Why person in their right mind would voluntarily walk around with "meta" or Google or Apple or any other surveillance camera and pay for doing so is beyond me. It feels like something straight out of the initiation scene in National Lampoon's Animal House where the pledges bend over, get whacked in the arse with a cricket bat and say "thank you sir, can I have another one" upon which they get whacked again.
These companies are so unlikable, I don't understand why they think people want to permantly mount their data collection systems right in front of their eyes. You couldn't give me one of those for free. Its like someone breaking into my car and leaving 2 copilot licenses on the seat: a nightmare
Meta's survival is fascinating to me. They dumped money in VR, their AI is not as good as their competitors and now they are dumping money on this glasses thing. They keep on getting caught doing shady things too.
It's one of Microsoft under Ballmer biggest victory, and one that's proving to be harder than you would think for tech behemoth: when you have one product that's so overwhelmingly dominating and raking unlimited money, diverting into other product lines seems to be almost impossible, either they don't make enough money, or you don't have enough focus, or enough need for survival and such need for it to succeed.
Despite everything Google is still the Google Ads company, Meta is still the FB/Insta company, etc ... I would even add Intel in there, they're where they are in part because every new thing they made they killed off right away because it wasn't "a money printing large margin xeon with no competition".
Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are the big ones that got out of that trap. Though with Apple I would say it's more limited than it looks, it's just that their "product" is the ecosystem they build around, so while they have lots of lines they're all linked together and feed off each other with iPhone at the core.
On the other hand some would say, Ballmer decoupled Microsoft survival from Widnows survival so much that it leads to what's happening to windows those past 5-8 years, and that's not a plus for its users.
i think honestly it’s the opposite. it still confuses me why meta invested so much in their pointless experiments (think any of their AR ventures) when their main source of revenue was, and continues to be, their boring advertising on consumer apps
Something doesn’t add up. According to what the article is saying about Meta’s help article, there is no price tier which allows unlimited conversation mode 720 hours/month. Even the highest paid tier can only get 15 hours.
But the article says this is an on-device feature. So there should be no overhead to Meta at all, aside from them storing the conversations I assume.
It's interesting that people seem to have forgotten/gotten over the whole Glasshole "rejection/anger" against Google glasses ~10years ago. Maybe it would have been more socially acceptable even back then if they hadn't made them look sci-fi and instead like regular glasses.
Or is it just that we haven't seen Scoble using these in the shower? :-D [1]
It was 10 years ago. Today's preteens were infants then. Today's university students were preteens. Today's parents of infants were university students. Things change. Time destroys everything.
...which has not been declared taboo through religious or cultural institutions. Time for those institutions to step up and declare a ban on networked surveillance devices. As long as the processing is all local and none of the gathered intel is shipped out to the mothership or the highest bidder (viz. Gargoyles from Snow Crash) they're fine but it should be legal to punch anyone in the nose who wears corporate spy-eyes.
I think it was an old issue of National Lampoon (and I have no idea what they would be parodying) that showed an old-timey cathedral-style radio in a child's pull-wagon, like some kind of advert from the 1920's. "Portable Radio is Here!" or similar for the caption…
(Sometimes you have to recognize that the tech is not ready for the intended form factor.)
I don’t think it should be banned but instead regulated and I think Apple has a unique opportunity here that will make them win this product category in fashion & social acceptability: Make the glasses glow. Have the top horizontal frame of the glasses illuminate when it’s recording and be able to glow on command
By making the glow a fashion aspect of the glasses, the fact that it should glow loudly will become a socially known part of the glasses. Because it’s Apple and because a good chunk of the frame needs to glow it’ll have a distinct look that’ll be easy to spot and if anyone has tampered with them to disable it, they can be asked to verify that it hasn’t by making it able to glow on command “Hey Siri, glow/party”.
For example, a musician would probably rather have the audience wearing recording glasses and actually watching then recording on phone and watching the phone screen.
