Back when I worked in cinema we would occasionally get lenticular movie posters. The cost varies by how many they print as a batch, but you're looking at about $10-20 a piece.
I don't understand why Meta is so insistent on making the camera and creepy video recording the primary feature of these glasses. They do have a ton of other uses. The speakers are genuinely great. It's useful to be able to hear notifications while walking. Having a decent AI for asking random questions is nice as well. It supports live translation. And unlike Airpods it doesn't tune out the rest of the world, which I like. And the new models have a display, which could be useful for stuff like maps.
Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance.
I do all* of that with my phone and a Bluetooth bone conduction headphones. It kinda seems like the glasses part only make sense if it's for loading it up with a camera. You know, for looking at things, with your glasses.
I agree it would be nice to have a non-skeezy offering, but I think that would be an entirely different product line.
[Edit: oh, well, I didn't realize some but not all of the meta glasses do actually have a tiny display built in. That would be the other use case, for the looking at things, through your glasses.]
* Okay, the sound quality is just alright, but if Meta wanted to pivot to headphones, I'm all ears, as it were.
The whole VR shtick they were hyping up for a decade now and even rebranded whole corporation for, only really works if everyone is wearing these cameras 24/7. They failed at advertising the experience itself, so while that is shelved they are exploring other paths. These glasses are intended to normalize widespread pervasive recording as a primary objective, and to collect vast amounts of data for the LLM "training" as a secondary.
PS: two of my friends found no issues with these, bought a pair each and excitedly recorded with many other people present. Like, the issue didn't even register. I foresee that a lot of people will follow, if the price will be accessible, and one day it will be.
In theory I could see really enjoying them in an action sports (backcountry skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing) setting. I'd want 1) true AR that could annotate terrain with stuff like slope angle, aspect etc, 2) all the GPS and monitoring functionality of a Garmin watch, and 3) a high quality action camera that could replace a gopro with less faff.
From what I can tell we aren't particularly close to putting this all together in a consumer usable package.
My father uses them to record and share videos of some of his craft work, and they're actually pretty good for that.
But that can only be a niche use-case - the sort of thing you'd expect to work better as a minor product from Logitech or GoPro, rather than as a celebrity-endorsed consumer flagship from a tech behemoth.
> Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance
They also have to look radically different, because anyone who sees someone wearing the current design will always just assume the person using them is a creeper recording creepy videos whether or not the glasses are even capable of doing that. The association is already made from the current model.
The financial motive must be capturing video data for AI training. Moreover, this data won't be entirely passive: the glasses can tell the user to do something and then observe how the video feed changes.
The more nefarious motive is to inject a layer of AI between humans and nature.
Eh, realistically speaking the camera is it's main selling point. If you want just audio, why not get eg an aftershockz headset. They've been around for over 10 yrs and work very well for that exact usecase (speaker that doesn't block your ears whatsoever)
The translation feature is also available on your phone which you'll need to pull out when using it anyway, because otherwise the other party won't understand what you're saying either...
> The translation feature is also available on your phone which you'll need to pull out when using it anyway, because otherwise the other party won't understand what you're saying either...
I think a major use case for live translation is one where the other party is standing opposite to you.
There’s no way this would work, or work more reliably, than the translator apps we have on phones. In order for this Babelfish sci-fi interface to work, the other party has to be aware and pause their speech for the translation. If they can’t hear their translated message they’ll speak over it. Either that or you have some kind of deafening that passes-thru the translated voice in realtime, and then you lose their emotion, emphasis, and tons of other information that doesn’t fit neatly into the standard monolingual worldview of tech.
Even the “conversation mode” built into Google translate or the iPhone app is useless. I can only imagine it working in the sterile environment it was probably designed in: a conference room with two people trying there hardest to make it work.
I live abroad and travel a lot for photography. Whenever I’m using a translator app, it’s typically a chaotic situation like haggling with a taxi driver, a meal with a group of strangers who invited me to eat with them, lots of background noise. The mode that everyone defaults to, without fail, is to use their own phone to speak or type a message and then hold it up in front of their interlocutor’s face. Sometimes they mix in some fragments of English or I know some fragments of their language. It’s lossy but it works.
I can’t imagine a wearable that would perform better. A notepad that can magically translate little messages is about as far as I would want it to go. Tech is pretty awful at intermediating human relations.
Having my main pair of prescription glasses, covered by insurance, also be my Bluetooth headset is super useful.
The camera feature is also really nice for a lot of non-creepy use cases. From translating signs and plaques in front of me w/o pulling out my phone, to taking 1st person videos on amusement park rides, to photos of my son without having to view the world through my phone waiting for just the right shot.
Heck video calls with Grandma where I can chase my son around the house and let Grandma see everything, or when we read books together over video chat.
Meta glasses are great for parents, kids do all sorts of wacky things and I don't want to be one of those parents always waiting with my phone out so I can capture the perfect picture.
Basically, "small cameras/microphones, cheap enough to be everywhere" completely changes the "free to take photos/video in public" equation - so that's probably worth revisiting legally.
Clearly there is a difference between someone waving a SLR camera around (digital or film) and the possibilities of today and where the content ends up.
However... the pub/bar/nightclub, gym, pool, etc etc etc isn't public. It is the private property of the owner. So if people don't like them - as is evident it seems - these glasses should hit social resistance.
Unfortunately, educating people against some technology is not going to help. It should be a state-level mandate to have any effect. Most people are discretion-less, sheep-minded money pockets. Meta and other businesses discovered this fact long ago and exploit it to maximum extent. Their products always target the "sheep-following" aspects, instead of individual usefulness.
A young, authoritarian-minded elitist aiming to force their views onto the rest of us 'stupid sheep'...with the implicit threat of a gun to the head via the state's monopoly on violence.
Have you ever examined the idea that, people doing things you don't agree with may not all be less enlightened than you? And that, in fact, it could be you who is a sheep, angrily shouting in unison with the mob in the midst of a trendy moral panic...scapegoating all the worlds problems and your own personal frustrations onto some dumb social media app?
On one end, we have a megacorporation that has been proven to engage in: willingly sharing private user data with random third parties; accepting and running ads for foreign state actors targeting another country; creating one of the most sophisticated tracking regimes in the world; collecting oceans of data to build profiles on everyone, user and not; enabling a genocide to be coordinated on their platform; using their money and power to influence legislation in their favor; knowingly designing their platforms to be incredibly addictive, including deliberately discussing how to get children hooked; and a practically endless list of other things.
On the other end, we have HN commenters. They are really angry and that they want to undo some of the damage described above. They are pretty jaded about how elegantly Meta has been able to exploit addiction, network effects and the human mind to keep people complicit.
To me it's obvious that #2 is the true evil. They obviously won't succeed because wealth controls our reality, but just for daring to question the status quo, they are authoritatian elitist sheep with superiority complexes. True freedom is when the world's biggest companies get to do whatever they want, slavery is when people to use their democratically elected governments to oppose that. Can you smell all that freedom in the air?
"Ray-Ban Wayfarer used to be a such classic design. By associating them with cameras and Meta, Essilor Luxottica has messed up an iconic name and brand."
It's hard to believe that in the late smartphone era there are people who think they're not online enough already, and want smart glasses so they can be even more online.
Well, I kinda wouldn't mind glasses that could show important notifications or maps. It could be handy for lots of things, like a heads up display. Not to watch the social feeds but to find my way or read a message from a friend saying they're late. When I use my phone or watch to navigate it's a bit more dangerous. Thinking specifically of one time when I fell badly doing just that.
I absolutely wouldn't want them to incorporate a camera though. They should not have one at all.
And I would want them with open firmware from a respectable company or organisation. So these ones are a non starter obviously.
There are all kinds of products that we need to reject not because the fundamentals aren't awesome for some proportion of people, but because the implementation is as obviously corrupt as the business owners pushing it.
The dumb speaker that OpenAI is hoping you stick in your home to spy on you is not some preposterously worthless piece of crap from beginning to end without exception. It's just a creepy mess that's nowhere near worth it for anybody who cares about themselves or anyone who ever visits their domicile. That doesn't mean that it isn't pretty nice to have your hands full of grease and be able to get a small piece of information using your voice.
