mommy, surely she would want you to be a good person, right?" The kid nods, still hesitates, but by the way the music swells as the ad fades you just know it's gonna be alright.
I’m not telling you that I think you’re wrong or foolish, to be clear! I just have this different instinct from you, although it sounds like we basically agree on the reflective level. I’m interested in what it is that directs peoples’ attention and interest in such a way that new information technology products pattern-match to “cool, shiny, new, handy, exciting; freedom” or to “dystopian social control, creepy surveillance capitalism; unfreedom.” People have different System 1 intuitions, orthogonal to their System 2 thinking!
It’s so weird because I used to be the other way. I can’t put my finger on when or how the phase transition took place in my mind.
In the beginning they stepped in with the cloud to bring the "always available" thing to the masses, while simultaneously socially and legally destroying the burgeoning p2p ecosystem. Convenience at the cost of freedom.
That had the effect of kneecapping the technological progress and knowhow of ordinary people and has left them trapped on platforms they moved their lives to but are owned by their abusers.
The abusers are now in complete control and the abused have no ability to even imagine an alternative.
The alternative is to leave these platforms. Form alternate social groups with open technologies that stay resilient to outages and attacks.
We don't need the cloud anymore for the vast majority of civic and social life.
The no camera HUD is exactly what I want, except I also want SSH (Mosh) and sending text to speech to it before I'd buy these.
This is a phenomenon among the masses of consumers who use this tech, the corporation has nothing to do with it. In fact the corporation is trying to reign in your freedom to use these tools by stopping this perverted stuff from happening. Blame US, consumers, not our corporate overlords.
Here's what I think: I think it is essential to protect freedom of the press and freedom of speech. This is just an unfortunate consequence of those freedoms. If you want to protect womens discomfort then you have to restrict these freedoms. I'm against that. This is an unfortunate situation but the alternative is worse. Because ONCE those rules are in place and codified into law, censorship and freedoms can become bigger and worse.
Women just need to deal with it. Assume that whenever you're in a public place, ALL your actions are PUBLIC. A women (and men) should dress and talk in a way conducive to the public arena.
Either way, despite what I believe, it's already to late. This freedom is already restricted by Wiretapping law. If someone threatens to kill you and you wiretap it as evidence... that evidence is dismissible in court even after said subject (you) was found dead. We are rapidly moving towards a world where a persons discomfort can control your freedoms and even dictate reality (evidence).
Same for phones too while we're at it.
That's not how the law works in the U.S. or most of Europe. A recording of the defendant threatening to kill the victim is admissible as evidence, especially if the victim winds up dead shortly thereafter. For example, see https://www.thebulldog.law/california-penal-code-633-5-the-v...
Imagine if tomorrow we invented ubiquitous instant teleportation to arbitrary locations.
There would be a moment where we hear how great it is to eliminate commutes, or air travel, followed shortly afterwards by the collapse of civilisation as societies grapple with the elimination of property, what remains of private space, and so on.
I worry that these will become so discreet that people will be suspicious of anyone wearing any glasses at all, even dumb ones, in a locker room or bathroom.
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.
In the meantime, it's quite telling that Meta is choosing not to.
They want recording to be constant, impossible to detect, and normalized. That's why the camera light is so subtle and easy to cover. The more constant surveillance is normalized, the more they have data about every single facet of our lives to sell to advertises.
In this case, maybe there could be some mandated standardized high-viz indicator that there is a camera lens being pointed at you in wearable devices.
I could see maybe allowing the high-viz element to be concealed if the mechanism concealing it also blocks the lens.
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.
First, I've had these for about 2-years. I purchased them to capture candid pictures and video's on a cruise and they were fantastic for that purpose but I've bought two pairs in two years and won't buy them again.
When you email Ray Bans for support they send you a wall of text mentioning everything their warranty doesn't cover. It was enough to discourage me from continuing to get a case replacement 2-weeks after my purchase and I just bought a third-party adapter instead. I expected more from the brand. I won't buy Ray Bans (Meta or otherwise) again because of the hostility in that one email.
My first pair died after 1-year (I gave them away after 6-months and they only lasted the new owner another 6-months). My second pair died after just over a year.
I'd love to have a good pair of camera/audio glasses. The audio is one of the best parts. But these Meta glasses aren't it for me anymore.
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 think this is pretty reasonable and something I hadn't thought of. I've been thinking about this generally a bunch as I agree that the blanket "No right to privacy in public" is really just lazy. Of course we've been filmed in public for decades now, but it wasn't being shown to people on the internet this whole time (or even to anyone in many cases). Concessions could be made for filming police/public figures and people committing crimes. It's probably harder than I think, but just being able to post anyone online is pretty terrible whether it's your "right" or not. Think of all the godawful nuisance "content" that would have just never existed.
I think this is wanting a rule that doesn't draw boundaries in a way that aligns with the natural world. Your right to see what is around you and to remember what you see is pretty fundamental. You might say there is a ethical reason not to gossip about what you remember seeing, but I would push back on the idea that it ought to be illegal for Bob to mention to Carol that he saw Alice at the store, and Meta glasses (or paparazzi or even Snow Crash's gargoyles) are a difference of degree, not kind, from the neighborhood gossip.
In which country? Certainly not the USA. There are very few countries in which this is true, such as France and Italy.
Well, let me stop you right there. That's the bit that needs fixing.
There's a museum with a very distinct building that is infamous for sending security staff out to tell photographers they cannot image the building. They have no idea what someone will do with the image, so they have no legal basis to prevent someone from taking the picture.
