Yesterday I saw someone with Meta smart glasses in public for the first time. Even just standing near him was unpleasant. It doesn’t matter whether it’s recording, pointing a camera and mics at somebody who didn’t agree to it feels rude and a bit shocking.
I worry that this is becoming more acceptable or do others feel the same way? Companies keep pushing forward, now with smart neckleses, smart headphones, (all equipped with camera and mic). Are these all doomed to fail? What feature would convince me or others to actually start using them? It’s certainly not chatgpt strapped on your face, or a shitty quality spy camera either.
If any of my friends or family wore these, I wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking to them.
Im interested in your experiences. Thanks for reading.
I mean I get it. Weird to have a private company walking monitoring device that proudly does so so they can… Upload more to social media? It just sorta marks you as a hyper user and in the past we would have doubted those types even came outside.
Like I would pair it with the people who have only clothes and decorated with souvenir items from some random brand. It IS a weird look.But unfortunately Flock exists and they are everywhere, spun up in seconds with cameras just running light and are even easily hacked. So like privacy wise its less a concern but personally… Definitely not a fan and I get uncomfortable around them. I don’t want to be used for content or actively sold by you just for being near.
You don’t get it. The smart glasses don’t matter, man. The panopticon’s already built. What do you think the AI bubble is all about? Do you really believe $35 trillion’s in play over a bullshit generator that synthesizes pornography and tells you to kill yourself? All that compute is needed to integrate the data from the Flock cameras, the smart phones, the smart homes. It’s all connected, man, or it soon will be. Big Brother is here. You’ll never go unobserved, unrecorded, again.
Written in jest and yet using CV at scale on GPUs initially used for LLMs make sense.
Yet… why do so? As I wrote just minutes ago in https://lemmy.ml/post/41546700/23280257 there is already very high quality signal that requires nearly no compute : your wireless trace. Google/Apple and your mobile provider or ISP and thus the government hosting it already know 24/7 where you are, how active you are, etc solely from your 5G/4G signal. Well OK for activity it’s with the IMU but the point is this is basically computationally free.
You move around,
- your mobile phone scans for 5G signals,
- login in a nearby tower via its SIM/eSIM
- and voila, you are there. It’s basically few requests on some databases and it’s instantaneous.
compare this with
- your identity with facial features (lots of photo) is store in a large DB
- there is no known location so a network of thousands if not millions of cameras have to be queried to try to match your facial features again the last frames, so that’s ~gigabytes of data to send somewhere or query all those cameras with setup locally
- there is a match! then repeat this locally for the next cameras, maybe just hundreds
- light change or hoodie on, no match, restart process
this is ridiculously expensive to run. I’m not saying it can’t be done (it’s been done and it’s not hard to setup) but… WHY would one do so when the first setup works more reliably and is orders of magnitude cheaper?
Obviously both can be combined but also both can be bypassed conveniently and extremely cheaply (leave your phone home, wear sunglasses and a hygiene mask) so even though a realistic scenario I’d argue it’s not rational to not just rely on what already works for the vast majority of situations.
People used to call me a creep whenever I raised concerns about mass surveillance. Like, obviously if I wasn’t okay with that then I must have been planning something nasty, right?
Well this is precisely the scenario I was trying to warn about, and it’s far nastier than anything I could have possibly done, even if that were my intention…
This feels like it’s supposed to be tongue in cheek, but it’s too close to reality tbh.
I wrote it humorously, but I’m only about 5% joking. Sure looks to me like Minority Report’s about to come true, only the precogs will be called Claude, Grok, and GPT, and they’ll first be tasked with finding Mexicans rather than murderers.
Fully automated drab earth fascism is here, baby.
I recently asked a friend to remove their meta glasses while we were out to eat. It was awkward for a moment but they were understanding, and we had a good talk about privacy and tech after.
If any of my friends showed up with facebook glasses, they would be ridiculed to the point of them either getting rid of them or us no longer being friends.
I’m not here for your entertainment, or whatever you’re going to use that footage for. That’s your deal, not mine. Take them off, or not coming in the house.
Ok
Only an absolute tool would wear that crap.
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There should be a law brought in so that any glasses fitted with cameras/microphones have to be clearly labeled (as in etched so it cant be removed) with a warning along the front face of the glasses and also make it to they can only be bright obnoxious high visibility colours like neon green/orange.
Lets see how “fashionable” they are when they make you look like a member of LMFAO.
The meta glasses supposedly are designed with a bright led on the front that comes on when the camera or microphone is recording.
Edit: I had forgotten when I wrote this that there are companies already offering services where you can send in your meta glasses and they claim they will somehow disable/bypass the LED indicator.
Yeah and people put little pieces of black tape over it that blends in with the black sunglasses and render that LED meaningless.
I don’t think that works anymore because I believe the LED is also a sensor that when covered (no light in) prevents recording.
And that doesn’t work because you can place your hand over the camera which will trick the glasses into thinking you are in the dark which will allow you to start recording, then you just take your hand away.
Youtube is full of videos that show people how to circumvent the LED on the these glasses. Its not rocket science.
I’m not saying that it’s not feasible, I’m saying the hardware changed since those first “hacks”.
Are you saying you tried on the latest version and covering the light sensor within the LED allow recording?
Because my best is that the videos are showcasing this on older models which precisely did not included that sensor. Here is a 404 episode on that https://www.404media.co/how-to-disable-meta-rayban-led-light/
Some laptops have that. They’re completely impossible to circumvent, right?