All about the details. You want to ethically produce something private at reasonable cost without excessive energy usage to serve useful functions, sign me up. Just no cloud, no privacy invasion, an entire impossible wishlist for companies not as cool as e.g. Framework.
> ...but because the implementation is as obviously corrupt as the business owners pushing it.
Because the business owners figured out that they could get you to pay for things that turn you into an even more valuable product.
The cat is out of the bag and there is no reason to believe there will ever be a reversal of this. Not enough people care, and there isn't enough demand for "clean" products to displace the big companies. People aren't going to pay $1,000 for a privacy-respecting version of a product that's available for $200.
As I see it, the only solution (if you really want one) is to reject the idea that every aspect of your life has to be tech-ified. To say no to digital crack because you recognize it's rotting your brain, harming your relationships, etc.
You don't need to stare at a screen 15 hours a day for work, education, information and entertainment. You don't need your watch, television, speakers, glasses, fridge and toilet to be connected to the internet. You don't need a smart phone or watch or pair of glasses to be the "load-bearing" foundation of your relationships with friends, family and community.
Well my family doesn't live in the same country and most of my friends I don't see every day yet I communicate with them daily. Same with the communities I'm in, they're really active online.
And all my stuff is connected yes but not through big tech cloud. It is pretty easy to avoid all that. I use home assistant and I buy stuff specifically because it supports local connectivity. The biggest issue is whatsapp for now.
I won't dismiss that technology can be great for keeping in touch with people (especially family) who are not physically close to you but we should also acknowledge that there's a huge difference between digital interactions and face-to-face connection. There is a compelling body of evidence that the latter provides far more emotional and mental health benefits than the former.
Anyone truly interested in their well-being should make sure they're not treating digital interactions as a 1:1 substitute for real-life connection.
I kinda have that though. I use a home assistant voice preview speaker, connected to a locally hosted whisper instance backed by Qwen 3.6. All local and fairly energy-reasonable :)
Just saying it's not impossible to have your cake and eat it.
Yes however the server for all that did not cost a hundred bucks. A lot more than that :P Of course it's not the only thing I use it for either, and I view it as an investment in learning too. And it wasn't terribly expensive either. Two GPUs of 500 euro in total and 100 worth of components, the rest was all surplus stuff I had from upgrading my gaming PC. Then some dockers for things like whisper (and home assistant's "wyoming" wrapper around it) and ollama etc.
The only issue right now is that home control is relatively slow because home assistant plonks way too much context into the pipeline. It would work much better with an elective tool model like MCP but they don't have this yet.
PS: You could also choose the new Pine64 voice thing, It's looking pretty decent. It wasn't out yet when I bought mine.
No but it would be handy. I don't really need my smartwatch to read notifications either but it's super handy when I'm out and I have my hands full. This would be even better (and replace my smartwatch I'm sure).
I would take a camera with AR integration. I'm imagining some mashup of scrap book note keeping in digital space and technical work like car repairs or utility work. Imagine seeing where the studs are in the walls, or finding a now you left yourself in the engine bay of your car...
The problem I see is you're going to want a camera built-in for vision reasons for your amazing reality-overlay, and at that point, well, you've got a camera built-in.
I'm sure you could do that without one. Gyro, accelerometer, compass, GPS, step counter, altimeter. Should be accurate enough for basic navigation. Especially with some smart dead reckoning algorithm that calibrates itself at known map points like when you turn a corner. Showing notifications shouldn't need any kind of AR awareness at all. You could just show them above the normal field of vision just like the Google glass did.
Again there the problem was not the display, it was the camera. And Google glass didn't even use it for any tracking purpose.
I don't think the issue is that it can't be done without the camera. I think the issue is that the whole product exists to get those cameras out there. Data is the new gold, those vision AIs need to be trained. So they've never even tried without one.
Where is the exact line - i.e. can you use Lidar? Infrared depth-sensing? Or do these provide too much data such that the scene could be recreated?
(I'm exploring this as a thought experiment, in general I agree that people shouldn't be carrying hidden cameras on their faces, and if those cameras are at all connected to Meta then it's much worse!)
Well lidar in that form factor would end up just being an 8x8 laser DoF sensor like some smartphones have. There's no space or power budget for a real lidar.
That would be ok I guess. That's not enough to capture much of anything even with a continuous feed.
The concept of constantly taking images and storing metadata so you can remember where your keys are seems nuts but at the same time I could see it being normal.
Smart glasses are very handy and when traveling especially solo asking about what your seeing in front of you is handy/informative.
I can see when AI becomes 100% reliable with smart glasses we all are almost know it alls. Everything and anything we need to know will be presented in front of us.
Ok all the above sounds crazy to most, but ive enjoyed using my Metas since Oct 2023 (had to buy another paid April 2025) though Meta glasses are sh!t in terms of durability. So i can recommend smart glasses but not really Metas especially if you like to buy technology that lasts!
Positioning smartphone camera seems way easier then positioning your head for a good photo. What do you do when you want low perspective? Or an overhead view?
> when AI becomes 100% reliable with smart glasses we all are almost know it alls
Keep going with that line of imagination and it's easy to understand how even someone burned on the Metaverse could be excited about the kinds of pitches Zuckerberg must give for his future visions. (Legitimately exciting thoughts, w/optimist hat on)
Have you ever unintentionally recorded a stranger?
Have you ever took a photo or video while your in a crowd and other people you don't know appearred in either? Did you care about them and look for them to ask if it was ok that they were in the background of the media you took?
Pardon but I don't understand your question cause if you think of it all humans have done the above since the day cameras or video cameras existed.
Further, im pretty sure smart glasses to AI devices are the next big thing. Meta probably will not win the smart glass race as many hate them due to privacy reasons. Apple a privacy focused company could add tech to blur out and or anonymize faces of those in the background to calm peoples fears.
There is a world of difference between (1) a random individual collecting a few people's faces and voices and (2) a huge corporation nonconsensually collecting that information at a mass scale (and with location!) in an age when identity resolution is automated.
yeah like said Meta is probably not going to win this race but Apple could as it's privaccy focused and they could have as noted..blur out or anonymizes faces that aren't in your network. Apple already labels and tries to name faces it sees often in your photos and has done for years.
Could you imagine someone walking around with their phone pointed wherever they look, recording the whole time, as they casually walk down the street, sit at a cafe, or engage in a conversation with you?
How are these things not publicly shamed out of existence?
It feels like each year lately has been a new Black Mirror episode.
The real killer app form me requires a camera (though it doesn’t need to record photos or video for me to access — I have a phone for that).
I need a device that tells me who I’m talking to if I’ve been introduced to them before and tell me how I know them (This is Bob Dobbs, you first met him in Texas in 1985 and he saved you at that party when you needed some Slack)”. Especially great when I meet someone out of context.
But bad actors mean I’ll probably never get this prosthesis.
You can actually accomplish this pretty easily with off the shelf components! You can just say, "Hey, I think we've met before but I can't remember exactly where?"
It also works really well as a conversation starter for me. I forget people’s names and the context all the time, but the faces stay familiar, and of course you can tell from their facial expression that we’ve met.
Showoff. I can't remember names or recognise faces. I've settled on a strategy of simply greeting everyone as though I've met them before, which feels a lot more empathic than sending everyone I meet's details to a mass surveillance company.
The bigger problem is that you essentially need to host somewhere a database with personal information of everyone you met, including their names, biometrics and private details. Nonconsensually. And it has to be accessible through the internet.
Honestly, just take notes and reread them sometimes, maybe?
AR will happen. Exactly what that future will look like I don't know. The one thing I do know though is that meta, the same company that decided you can be AI injected into an ad without informed consent, has no business paving the path to AR adoption.
People wearing cameras is going to increase over time, no matter what. Why would it slow down?
Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely anti a lot of things, including people wearing cameras all the time, but I see no logical way to stop it without stomping on freedoms. In this case, defense will be your ally, whatever form that may take,eg wearing a mask.
If I had to choose between flock cameras and meta glasses existing, I'd choose the glasses.