The 'creepy pick up artists' and other social media types have become synonymous with it unfortunately
I'm sure many vision impaired people find these to be life changing. Very ableist mindset to ban these, instead of establishing stronger privacy protections around data and usage.
Mild tangent: are there smart glasses out there without camera, without needing internet access, and with custom app support? All my neck and back want is a way for me to look up instead of down whenever I'm bored and smart glasses would be one possible solution for that.
You can look for smart glasses (hey cyan) in aliexpress, and use claude/codex to reverse engineer. There's a guy who put an sdk on github. All you need is bluetooth to your phone, and of you go. You can build an app that does whatever you want within the firmware limitations of the glasses.
> Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. [...] feature [...] doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device, using the chips inside the glasses [...] I turned off my internet, and it kept working.
Well, of course it's getting rate limited behind a subscription. Someone has to pay for all the additional compute and storage required to datamine your conversations.
Typical of any new product/service these days. The first few weeks/months are "free" (or included) and then they start locking up things behind a paywall (i.e.,. subscription).
I get that recurring revenue is needed for hardware development. It'd be easier to stomach if they flat out had that subscription pricing locked in early on instead of rolling it out after hundreds/thousands of unit sales. Yes, I know it's "smart business". I say it's anti-consumer practice.
They are actually selling really well. But sadly, they are selling because you can drill out the 'recording' indicator light and use them to secretly record people to make creepy TikToks.
Thats a good candidate for a closed fist falling at non-walking speeds at somebody's ugly face. Do that around my kids and you are automatically a pedo that will get adequate treatment.
Also, where I live its against the law to record people without their consent so if I would be feeling very nice I would just hold you against the ground till cops come.
You wear them = you film with them. Get your shit together kids, this ain't some harmless fun.
It seems to mostly just be a problem if you’re caught (aka if you’re being obnoxious or using a tripod) or if you try to use the subsequent footage for anything other than private viewing.
In many places you’re allowed to take wide shots where people might be captured incidentally, though not everywhere, as some places don’t allow photos of “copyrighted” buildings and landmarks.
I mean technically if you do it for no reason (it not actually recording), they have no video evidence, and if they did actually record and use it as evidence, well, it shows you were in the right. Not sure what punishment is for creeping on someone's kid vs getting a slap in the face tho
Why person in their right mind would voluntarily walk around with "meta" or Google or Apple or any other surveillance camera and pay for doing so is beyond me. It feels like something straight out of the initiation scene in National Lampoon's Animal House where the pledges bend over, get whacked in the arse with a cricket bat and say "thank you sir, can I have another one" upon which they get whacked again.
Hey Alexa: what person in their right mind would walk around wearing spyware glasses?
Alexa: Hey Siri, what person in their right mind would place spyware microphones inside their house?
Siri: Hey human, what person in their right mind would carry a spyware tracking device with them 24/7 ?
----
Celebrating the "4th Amendment rights" that Monday's SCOTUS ruling brought us – if any (IMHO).
<https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-rules-that-law-enfo...>
All-in for the parallel construction(s)...
These companies are so unlikable, I don't understand why they think people want to permantly mount their data collection systems right in front of their eyes. You couldn't give me one of those for free. Its like someone breaking into my car and leaving 2 copilot licenses on the seat: a nightmare
Meta's survival is fascinating to me. They dumped money in VR, their AI is not as good as their competitors and now they are dumping money on this glasses thing. They keep on getting caught doing shady things too.
>Meta's survival is fascinating to me
Their ad revenue is $243.46 billion annual, so not sure why you mention survival.
If a company making money spends that money internally on projects that is ok, it's when they borrow money that survival becomes a risk.
It's not Meta's survival that is fascinating, it's Zuckerberg's ongoing survival as CEO!!
"Their ad revenue is $243.46 billion annual"
That is remarkable. Who is spending this kind of money on FB ads?
millions of small businesses
Says a lot about just how much money they’re raking in from core business.