It’s an ok system but too restrictive and outdated IMHO, so many people recording something with their phone will unwillingly record people passing by, which is likely not allowed.
"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!
The metaverse was the same thing: they are willing to spend an inordinate amount of money on the chance that something new - in this case face-computers - will be the next big platform.
I think you are fighting a losing battle if you choose to allow your kids to enter society.
Similar to how cops getting a warrant and tapping a single person's phone is different from the government spying on all citizens at all times.
Vuzix Z100 if you can find them anywhere as well...
All of these are green LED displays though, not a full color HUD.
I do think that people should be legally allowed to make recordings in public, provided they are not harassing anyone. I do not think they are entitled to make those recordings in secret; just have a regulated indicator, like the bluetooth led.
If anyone comes up with a nice set without a camera, I'll consider it.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1963472698/memomind-one...
I don't have a pitch deck ready to go, but I think if constrained to not have a camera, product teams may still come up with a compelling product.
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.
What is _your_ default assumption re: use case? I honestly can't think of any use cases (outside of very niche a11y uses) that are not in some way offensive, though perhaps not 'perverted'.
This product is absolutely toxic, and I can't imagine myself or anyone I know being willing to associate or socialize with someone wearing them (again, excluding some very specific a11y use).
Hmm, here's a few that could potentially be implemented in augmented glasses, though I have no idea if they're implemented yet:
- Giving me directions via an overlay when I'm walking around without requiring me to pull out my phone
- overlay of a recipe when I'm cooking something new
- pointing out constellations in the night sky
- reminding me of people's names and/or upcoming plans with them
- price comparisons in grocery stores; the glasses read the prices and tell you how they compare to prices in other nearby stores
- (at the gym) correcting someone's form on weightlifting, with visual overlays
- taking pictures in general
- easy recording of ICE or police
Being able to snap a pic without getting too far out of the moment, like when I am at a museum or in a beautiful place is great.
Even better is being able to snap a picture of my grandchildren without distracting them. As soon as I pull out my phone, they are grabbing for it. Some of my favorite pics were taken by my meta glasses.
Also, I really, really hope you take them off when using the shared bathrooms at such an event. And you know, keep them off. Permanently.
most of them use meta glasses it seems to record the pov
I for one prefer taking pictures with the Meta glasses when traveling. Taking a phone out of your pocket, launching an app, holding the phone in front of you until you align the object in focus and then tapping a button starts feeling so inelegant after a while, compared to a quick press on the side of the glasses. The picture also comes out looking exactly how you saw it, videos are from your POV.
When driving, I like hearing the GPS navigation instructions discreetly without having my ears blocked by earphones and the car music being interrupted (also my wife can't stand the navigation voice and always asks me to silence it. With the glasses I can still hear the instructions).
Again, when traveling, if I'm staring at a building or something I'm curious about, I can ask the AI to tell me more things about the thing I'm looking at. It's quick and convenient.
Obvious non-perverted use cases:
* HUD when your hands are occupied - biking, cooking, etc.
* Camera-augmented navigation directions, especially indoors
* Shopping, price comparison
* Tourism, museum visits - automatically surfacing information about historical landmarks or artworks.
I would have loved to have smart glasses for these reasons, but unfortunately, the perverts ruined it for the rest of us and made the product category toxic.
It's not an assumption. People started using it for being creepy almost immediately.
https://nypost.com/2026/04/14/business/metas-pervert-glasses...
https://fortune.com/2026/07/28/ray-ban-meta-pervert-glasses-...
https://thenextweb.com/news/instagram-meta-glasses-harassmen...
https://www.wired.com/story/the-rise-of-the-ray-ban-meta-cre...
You come off as naive.
Maybe because most (tech) things do make most people's live worse without fail (such as these glasses being available)? I don't see how you can blame people for a very rational reaction here
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.
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
“Did I just run into my future wife?” he asked.
She politely let him know she wasn’t interested and moved on with her evening.
She was shocked to find out later that their interaction was recorded and posted on YouTube without her knowledge or permission, using smart glasses which, she said, looked like Meta’s glasses.
Goddamn this wild. Maybe tell people you’re recording and later plan to upload to YouTube?
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.
Alternatively, maybe the solution will be some sort of device signature embedded into the video data at the hardware level so that videos are traceable to the person that recorded them.
To me the main annoyance is that XR glasses partially rely on cameras to enable things like 6DOF tracking and hand tracking. Having that use conflated with people trying to secretly record others is pretty annoying.
People also walk around with their phones out so often. There's no way for you to know that they aren't recording. E.g. someone could easily be pretending to use their phone when climbing stairs while actually taking upskirt shots with the front camera.
Social media is also already full of people shamelessly recording others in situations where they would not want to be recorded.
Actual perverts have little reason to use these glasses specifically, and as mentioned in my previous post, the cameras have utility other than recording others.
https://www.engadget.com/2227710/a-dollar2-sticker-let-me-by...
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.
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.
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
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...
Exactly!
People could be "covertly recorded at the gym" (as the article states!) by other pre-existing recording devices (any other kind of video camera, mounted in the gym or on a gym member's smartphone or other electronic device) -- not just Meta's smart glasses!
In other words, the central issue of the article seems to stem more from consent (more specifically, the lack of consent!) than it does from a specific type of video recording device...
Stop it.
They should be banned from the market immediately.
Google already found out the hard way that these glasses aren't socially acceptable. Meta will have to learn the same hard lesson. Maybe others too.
People certainly did have a problem with them.