Quite simply because people don't want to be casually recorded 24/7. By "casually" I mean by other people doing so indiscriminately, if not actively fishing for "content", as opposed to entities doing so for more justifiable reasons, like a security cam.
No. People simply stop behaving naturally when being casually recorded. It creates completely artificial scenarios. For instance if for some reason I had a friend pick up one of these glasses I certainly wouldn't allow him into my house with them on, even if he assured there was no recording, and I completely believed him. The mere presence of a such would just create a dampening effect on normal behavior. It'd be akin to somebody constantly pointing their phone camera at everybody, even if it was indeed off.
And in practice many of the undesirable things that will happen with these glasses are 100% legal. For instance people are going to bars, finding drunk girls, and recording everything for clicks and humiliation. Ban the filming and you ban the glasses. Banning the publication would do nothing since there's endless ways to share "content" that would sidestep this.
And that's just one trend. There's endless ways for this stuff to be abused, yet very few ways it'll achieve anything good. And those are much more hypothetical than the endless abuses which are already rife in spite of these things being extremely fringe.
I happen to were in exact scenario that you have mentioned, and I think I understand what you mean. Just as an anecdote - no, it doesn’t always work that way. At least it didn’t worked that way with me, because I held a different belief. It irked me for a moment - when I recognized a camera the association of topic-adjacent controversies sprung to mind. However, I dismissed it, and in retrospect I can assure that my behavior returned to natural. And if not for Meta specifically, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me at all.
(The person with glasses had an - IMHO - very legit use case for having a device like that, if this matters.)
But that’s just me with my weird beliefs. In my head a camera is a sensor. It’s no fundamentally different from wearer’s own eyes to me.
When I emphasized “actually” I was (very poorly) trying to say that it ideally shouldn’t be a problem, because its not what causes harm, only provides a way to cause it. But you’re right, when the abuse is de-facto the only prevalent spoken about use case, and legal side doesn’t match social expectations, it creates all those ill effects, so even if it possibly shouldn’t be problematic - it becomes such, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy’s way.
People nearly always go for the lowest hanging fruits, I shouldn’t hate us for this. But it’s really depressing, to be honest.
The big difference is one's eyes cannot be used to record and share events in perfect detail. What happens between people stays between people, or relies on low reliability recounting. This is of course without even hitting on what you mentioned - that this is all being beamed back to Meta who's going to try to monetize it in any way they can, and then likely further onto the NSA who's sole purpose in modern existence seems to be to try to create Precrime.
And in exchange we get... what? Somebody can record things slightly faster than the approximately 3 seconds it'd take you to do so on your phone?
I wonder if these things will meet the same fate as bluetooth headsets. Once upon a time decried as the preserve of "Bluetooth Douches" who worse the Jabra while taking their banking phone calls, now they're everywhere. Everyone's got Airpods in.
One day perhaps Meta Glasses will be the same. I really like them. They're a spectacular (haha) addition to a sightseeing trip. At the aquarium you can ask them what you're looking at and it'll tell you about the fish, at the playground you can record your kids running around, and you've got music where you go and so on. The problem, of course, is that they have short battery life and I don't want to switch from my smart glasses to my other glasses since the entire point is availability.
Do you expect your opinion to change as your daughter grows up and makes her own experiences with being filmed all the time?
I feel reminded of those always on AI cameras from a few years ago (google?) that were advertised to young parents because that’s like the one singular moment where it’s pretty uncontroversial to do this.
Kids are cute and full of energy, hands full, don’t want to miss a moment.
But smart glasses have real implications for our society around bullying, harassment, stalking etc.
All things that older children and young adults are affected by the most
If I were in high school again I would not want smart glasses to be normal
That's a valid point. I think that kids should be able to live with experimentation possible without consequences. In practice, most teens have smartphones now and are indiscriminate in recording them. If anything changes here it will have to be the practice of recording people has to fade because it's impossible to be certain you've not got a smartphone across the room videotaping you. And in public there's no proscription on other people using their smartphones to video you as well.
I doubt I'd even notice if someone was leaning back and video recording me from their seat as I walk down the street. It would just look like a lounging person reading social media.
But yeah, I probably would prefer to have her have access to at least some private spaces without any recording so she can rest easy, but in public that's a societal shift and the smart goggles add very little. It's just inherent in computers that their processes to see also store high-fidelity. Presumably with sufficiently advanced video generation all acts will be deniable or some other such thing will occur.
That is an interesting perspective I hadn't thought about. I see relatives constantly throwing phone cameras in baby's faces "look here, look here" the kids are trained to look at the phone/camera. I think of the experience from your daughter here, just running up to her mom wearing glasses - I hear the mass surveillance concerns, I see the pervert/harassment angle, I saw a friend do the "recording a party" angle, but I am just surprised I didn't see something as wholesome as this - thanks for expanding my view.
It's been over 20 years since then and it's still just as awkward to take a call in public. People will instinctively prefer a quiet place away from the crowd. Otherwise others may eavesdrop, think you're talking to them, or are crazy.
You'll find that most of those people with airpods are listening to something, not talking on a call. The most popular "smart glasses" that I see everywhere don't have cameras. They're "AR" HUDs for watching movies or playing games.
It's not about social acceptance. These hardware designs still suck big time.
Yeah that's still weird. Last time it happened to me was in the City of London near Liverpool St (ironic as we're talking about banking phonecalls). Out of nowhere a guy walking towards me starts speaking, for all the world like he's trying to talk to me, so I stopped and said "Hey, can I help you?"
Nope, strides on past, then I noticed the airpods.
> Once upon a time decried as the preserve of "Bluetooth Douches" who worse the Jabra while taking their banking phone calls, now they're everywhere. Everyone's got Airpods in.
Two very different use cases. The vast majority of folks wearing AirPods are listening, not talking. The former is not disruptive to others while the latter is.
> Meta monitoring your social media posts to their platforms.
Monitoring everything around you, all the time.
And what you've heard about the UK police is likely to have been comically exaggerated by people with an agenda. There are problems, yes, they do not arrest thousands of people a year for being mean on twitter, no.
(I'm rate limited and can't reply below - when people look into these figures what they tend to find is the majority are people getting arrested for using services like whatsapp or facebook messenger to stalk, harass and threaten others, often in a domestic-violence situation. These are categorised as social media-related but it's not what is often described or assumed by american commentators, that they said something politically sensitive in public, and OH MY GOSH just look at the state of free speech in Britain. It's often much more along the lines of abusers threatening to kill an ex that finally managed to leave them.)
That's exactly what I mean by comically exaggerated. I don't need to defend it, or go out of my way at all. Do you understand what that figure covers?
It's everything from sending death threats in an email or SMS to your ex who finally got up the courage to leave your abusive ass, to sending unsolicited dick-pics on whatsapp, to bomb threats old-school paper-mailed to a school, to direct, public incitements to mass murder on twitter during a riot, hoax calls to emergency services and a ton of other stuff. But it gets thrown around as if it's all about people making 'edgy' social media posts. I believe at least some of these would be grounds for arrest in the bastion of free speech that is the USA too?
Is there a problem with police in the UK overreaching on speech on social media? Yes I believe there is, and there are specific examples to show that. Is that figure you've got there in any way meaningful? On its own, no. Is it a delicious tidbit for people with scant regard for the truth and a specific agenda to push? You betcha.
> they do not arrest thousands of people a year for being mean on twitter, no.
It doesn't need to be thousands for it to be worrying.
From [1]:
> The Metropolitan Police has awarded Father Ted creator and Irish comedian Graham Linehan £25,000 and an unreserved apology after they arrested him last year as his plane touched down at Heathrow airport.
> Last year, Graham Linehan — who now lives in Arizona, United States of America — was arrested by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow airport in one of the most shocking incidents we have seen in years.
> What was Graham's supposed crime? Three gender-critical posts on X. This is despite the fact that gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act 2010 and were reaffirmed by last year's landmark Supreme Court ruling, which settled that "sex" is defined by biology, not gender identity.
Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word. It also seems that it is far more than one, too:
> General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young, said: "I'm beginning to lose count of the number of cases we've fought in which the police have arrested someone for a tweet, decided to take no further action and then had to pay them substantial compensation for wrongful arrest.