It's one of Microsoft under Ballmer biggest victory, and one that's proving to be harder than you would think for tech behemoth: when you have one product that's so overwhelmingly dominating and raking unlimited money, diverting into other product lines seems to be almost impossible, either they don't make enough money, or you don't have enough focus, or enough need for survival and such need for it to succeed.
Despite everything Google is still the Google Ads company, Meta is still the FB/Insta company, etc ... I would even add Intel in there, they're where they are in part because every new thing they made they killed off right away because it wasn't "a money printing large margin xeon with no competition".
Apple, Amazon and Microsoft are the big ones that got out of that trap. Though with Apple I would say it's more limited than it looks, it's just that their "product" is the ecosystem they build around, so while they have lots of lines they're all linked together and feed off each other with iPhone at the core.
On the other hand some would say, Ballmer decoupled Microsoft survival from Widnows survival so much that it leads to what's happening to windows those past 5-8 years, and that's not a plus for its users.
I think it is the shady stuff that earns them money. They cant survive without that. The rest is a corporate hobby, basically.
i think honestly it’s the opposite. it still confuses me why meta invested so much in their pointless experiments (think any of their AR ventures) when their main source of revenue was, and continues to be, their boring advertising on consumer apps
You call it "boring advertising on consumer apps", but that's exactly where all the shady stuff keeps happening.
> continues to be, their boring advertising on consumer apps
That is where the ugly shady stuff is.
> AR ventures
That is the corporate hobby stuff.
I think all their actions could be explained by "they thought it will be next great thing and it either wasn't or they stumbled hard"
> their AI is not as good as their competitors
That's irrelevant because their AI was never a product they sold.
It is true that their AI is not their main product for sale, however they did spend more than 100 billions on AI.
Me: You know, these ugly creeper peepers could not possibly make me want them any less.
A PM deep in the heart of darkness: Hold my creatine.
Hey, the sky's the limit. The next version can also shock the user!
Physically or psychologically?
This platform will allow new opportunities - previously it was just organising a genocide, now you can have a first person view.
Something doesn’t add up. According to what the article is saying about Meta’s help article, there is no price tier which allows unlimited conversation mode 720 hours/month. Even the highest paid tier can only get 15 hours.
But the article says this is an on-device feature. So there should be no overhead to Meta at all, aside from them storing the conversations I assume.
It's interesting that people seem to have forgotten/gotten over the whole Glasshole "rejection/anger" against Google glasses ~10years ago. Maybe it would have been more socially acceptable even back then if they hadn't made them look sci-fi and instead like regular glasses.
Or is it just that we haven't seen Scoble using these in the shower? :-D [1]
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/yes-you-can-w...
It was 10 years ago. Today's preteens were infants then. Today's university students were preteens. Today's parents of infants were university students. Things change. Time destroys everything.
> Time destroys everything.
...which has not been declared taboo through religious or cultural institutions. Time for those institutions to step up and declare a ban on networked surveillance devices. As long as the processing is all local and none of the gathered intel is shipped out to the mothership or the highest bidder (viz. Gargoyles from Snow Crash) they're fine but it should be legal to punch anyone in the nose who wears corporate spy-eyes.
Many religious and cultural institutions are also dead.
> Maybe it would have been more socially acceptable even back then if they hadn't made them look sci-fi and instead like regular glasses.
They literally couldn’t.
Glass cost $1,500 and had tech spilling out into separate modules attached to the (already too clunky) glasses.
It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the problem is dropped by society at large because the hardware has become too subtle to notice,
and the “superpowers” (or draw of entertainment) are too strong to ignore.
I think it was an old issue of National Lampoon (and I have no idea what they would be parodying) that showed an old-timey cathedral-style radio in a child's pull-wagon, like some kind of advert from the 1920's. "Portable Radio is Here!" or similar for the caption…
(Sometimes you have to recognize that the tech is not ready for the intended form factor.)
This kind of product should simply be banned, there's just so many things wrong.
