The Meta Glasses backlash is changing how (or if) people use them

For those who grew up post-iPhone: wearable computing was a huge, dorky trend in the 90's and early 2000's. Well, not exactly huge, but hugely dorky. Some people came to class/work/etc. absolutely strapped with a plethora of PDA's, camera's, etc.. It was actually pretty amusing and a lot of people had a great deal of fun embracing the dork energy. Then smart-phones came along, did everything a fairly ambitious wearable computing rig could, and fit in your pocket to boot.

There's a critical difference between this early embrace of what cell-phones would soon do and the wearable glasses being produced by Google and Meta: consent.

If a 90's dork had a camera in a quick-draw harness, you'd know they were taking pictures because they had to point the camera and press a button. You didn't have to worry that some of the most amoral and ruthlessly invasive companies on the planet were getting a live-feed from that camera, nor did you have to worry about what they were going to use it for. You didn't have to simply trust that they haven't disabled the recording light, nor did you have to deal with that light coming on suddenly without your permission. Back in the 90's, you could also safely assume that you just weren't interesting enough to spy on. Thanks to AI, every conversation will soon be (or already is) worth spying on, just for the relatively minor application of ad tailoring.

Meta glasses are not just a new, dorky fad that people will find amusing and soon learn to ignore. They're going to piss reasonable people off.

> Many of these services, which use simple tools like drills and dental probes to disable the recording light, have been advertised on Meta's own platforms. There are also dozens of videos on YouTube offering DIY tutorials.

This right here is why these stupid camera-on-face products are non-starters outside of very niche applications. They're never going to the next iPhone because people will assume you're secretly recording and there's a non-zero chance someone is going (rightfully) get freaked out and suddenly make it a very serious problem for you. Like did these product people ever talk to the average parent from the midwest and ask what kinds of violence they'd gleefully mete out on someone they believed to be covertly recording their children?

It's a scenario that makes these things unthinkable for public use.

Beyond this, everyone already has an excellent camera on their phone and there just isn't a need to have a face camera on all the time.

These products seem like a very easy IQ test for product managers and investors and yet huge market cap companies are failing it.