> It doesn't need to be thousands for it to be worrying.
I very much agree, which is another reason I think facts are important. There are real issues and discussing them using real data is great, productive etc.
But instead of rational debate what I see time and again is spurious figures like these thrown around by talking heads, repeated by posters like those above, trying to ... well I don't know, I don't fully understand why the US right wing thinks it's a smart move to demonise its allies at the moment, but here we are.
> Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word.
Yeah, it's a gross abuse of police power. Linehan seems like he's a bit of a nob, but being a bit of a nob in public shouldn't attract anything like this sort of attention. The police need to be reined in seriously, and to have pointed questions put to them about what they think is their damn job and where the money is going. At least it looks like he won the day in court, and the policy has changed - https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/jul/09/graham-lineh... - but IMHO heads should be rolling over this.
- people are being arrested, charged, and prosecuted, for opinions
- that number is greater than 1
- the number of people being arrested under speech laws, per year, is reportedly[0] over 12,000
- some substantial number of those are for opinions, some are not but we don't know how many either way [0] (and considering the government were attempting to delete the Courtdesk archive[1], I'd say that's by design)
- "convictions and sentencings for the relevant offences had decreased dramatically" [0]
This points to overzealous policing and vague laws.
The criticisms by Americans, who are surely aghast at this state of affairs given their founding principles, cannot be dismissed until better numbers are available, but while the number we do know is > 1, the criticisms are valid if not entirely sound (but may be entirely sound).
I agree there is a problem if even 1 person is treated like this.
I disagree that the American commentary on it is well informed, motivated by anything approaching principle, or really anything other than a desire to paint the UK in the worst possible light. Such figures being bandied around form part of a larger narrative along with false claims about "no-go" areas and hysteria about London having a Muslim mayor.
It's effectively rage-porn for the US right wing. We can see this in the continued framing as "12000 people arrested for inappropriate speech", when that number includes death threats as part of (for example) domestic violence cases.
Meanwhile, of course, let's ignore that the US President is weaponising the civil justice system in the US to silence critics and journalism he finds unfavourable.
> (but may be entirely sound)
We know they're not entirely sound, because the category of offences is wide enough that the number of these offences which are not, in fact, related to expressing one's opinion on social media is substantial. The arrests cover stalking and harassment, making death threats and threats of violence, racial abuse, intimidation, and inciting hatred via any form of communication down to and including snail mail.
So if there's one thing we do know, it's that the actual number arrested for "posts they make online" that should really be considered free speech is unlikely to be anywhere near that, and as such the statistic itself is useless. It's like looking at the overall death rate for the US (approximately 3 million) and proclaiming to be shocked at the results of gun ownership. But it will continue to be thrown around because it fits a specific narrative.
They arrest thousands of people under the communications act, which covers everything from the mail to Whatsapp. If I was your neighbour and I called you up on the phone and threatened to break your legs if your dog didn't stop barking, and you called the police on me, I'd likely be in those stats.
It's clear they arrest some people for posts online, and that is bad. But the numbers aren't clear at all, and the one bandied around most in public at the moments is so not informative that its use is basically propaganda.
Help me understand this attitude, because I've mostly seen women wearing these types of products, and they stand to gain a lot in terms of security from wearing them. So why the ad hominems? What is your best argument against these devices? When I go to a coffee shop I do so with the understanding that the establishment is likely recording me, are we going to accept this same rhetoric for anyone that films others in public and/or commercial spaces?
Generally public places do not have cameras that record your interactions with others in detail (including sound) and the owners of the establishment generally do not interact with you for the sole purpose of generating footage they can monetize online.
Additionally there are laws and expectations around cameras in places like bathrooms. Those laws still exist for smartglasses-wearers, but it can be hard to police if it is not obvious that the glasses have cameras and are recording.
> Help me understand this attitude, because I've mostly seen women wearing these types of products, and they stand to gain a lot in terms of security from wearing them.
How? This is just going to give a bunch of creepy men an easier way to film me. I'm dreading these getting mainstream adoption.
I'll give a personal example. At a coffee shop I go to, someone repeatedly threatened to kill me. The owners would call the police, and they'd take a report, but without direct evidence the police claimed to have no power other than to trespass this individual. Which they did. Since that first time, he's threatened to kidnap, torture, and then murder me on several occasions. For my own safety, it would have been nice to have a video/audio of these events. As you might imagine, pulling out my phone and filming it seems like a dangerous option.
The coffee isn't why I go there, it's where my friends meet up, and I go to the gym next door. He's also threatened employees, one quit. I'm not sure why you're making jokes, but since you are it seems like I should double down and insist that I have the right to film such encounters.. especially when my account of these events isn't taken seriously.
(1) a single or handful of security-angled cameras controlled by a local business for security purposes
(2) any individual possibly recording you at eye level at any second without you knowing, and having the ability to use and manipulate that footage and upload it to the internet
Ok, let's not assume (1), plenty of cameras are connected to law enforcement, upload everything to a random cloud service, are trivially accessible by others online, or are made by sketchy Chinese companies.
Not a substantial difference, recordings of both kinds are uploaded to the internet all the time. So if we're not going to forbid one, then I don't see a significant enough reason to forbid the other. What it seems like is that you offer your trust for one situation, because you benefit from it, but are unwilling to trust the other, because you don't. This seems like selfishness, especially after years of being told there is no presumption of privacy in public spaces.
From my vantage, this appears to be a "rules for thee but not for me" situation. If you support filming in public spaces, but believe restricting that to only those you trust, then this is hypocrisy.
> You only have to remind yourself of what catcalling is.
What do you think all these glasshole-women are going to do with bunch of (poor quality, grainy night) videos of some drunk bro on the street telling them "nice rack you have there, sweetheart"? Call FBI so they would give chase on a helicopter immediately?
Please stop using ad hominem attacks, this is not the appropriate forum for such remarks.
> "nice rack you have there, sweetheart"
I assume that would be considered sexual harassment in most jurisdictions, which local police should concern themselves with, especially if it's happening to minors.
> Please stop using ad hominem attacks, this is not the appropriate forum for such remarks.
I feel quite strongly about people nonconsensually filming other people in public spaces. The proliferation of guides about disabling the indicators of active camera on smart glasses make me even more hesitant to normalize or condone such behavior.
> I assume that would be considered sexual harassment in most jurisdictions, which local police should concern themselves with, especially if it's happening to minors.
Stealing an Amazon package from your porch is also illegal in most jurisdictions yet police won't do anything with a video from your Ring doorbell showing some generic young-dude-in-a-baseball-cap-and-a-hoodie taking it away. They are only interested in such videos when investigating (what they consider) serious crimes.
> especially if it's happening to minors
You want minors to wear Meta glasses and film all the time? I shudder imagining growing up in such dystopia.
> I'm at a loss for why you brought up the FBI.
Sorry, that was a snark about how people who support installing smart doorbells and Flock cameras everywhere imagine police would react to a video showing someone stealing a bag from their car or a package from their porch.
I suspect the OP is being somewhat sarcastic because it is widely known that the police will do absolutely nothing about a report of catcalling, video or not.
I would be satisfied with that, what bothers me is hypocrisy. If we want to do away with all of this behavior, then let's do so, but failing that then we're simply making up rules that some people have to follow, but others don't.
Is there a better way to modulate others’ behavior?
Before, when it was he said, she said, it was always tenuous for the person with less power to pursue the issue. Now, they can finally access consequences for people violating their freedoms.
Same can be said about what is going on in bedrooms but I don't think that having stronger evidence for home abuse justify the invasion of privacy. And I don't think random people filming everything in bars/restaurants/night-clubs is a price I'm willing to pay just to make it easier to prosecute some crazies or drunken catcallers.
Social expectations, upbringing, interpersonal ties that make social behaviors potentially costly on a personal level to do wrong, all things the same people making the glasses made all of their money degrading?
Easy - covert recording of other people in public is not OK.
This ridiculous idea that "it's in public so you have no expectation of privacy" is a semantic retcon, the pervasiveness of cameras is new and fundamentally changes your level of exposure in the public sphere. Overtly recording people in public is not really OK. Face-mounted, covert recording is another step too far and offensive to most people.