Depends entirely on the implementation. If it’s wired right into the power line for the camera/mic, then it comes on when power goes to that hardware, but without extra engineering you could just pull off the LED and solder over the gap in the trace/wire.
And I have to apologize, I had forgotten that there are already third party companies advertising services to bypass/disable it on the meta glasses. Have to edit my last comment.
This is the next logical iteration of “if you aren’t doing anything wrong then you have no reason to be concerned with people filming you without your knowledge/consent!”
It was never a good argument, but too many people seemed to believe it and now we’re here…
Since these types never understand anything until it directly affects them, we should all ensure it does quickly and at all costs, because eventually it will cost us everything.
New rule: recording someone else without their consent gives them partial ownership of your device: enough that they can rightfully destroy it if they so choose.
Glasshole indeed!
What an absolute Stacy, massive respect
21st Century Bernie Goetz.
I remember back in the 80s,.and SONY Walkman cassette players became a thing. I worked in a record store, and I was an early adopter, although I had to go with a knock-off because I couldn’t afford the SONY at $3.35 /hour minimum wage.
I loved being able to listen to music while I was driving (way better sounding than whatever shitty radio I had in my shitty car), park, get out, walk across the parking lot, through the mall, and to my store (or wherever), without stopping the music.
I quickly realized that as I walked through the mall, I would get really dirty looks from people, especially older ones. They really took offense at me minding my own business and listening to music. I’m sure they would have been more offended if I was just walking around with a boombox blasting on my shoulder, like the style in some places at the time.
I don’t know why they would care about me listening to music, or why they would think they have any right to let me know their opinion (through their visual cues), and mostly why I’d care what they’d think. I didn’t care what they thought about it, and I was offended that they presumed that I should care what they think.
Having seen what people now accept I would not want to bet that these will fail. Never thought people would be OK with Google using their phone to record their exact location 24/7 and save a searchable history of it for example but it seems that never was even controversial. Same with phones and other dedicated little devices that are always listening…
met up with a family member once who was wearing them and i immediately put on a face mask.
I would not stay nearby.
Imho this ‘trend’ will end:
- the day enough of the wearers start getting punched in the face. Not that I encourage anyone to do that, I don’t, but seeing how… angry and and willing to fight so many people already are, I can’t imagine it won’t happen more and more as those stupid glasses become more common.
- If enough people start shaming them/their behavior, and it becomes a hurdle to wear those in public.
Otherwise, it will probably become as ‘normal’ as messaging people sitting right next to you instead of, you know, talking to them.
You can always cover your face in public. Islam is the light.
Are there any glasses that block smart glasses available? Like a localized jammer, or like shining an IR light at a camera, sort of thing?
One project that can help with this is the OUI-SPY, a small piece of open source hardware. The OUI-SPY runs on a cheap Arduino compatible chip called an ESP-32. There are multiple programs available for loading on the chip, such as “Flock You,” which allows people to detect Flock cameras and “Sky-Spy” to detect overhead drones. There’s also “BLE Detect,” which detects various Bluetooth signals including ones from Axon, Meta’s Ray-Bans that secretly record you, and more. It also has a mode commonly known as “fox hunting” to track down a specific device.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/how-hackers-are-fighting-back-against-ice
I would get a very powerful magnet and ruin their devices. That works right? Otherwise I’ll get a device that scrambles smart devices. Fuck Zuckerberg.
Magnets have no effect on flash memory or storage.
Does it? Would be keen to know about this. Gonna have to keep some in my bag 🤣
If you hit the glasses hard enough it will to the job as good as a hammer… failing that it takes a tad too much power for a « magnet » to affect electronics at a distance.
😄 I’m a millennial so back in the day we learned that magnets ruin some electronics, but things might have changed now. So we need a knowledgeable tech person to let us know.
Magnets mostly messed with tapes, floppies and hard disks. I believe you could also mess up a CRT’s calibration with one.
None of those technologies are particularly commonplace these days, especially not in those glasses.
I mean an MRI level magnet could crush them, but you’re gonna struggle to move that around
I guess CRTs were fine. I used to play a lot with that. If it’s looking funny, use degauss and watch the magic.
DONKkk vvvvvvvvvvrrrrrr click
And it’s very expensive.
Is there any song or maybe some audio that could be played out loud to discourage sharing of content or maybe get them on a list or something?
I’m usually against punching people in the face from behind then running away…
From behind? How many elbows do you have?
To be fair, you should have no expectation of privacy when in public. You’re constantly being recorded when in public whether you know it or not. If you keep this mindset then you can take steps to secure what little privacy is possible. Masks, hats, and IR blocking eyeglass lenses or sunglasses would be my protocol. And mindfully avoiding unscrupulous cameras. Also don’t discredit the power of blending in, become an unnoticeable object that blends into the background.
In private, if a friend was wearing them, you should have more expectation of privacy and should voice the concerns to the friend. And if they don’t care then walk away, they’re not a good friend anyways.
There’s already people pointing smart cameras and mics hooked up to Meta that point at me everytime I go in public. That’s life in a major city where half the people have Facebook on their phone. The TVs have mics, there’s wifi security cameras everywhere with all kinds of terrible privacy policies. The smart glasses are tanking your anger right now but even if there were no glasses you are already surrounded
So no, you impotent nerds aren’t going to punch your way out of this predicament. I bet most of you couldn’t punch your way out of any predicament
;p
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