I don’t think it should be banned but instead regulated and I think Apple has a unique opportunity here that will make them win this product category in fashion & social acceptability: Make the glasses glow. Have the top horizontal frame of the glasses illuminate when it’s recording and be able to glow on command
By making the glow a fashion aspect of the glasses, the fact that it should glow loudly will become a socially known part of the glasses. Because it’s Apple and because a good chunk of the frame needs to glow it’ll have a distinct look that’ll be easy to spot and if anyone has tampered with them to disable it, they can be asked to verify that it hasn’t by making it able to glow on command “Hey Siri, glow/party”.
Like all things, there can be positive use cases.
For example, a musician would probably rather have the audience wearing recording glasses and actually watching then recording on phone and watching the phone screen.
The 'creepy pick up artists' and other social media types have become synonymous with it unfortunately
I'm sure many vision impaired people find these to be life changing. Very ableist mindset to ban these, instead of establishing stronger privacy protections around data and usage.
absurd to ban cameras but allow firearms
I'm not in the US so firearms are not even a question for me.
I was shown a full page interstitial for Meta Starfire by Kylie the other day, and it wasn't even the good Kylie.
I have doubts they know how to market these if I'm seeing this ad.
Mild tangent: are there smart glasses out there without camera, without needing internet access, and with custom app support? All my neck and back want is a way for me to look up instead of down whenever I'm bored and smart glasses would be one possible solution for that.
You can look for smart glasses (hey cyan) in aliexpress, and use claude/codex to reverse engineer. There's a guy who put an sdk on github. All you need is bluetooth to your phone, and of you go. You can build an app that does whatever you want within the firmware limitations of the glasses.
this is why open source [is important] [(or truly "free" software?)]
> Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. [...] feature [...] doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device, using the chips inside the glasses [...] I turned off my internet, and it kept working.
BMW heated-seats style move. Classy.
Well, of course it's getting rate limited behind a subscription. Someone has to pay for all the additional compute and storage required to datamine your conversations.
https://archive.is/vGVor
Typical of any new product/service these days. The first few weeks/months are "free" (or included) and then they start locking up things behind a paywall (i.e.,. subscription).
I get that recurring revenue is needed for hardware development. It'd be easier to stomach if they flat out had that subscription pricing locked in early on instead of rolling it out after hundreds/thousands of unit sales. Yes, I know it's "smart business". I say it's anti-consumer practice.
Doesn’t even have adoption yet? They’re skipping a couple of steps on the enshitification ladder here
They are actually selling really well. But sadly, they are selling because you can drill out the 'recording' indicator light and use them to secretly record people to make creepy TikToks.
That's not why they're selling.
They're selling because people love to record other people, publicly, without shame. It's kind of like a go-pro, is the use case for these.
The creepers exist but they're not enough people to build a business around.
Thats a good candidate for a closed fist falling at non-walking speeds at somebody's ugly face. Do that around my kids and you are automatically a pedo that will get adequate treatment.
Also, where I live its against the law to record people without their consent so if I would be feeling very nice I would just hold you against the ground till cops come.
You wear them = you film with them. Get your shit together kids, this ain't some harmless fun.
Seems likely that the cops would take action against you for assault more than filming
> Also, where I live its against the law to record people without their consent
In public? How does this work in practice? There are so many uses for cameras and avoiding showing people would be impossible.
Eg dash cams, security cameras.
Wikipedia has a starting point if you’re interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law
It seems to mostly just be a problem if you’re caught (aka if you’re being obnoxious or using a tripod) or if you try to use the subsequent footage for anything other than private viewing.
In many places you’re allowed to take wide shots where people might be captured incidentally, though not everywhere, as some places don’t allow photos of “copyrighted” buildings and landmarks.
Watch any Japanese news broadcast. The blurring can get out of control.
It’s one thing to make a passionate speech on the internet. It is another thing to be charged with battery and assault.
I mean technically if you do it for no reason (it not actually recording), they have no video evidence, and if they did actually record and use it as evidence, well, it shows you were in the right. Not sure what punishment is for creeping on someone's kid vs getting a slap in the face tho
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