If you genuinely wish to understand the attitude, may I recommend doing a deep dive into the many fine articles written about this back in 2013-15, when Google failed to launch the original glasshole-wear.
I think it can be a general rule without being a concrete one, and is heavily context dependent.
I agree that dash cams are for the most part OK, because for the most part they're recording for safety reasons and evidence in case of accidents. But sitting in a coffee shop as a private citizen, recording everyone that comes in without any particular justification would not really be OK, covertly or overtly. Even though the owner might be doing the same thing for security.
So perhaps "covert recording of other people in public without an accepted, socially justifiable reason, is not OK"
I'm not a fan of rules that aren't concrete, especially when the opposition tends to muddy the water and use ad hominems to justify their opinions. Lacking a clear set of rules has never led us to a safer community.
Then you are going to have a hard time in a society filled with other humans, or living with a legal system that takes human complexity and grey areas into account in so many different ways.
Outside of a parser or a maths class, rules are rarely that concrete.
(Reading your other comments, I am sorry that your experiences have lead you to be so scared going about your day to day life that you think recording every interaction is a necessary thing to do. I'm afraid you're not going to find a lot of people who agree with that, and many who will find the idea very intrusive, though I suspect you're far from the only one in your position.
FYI if you go down this route, in some countries it is a legal, not just social, requirement that people be notified that you're recording them, particularly when it comes to audio, see one-party or two-party consent jurisdictions etc, while recording of direct threats may be legit, blanket recording of all interactions or of other people's conversations, as a precautionary measure, may not be)
Wow really well done with the lenticular effect. I immediately recognised the reference to They Live too.
That must have cost a lot. To get posters like that made.
Back when I worked in cinema we would occasionally get lenticular movie posters. The cost varies by how many they print as a batch, but you're looking at about $10-20 a piece.
I doubt it's that pricy. I believe you print a regular poster with a special image then apply the textured layer on top.
You literally only need a special image and a "lens": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRTe_MRSbsY
I agree it’s very well done. Not sure if they’re all from/by EHE but the political adverts like this I’ve seen from around the UK are so clever.
Yes, and we definitely need more of them, society seems to have gone numb, especially for those of us that had activism in the 70s and 80s.
Gemini estimated it to cost around 500€ per piece
I don't understand why Meta is so insistent on making the camera and creepy video recording the primary feature of these glasses. They do have a ton of other uses. The speakers are genuinely great. It's useful to be able to hear notifications while walking. Having a decent AI for asking random questions is nice as well. It supports live translation. And unlike Airpods it doesn't tune out the rest of the world, which I like. And the new models have a display, which could be useful for stuff like maps.
Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance.
I do all* of that with my phone and a Bluetooth bone conduction headphones. It kinda seems like the glasses part only make sense if it's for loading it up with a camera. You know, for looking at things, with your glasses.
I agree it would be nice to have a non-skeezy offering, but I think that would be an entirely different product line.
[Edit: oh, well, I didn't realize some but not all of the meta glasses do actually have a tiny display built in. That would be the other use case, for the looking at things, through your glasses.]
* Okay, the sound quality is just alright, but if Meta wanted to pivot to headphones, I'm all ears, as it were.
The whole VR shtick they were hyping up for a decade now and even rebranded whole corporation for, only really works if everyone is wearing these cameras 24/7. They failed at advertising the experience itself, so while that is shelved they are exploring other paths. These glasses are intended to normalize widespread pervasive recording as a primary objective, and to collect vast amounts of data for the LLM "training" as a secondary.
PS: two of my friends found no issues with these, bought a pair each and excitedly recorded with many other people present. Like, the issue didn't even register. I foresee that a lot of people will follow, if the price will be accessible, and one day it will be.
In theory I could see really enjoying them in an action sports (backcountry skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing) setting. I'd want 1) true AR that could annotate terrain with stuff like slope angle, aspect etc, 2) all the GPS and monitoring functionality of a Garmin watch, and 3) a high quality action camera that could replace a gopro with less faff.
From what I can tell we aren't particularly close to putting this all together in a consumer usable package.
My father uses them to record and share videos of some of his craft work, and they're actually pretty good for that.
But that can only be a niche use-case - the sort of thing you'd expect to work better as a minor product from Logitech or GoPro, rather than as a celebrity-endorsed consumer flagship from a tech behemoth.
> Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance
They also have to look radically different, because anyone who sees someone wearing the current design will always just assume the person using them is a creeper recording creepy videos whether or not the glasses are even capable of doing that. The association is already made from the current model.
The financial motive must be capturing video data for AI training. Moreover, this data won't be entirely passive: the glasses can tell the user to do something and then observe how the video feed changes.
The more nefarious motive is to inject a layer of AI between humans and nature.
Eh, realistically speaking the camera is it's main selling point. If you want just audio, why not get eg an aftershockz headset. They've been around for over 10 yrs and work very well for that exact usecase (speaker that doesn't block your ears whatsoever)
The translation feature is also available on your phone which you'll need to pull out when using it anyway, because otherwise the other party won't understand what you're saying either...
> The translation feature is also available on your phone which you'll need to pull out when using it anyway, because otherwise the other party won't understand what you're saying either...
I think a major use case for live translation is one where the other party is standing opposite to you.
There’s no way this would work, or work more reliably, than the translator apps we have on phones. In order for this Babelfish sci-fi interface to work, the other party has to be aware and pause their speech for the translation. If they can’t hear their translated message they’ll speak over it. Either that or you have some kind of deafening that passes-thru the translated voice in realtime, and then you lose their emotion, emphasis, and tons of other information that doesn’t fit neatly into the standard monolingual worldview of tech.
Even the “conversation mode” built into Google translate or the iPhone app is useless. I can only imagine it working in the sterile environment it was probably designed in: a conference room with two people trying there hardest to make it work.
I live abroad and travel a lot for photography. Whenever I’m using a translator app, it’s typically a chaotic situation like haggling with a taxi driver, a meal with a group of strangers who invited me to eat with them, lots of background noise. The mode that everyone defaults to, without fail, is to use their own phone to speak or type a message and then hold it up in front of their interlocutor’s face. Sometimes they mix in some fragments of English or I know some fragments of their language. It’s lossy but it works.
I can’t imagine a wearable that would perform better. A notepad that can magically translate little messages is about as far as I would want it to go. Tech is pretty awful at intermediating human relations.
Having my main pair of prescription glasses, covered by insurance, also be my Bluetooth headset is super useful.
The camera feature is also really nice for a lot of non-creepy use cases. From translating signs and plaques in front of me w/o pulling out my phone, to taking 1st person videos on amusement park rides, to photos of my son without having to view the world through my phone waiting for just the right shot.
Heck video calls with Grandma where I can chase my son around the house and let Grandma see everything, or when we read books together over video chat.
Meta glasses are great for parents, kids do all sorts of wacky things and I don't want to be one of those parents always waiting with my phone out so I can capture the perfect picture.
> I don't understand why
A self-definition as an intrusive peeping Tom is not easily overcome.
Basically, "small cameras/microphones, cheap enough to be everywhere" completely changes the "free to take photos/video in public" equation - so that's probably worth revisiting legally.
Clearly there is a difference between someone waving a SLR camera around (digital or film) and the possibilities of today and where the content ends up.
However... the pub/bar/nightclub, gym, pool, etc etc etc isn't public. It is the private property of the owner. So if people don't like them - as is evident it seems - these glasses should hit social resistance.
Unfortunately, educating people against some technology is not going to help. It should be a state-level mandate to have any effect. Most people are discretion-less, sheep-minded money pockets. Meta and other businesses discovered this fact long ago and exploit it to maximum extent. Their products always target the "sheep-following" aspects, instead of individual usefulness.
Education can work if there is a convincing story.
What’s the story here other than a gruesome image?
I wish their storytelling matched their visual designs in terms of imagination.
This is why the "put the sunglasses on" fight went on forever. :)
Companies, businesses, governments of all sizes, while having distinct legal rights to them as entities, are actually made up of people.
So yeah, "educating people against some technology" is kind of the only way to help people see what is going on.
I mean, the government isn't run by aliens... probably.
How charming.
A young, authoritarian-minded elitist aiming to force their views onto the rest of us 'stupid sheep'...with the implicit threat of a gun to the head via the state's monopoly on violence.
Have you ever examined the idea that, people doing things you don't agree with may not all be less enlightened than you? And that, in fact, it could be you who is a sheep, angrily shouting in unison with the mob in the midst of a trendy moral panic...scapegoating all the worlds problems and your own personal frustrations onto some dumb social media app?
What a balanced viewpoint!
On one end, we have a megacorporation that has been proven to engage in: willingly sharing private user data with random third parties; accepting and running ads for foreign state actors targeting another country; creating one of the most sophisticated tracking regimes in the world; collecting oceans of data to build profiles on everyone, user and not; enabling a genocide to be coordinated on their platform; using their money and power to influence legislation in their favor; knowingly designing their platforms to be incredibly addictive, including deliberately discussing how to get children hooked; and a practically endless list of other things.
On the other end, we have HN commenters. They are really angry and that they want to undo some of the damage described above. They are pretty jaded about how elegantly Meta has been able to exploit addiction, network effects and the human mind to keep people complicit.
To me it's obvious that #2 is the true evil. They obviously won't succeed because wealth controls our reality, but just for daring to question the status quo, they are authoritatian elitist sheep with superiority complexes. True freedom is when the world's biggest companies get to do whatever they want, slavery is when people to use their democratically elected governments to oppose that. Can you smell all that freedom in the air?
Ray-Ban Wayfarer used to be a such classic design. By associating them with cameras and Meta, Ray-Ban risks messing that up for good.
"Ray-Ban Wayfarer used to be a such classic design. By associating them with cameras and Meta, Essilor Luxottica has messed up an iconic name and brand."
Fixed it for you.
It's hard to believe that in the late smartphone era there are people who think they're not online enough already, and want smart glasses so they can be even more online.
Well, I kinda wouldn't mind glasses that could show important notifications or maps. It could be handy for lots of things, like a heads up display. Not to watch the social feeds but to find my way or read a message from a friend saying they're late. When I use my phone or watch to navigate it's a bit more dangerous. Thinking specifically of one time when I fell badly doing just that.
I absolutely wouldn't want them to incorporate a camera though. They should not have one at all.
And I would want them with open firmware from a respectable company or organisation. So these ones are a non starter obviously.
> Not to watch the social feeds but to find my way or read a message from a friend saying they're late.
Do you really need this for that?
There are all kinds of products that we need to reject not because the fundamentals aren't awesome for some proportion of people, but because the implementation is as obviously corrupt as the business owners pushing it.
The dumb speaker that OpenAI is hoping you stick in your home to spy on you is not some preposterously worthless piece of crap from beginning to end without exception. It's just a creepy mess that's nowhere near worth it for anybody who cares about themselves or anyone who ever visits their domicile. That doesn't mean that it isn't pretty nice to have your hands full of grease and be able to get a small piece of information using your voice.
All about the details. You want to ethically produce something private at reasonable cost without excessive energy usage to serve useful functions, sign me up. Just no cloud, no privacy invasion, an entire impossible wishlist for companies not as cool as e.g. Framework.
> ...but because the implementation is as obviously corrupt as the business owners pushing it.
Because the business owners figured out that they could get you to pay for things that turn you into an even more valuable product.
The cat is out of the bag and there is no reason to believe there will ever be a reversal of this. Not enough people care, and there isn't enough demand for "clean" products to displace the big companies. People aren't going to pay $1,000 for a privacy-respecting version of a product that's available for $200.
As I see it, the only solution (if you really want one) is to reject the idea that every aspect of your life has to be tech-ified. To say no to digital crack because you recognize it's rotting your brain, harming your relationships, etc.
You don't need to stare at a screen 15 hours a day for work, education, information and entertainment. You don't need your watch, television, speakers, glasses, fridge and toilet to be connected to the internet. You don't need a smart phone or watch or pair of glasses to be the "load-bearing" foundation of your relationships with friends, family and community.
Well my family doesn't live in the same country and most of my friends I don't see every day yet I communicate with them daily. Same with the communities I'm in, they're really active online.
And all my stuff is connected yes but not through big tech cloud. It is pretty easy to avoid all that. I use home assistant and I buy stuff specifically because it supports local connectivity. The biggest issue is whatsapp for now.
I won't dismiss that technology can be great for keeping in touch with people (especially family) who are not physically close to you but we should also acknowledge that there's a huge difference between digital interactions and face-to-face connection. There is a compelling body of evidence that the latter provides far more emotional and mental health benefits than the former.
Anyone truly interested in their well-being should make sure they're not treating digital interactions as a 1:1 substitute for real-life connection.
I kinda have that though. I use a home assistant voice preview speaker, connected to a locally hosted whisper instance backed by Qwen 3.6. All local and fairly energy-reasonable :)
Just saying it's not impossible to have your cake and eat it.
Under a hundred bucks?! Ooooh! https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/
Yes however the server for all that did not cost a hundred bucks. A lot more than that :P Of course it's not the only thing I use it for either, and I view it as an investment in learning too. And it wasn't terribly expensive either. Two GPUs of 500 euro in total and 100 worth of components, the rest was all surplus stuff I had from upgrading my gaming PC. Then some dockers for things like whisper (and home assistant's "wyoming" wrapper around it) and ollama etc.
The only issue right now is that home control is relatively slow because home assistant plonks way too much context into the pipeline. It would work much better with an elective tool model like MCP but they don't have this yet.
PS: You could also choose the new Pine64 voice thing, It's looking pretty decent. It wasn't out yet when I bought mine.
No but it would be handy. I don't really need my smartwatch to read notifications either but it's super handy when I'm out and I have my hands full. This would be even better (and replace my smartwatch I'm sure).
I would take a camera with AR integration. I'm imagining some mashup of scrap book note keeping in digital space and technical work like car repairs or utility work. Imagine seeing where the studs are in the walls, or finding a now you left yourself in the engine bay of your car...
Certainly I'd like to have my expensive, fragile tech glasses while fixing a car, with all the potential debris about to fling.
Well the hololens did come with an optional shield/hardhat cover just for that kind of scenario. It's not unprecedented.
The problem I see is you're going to want a camera built-in for vision reasons for your amazing reality-overlay, and at that point, well, you've got a camera built-in.
I'm sure you could do that without one. Gyro, accelerometer, compass, GPS, step counter, altimeter. Should be accurate enough for basic navigation. Especially with some smart dead reckoning algorithm that calibrates itself at known map points like when you turn a corner. Showing notifications shouldn't need any kind of AR awareness at all. You could just show them above the normal field of vision just like the Google glass did.
Again there the problem was not the display, it was the camera. And Google glass didn't even use it for any tracking purpose.
I don't think the issue is that it can't be done without the camera. I think the issue is that the whole product exists to get those cameras out there. Data is the new gold, those vision AIs need to be trained. So they've never even tried without one.
Yeah you could definitely have a go.
Where is the exact line - i.e. can you use Lidar? Infrared depth-sensing? Or do these provide too much data such that the scene could be recreated?
(I'm exploring this as a thought experiment, in general I agree that people shouldn't be carrying hidden cameras on their faces, and if those cameras are at all connected to Meta then it's much worse!)
Well lidar in that form factor would end up just being an 8x8 laser DoF sensor like some smartphones have. There's no space or power budget for a real lidar.
That would be ok I guess. That's not enough to capture much of anything even with a continuous feed.
What if I could watch Instagram reels at all moments all day. Streamed right in to my eyeballs.
> What if I could watch Instagram reels at all moments all day. Streamed right in to my eyeballs.
You'd be Mark Zuckerberg's idea of an ideal person.
The concept of constantly taking images and storing metadata so you can remember where your keys are seems nuts but at the same time I could see it being normal.
If you do one of the following now...
- Wear sunglasses or glasses now
- Take pics or videos with your phone
Smart glasses are very handy and when traveling especially solo asking about what your seeing in front of you is handy/informative.
I can see when AI becomes 100% reliable with smart glasses we all are almost know it alls. Everything and anything we need to know will be presented in front of us.
Ok all the above sounds crazy to most, but ive enjoyed using my Metas since Oct 2023 (had to buy another paid April 2025) though Meta glasses are sh!t in terms of durability. So i can recommend smart glasses but not really Metas especially if you like to buy technology that lasts!
>> Take pics or videos with your phone
Positioning smartphone camera seems way easier then positioning your head for a good photo. What do you do when you want low perspective? Or an overhead view?
> when AI becomes 100% reliable with smart glasses we all are almost know it alls
Keep going with that line of imagination and it's easy to understand how even someone burned on the Metaverse could be excited about the kinds of pitches Zuckerberg must give for his future visions. (Legitimately exciting thoughts, w/optimist hat on)
Have you ever unintentionally recorded a stranger?
Have you ever took a photo or video while your in a crowd and other people you don't know appearred in either? Did you care about them and look for them to ask if it was ok that they were in the background of the media you took?
Pardon but I don't understand your question cause if you think of it all humans have done the above since the day cameras or video cameras existed.
Further, im pretty sure smart glasses to AI devices are the next big thing. Meta probably will not win the smart glass race as many hate them due to privacy reasons. Apple a privacy focused company could add tech to blur out and or anonymize faces of those in the background to calm peoples fears.
There is a world of difference between (1) a random individual collecting a few people's faces and voices and (2) a huge corporation nonconsensually collecting that information at a mass scale (and with location!) in an age when identity resolution is automated.
yeah like said Meta is probably not going to win this race but Apple could as it's privaccy focused and they could have as noted..blur out or anonymizes faces that aren't in your network. Apple already labels and tries to name faces it sees often in your photos and has done for years.
Could you imagine someone walking around with their phone pointed wherever they look, recording the whole time, as they casually walk down the street, sit at a cafe, or engage in a conversation with you?
How are these things not publicly shamed out of existence?
It feels like each year lately has been a new Black Mirror episode.
The real killer app form me requires a camera (though it doesn’t need to record photos or video for me to access — I have a phone for that).
I need a device that tells me who I’m talking to if I’ve been introduced to them before and tell me how I know them (This is Bob Dobbs, you first met him in Texas in 1985 and he saved you at that party when you needed some Slack)”. Especially great when I meet someone out of context.
But bad actors mean I’ll probably never get this prosthesis.
You can actually accomplish this pretty easily with off the shelf components! You can just say, "Hey, I think we've met before but I can't remember exactly where?"
It also works really well as a conversation starter for me. I forget people’s names and the context all the time, but the faces stay familiar, and of course you can tell from their facial expression that we’ve met.
Showoff. I can't remember names or recognise faces. I've settled on a strategy of simply greeting everyone as though I've met them before, which feels a lot more empathic than sending everyone I meet's details to a mass surveillance company.
I would immediately walk way from you. Then you could label me as an uncooperative element in your database of people you've met.
These things are peak ick
The bigger problem is that you essentially need to host somewhere a database with personal information of everyone you met, including their names, biometrics and private details. Nonconsensually. And it has to be accessible through the internet.
Honestly, just take notes and reread them sometimes, maybe?
AR will happen. Exactly what that future will look like I don't know. The one thing I do know though is that meta, the same company that decided you can be AI injected into an ad without informed consent, has no business paving the path to AR adoption.
Dang that's good production value. Did they pick the lock on the box?
People wearing cameras is going to increase over time, no matter what. Why would it slow down?
Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely anti a lot of things, including people wearing cameras all the time, but I see no logical way to stop it without stomping on freedoms. In this case, defense will be your ally, whatever form that may take,eg wearing a mask.
If I had to choose between flock cameras and meta glasses existing, I'd choose the glasses.
Quite simply because people don't want to be casually recorded 24/7. By "casually" I mean by other people doing so indiscriminately, if not actively fishing for "content", as opposed to entities doing so for more justifiable reasons, like a security cam.
Doesn’t that strongly suggest us that it’s not the filming that’s actually problematic, but something that happens afterwards?
No. People simply stop behaving naturally when being casually recorded. It creates completely artificial scenarios. For instance if for some reason I had a friend pick up one of these glasses I certainly wouldn't allow him into my house with them on, even if he assured there was no recording, and I completely believed him. The mere presence of a such would just create a dampening effect on normal behavior. It'd be akin to somebody constantly pointing their phone camera at everybody, even if it was indeed off.
And in practice many of the undesirable things that will happen with these glasses are 100% legal. For instance people are going to bars, finding drunk girls, and recording everything for clicks and humiliation. Ban the filming and you ban the glasses. Banning the publication would do nothing since there's endless ways to share "content" that would sidestep this.
And that's just one trend. There's endless ways for this stuff to be abused, yet very few ways it'll achieve anything good. And those are much more hypothetical than the endless abuses which are already rife in spite of these things being extremely fringe.
Thank you. I think (or hope) I see your point.
I happen to were in exact scenario that you have mentioned, and I think I understand what you mean. Just as an anecdote - no, it doesn’t always work that way. At least it didn’t worked that way with me, because I held a different belief. It irked me for a moment - when I recognized a camera the association of topic-adjacent controversies sprung to mind. However, I dismissed it, and in retrospect I can assure that my behavior returned to natural. And if not for Meta specifically, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me at all.
(The person with glasses had an - IMHO - very legit use case for having a device like that, if this matters.)
But that’s just me with my weird beliefs. In my head a camera is a sensor. It’s no fundamentally different from wearer’s own eyes to me.
When I emphasized “actually” I was (very poorly) trying to say that it ideally shouldn’t be a problem, because its not what causes harm, only provides a way to cause it. But you’re right, when the abuse is de-facto the only prevalent spoken about use case, and legal side doesn’t match social expectations, it creates all those ill effects, so even if it possibly shouldn’t be problematic - it becomes such, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy’s way.
People nearly always go for the lowest hanging fruits, I shouldn’t hate us for this. But it’s really depressing, to be honest.
The big difference is one's eyes cannot be used to record and share events in perfect detail. What happens between people stays between people, or relies on low reliability recounting. This is of course without even hitting on what you mentioned - that this is all being beamed back to Meta who's going to try to monetize it in any way they can, and then likely further onto the NSA who's sole purpose in modern existence seems to be to try to create Precrime.
And in exchange we get... what? Somebody can record things slightly faster than the approximately 3 seconds it'd take you to do so on your phone?
> People wearing cameras is going to increase over time, no matter what.
Why?
>If I had to choose between flock cameras and meta glasses existing, I'd choose the glasses.
Whatever happened to give me liberty or give me death
> without stomping on freedoms
Despite the f. up American idea that people have no expectation of any privacy in public, recording others on behalf of Meta is stomping on freedoms
I think the biggest barrier isn't the hardware anymore, it's trust!
Has the be the product of an CEO's fever dream and a bunch of yes men.
I wonder if these things will meet the same fate as bluetooth headsets. Once upon a time decried as the preserve of "Bluetooth Douches" who worse the Jabra while taking their banking phone calls, now they're everywhere. Everyone's got Airpods in.
One day perhaps Meta Glasses will be the same. I really like them. They're a spectacular (haha) addition to a sightseeing trip. At the aquarium you can ask them what you're looking at and it'll tell you about the fish, at the playground you can record your kids running around, and you've got music where you go and so on. The problem, of course, is that they have short battery life and I don't want to switch from my smart glasses to my other glasses since the entire point is availability.
Here's a video of my daughter running around the playground from the perspective of my wife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcLAByw6ZYc
> I really like them
Do you expect your opinion to change as your daughter grows up and makes her own experiences with being filmed all the time?
I feel reminded of those always on AI cameras from a few years ago (google?) that were advertised to young parents because that’s like the one singular moment where it’s pretty uncontroversial to do this.
Kids are cute and full of energy, hands full, don’t want to miss a moment.
But smart glasses have real implications for our society around bullying, harassment, stalking etc.
All things that older children and young adults are affected by the most
If I were in high school again I would not want smart glasses to be normal
That's a valid point. I think that kids should be able to live with experimentation possible without consequences. In practice, most teens have smartphones now and are indiscriminate in recording them. If anything changes here it will have to be the practice of recording people has to fade because it's impossible to be certain you've not got a smartphone across the room videotaping you. And in public there's no proscription on other people using their smartphones to video you as well.
I doubt I'd even notice if someone was leaning back and video recording me from their seat as I walk down the street. It would just look like a lounging person reading social media.
But yeah, I probably would prefer to have her have access to at least some private spaces without any recording so she can rest easy, but in public that's a societal shift and the smart goggles add very little. It's just inherent in computers that their processes to see also store high-fidelity. Presumably with sufficiently advanced video generation all acts will be deniable or some other such thing will occur.
That is an interesting perspective I hadn't thought about. I see relatives constantly throwing phone cameras in baby's faces "look here, look here" the kids are trained to look at the phone/camera. I think of the experience from your daughter here, just running up to her mom wearing glasses - I hear the mass surveillance concerns, I see the pervert/harassment angle, I saw a friend do the "recording a party" angle, but I am just surprised I didn't see something as wholesome as this - thanks for expanding my view.
I'm glad you enjoyed it. We ended up not using the glasses very much eventually but I'm glad we got some happy moments.
I'm very confused by this take.
It's been over 20 years since then and it's still just as awkward to take a call in public. People will instinctively prefer a quiet place away from the crowd. Otherwise others may eavesdrop, think you're talking to them, or are crazy.
You'll find that most of those people with airpods are listening to something, not talking on a call. The most popular "smart glasses" that I see everywhere don't have cameras. They're "AR" HUDs for watching movies or playing games.
It's not about social acceptance. These hardware designs still suck big time.
> think you're talking to them
Yeah that's still weird. Last time it happened to me was in the City of London near Liverpool St (ironic as we're talking about banking phonecalls). Out of nowhere a guy walking towards me starts speaking, for all the world like he's trying to talk to me, so I stopped and said "Hey, can I help you?"
Nope, strides on past, then I noticed the airpods.
> City of London
Thanks to binge-watching CGP Grey's channel this week, I know exactly what you're referring to, and why you wrote it fully-specified like that!
> Once upon a time decried as the preserve of "Bluetooth Douches" who worse the Jabra while taking their banking phone calls, now they're everywhere. Everyone's got Airpods in.
Two very different use cases. The vast majority of folks wearing AirPods are listening, not talking. The former is not disruptive to others while the latter is.
Love the ads.
> A visual depiction of the ad’s transformation from different angles
How does the ad know from what angle I'm watching? "We're always watching" must be literally true!
Anyway, gotta love British humor.
one questions , Meta with joint venture product Kylie Jenner's, how its possible
The UK police monitoring your social media posts is more of a risk than Meta monitoring your social media posts to their platforms.
We can (and should) try to avoid many bad things at once, not just whatever might be the worst bad thing.
One _directly_ feeds into the other. Next step: The UK police monitoring all glasses livestreams.
> Meta monitoring your social media posts to their platforms.
Monitoring everything around you, all the time.
And what you've heard about the UK police is likely to have been comically exaggerated by people with an agenda. There are problems, yes, they do not arrest thousands of people a year for being mean on twitter, no.
(I'm rate limited and can't reply below - when people look into these figures what they tend to find is the majority are people getting arrested for using services like whatsapp or facebook messenger to stalk, harass and threaten others, often in a domestic-violence situation. These are categorised as social media-related but it's not what is often described or assumed by american commentators, that they said something politically sensitive in public, and OH MY GOSH just look at the state of free speech in Britain. It's often much more along the lines of abusers threatening to kill an ex that finally managed to leave them.)
"comically exaggerated". Tell that to the 10-12,000 people arrested per year for "inappropriate" speech. Please don't go out of your way to defend it.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
That's exactly what I mean by comically exaggerated. I don't need to defend it, or go out of my way at all. Do you understand what that figure covers?
It's everything from sending death threats in an email or SMS to your ex who finally got up the courage to leave your abusive ass, to sending unsolicited dick-pics on whatsapp, to bomb threats old-school paper-mailed to a school, to direct, public incitements to mass murder on twitter during a riot, hoax calls to emergency services and a ton of other stuff. But it gets thrown around as if it's all about people making 'edgy' social media posts. I believe at least some of these would be grounds for arrest in the bastion of free speech that is the USA too?
Is there a problem with police in the UK overreaching on speech on social media? Yes I believe there is, and there are specific examples to show that. Is that figure you've got there in any way meaningful? On its own, no. Is it a delicious tidbit for people with scant regard for the truth and a specific agenda to push? You betcha.
> they do not arrest thousands of people a year for being mean on twitter, no.
It doesn't need to be thousands for it to be worrying.
From [1]:
> The Metropolitan Police has awarded Father Ted creator and Irish comedian Graham Linehan £25,000 and an unreserved apology after they arrested him last year as his plane touched down at Heathrow airport.
> Last year, Graham Linehan — who now lives in Arizona, United States of America — was arrested by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow airport in one of the most shocking incidents we have seen in years.
> What was Graham's supposed crime? Three gender-critical posts on X. This is despite the fact that gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act 2010 and were reaffirmed by last year's landmark Supreme Court ruling, which settled that "sex" is defined by biology, not gender identity.
Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word. It also seems that it is far more than one, too:
> General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young, said: "I'm beginning to lose count of the number of cases we've fought in which the police have arrested someone for a tweet, decided to take no further action and then had to pay them substantial compensation for wrongful arrest.
[1] https://freespeechunion.org/news/met-police-apologises-and-p...
> It doesn't need to be thousands for it to be worrying.
I very much agree, which is another reason I think facts are important. There are real issues and discussing them using real data is great, productive etc.
But instead of rational debate what I see time and again is spurious figures like these thrown around by talking heads, repeated by posters like those above, trying to ... well I don't know, I don't fully understand why the US right wing thinks it's a smart move to demonise its allies at the moment, but here we are.
> Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word.
Yeah, it's a gross abuse of police power. Linehan seems like he's a bit of a nob, but being a bit of a nob in public shouldn't attract anything like this sort of attention. The police need to be reined in seriously, and to have pointed questions put to them about what they think is their damn job and where the money is going. At least it looks like he won the day in court, and the policy has changed - https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/jul/09/graham-lineh... - but IMHO heads should be rolling over this.
The facts are:
- people are being arrested, charged, and prosecuted, for opinions
- that number is greater than 1
- the number of people being arrested under speech laws, per year, is reportedly[0] over 12,000
- some substantial number of those are for opinions, some are not but we don't know how many either way [0] (and considering the government were attempting to delete the Courtdesk archive[1], I'd say that's by design)
- "convictions and sentencings for the relevant offences had decreased dramatically" [0]
This points to overzealous policing and vague laws.
The criticisms by Americans, who are surely aghast at this state of affairs given their founding principles, cannot be dismissed until better numbers are available, but while the number we do know is > 1, the criticisms are valid if not entirely sound (but may be entirely sound).
[0] https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
[1] https://www.legalcheek.com/2026/02/ministry-of-justice-order...
I agree there is a problem if even 1 person is treated like this.
I disagree that the American commentary on it is well informed, motivated by anything approaching principle, or really anything other than a desire to paint the UK in the worst possible light. Such figures being bandied around form part of a larger narrative along with false claims about "no-go" areas and hysteria about London having a Muslim mayor.
It's effectively rage-porn for the US right wing. We can see this in the continued framing as "12000 people arrested for inappropriate speech", when that number includes death threats as part of (for example) domestic violence cases.
Meanwhile, of course, let's ignore that the US President is weaponising the civil justice system in the US to silence critics and journalism he finds unfavourable.
> (but may be entirely sound)
We know they're not entirely sound, because the category of offences is wide enough that the number of these offences which are not, in fact, related to expressing one's opinion on social media is substantial. The arrests cover stalking and harassment, making death threats and threats of violence, racial abuse, intimidation, and inciting hatred via any form of communication down to and including snail mail.
So if there's one thing we do know, it's that the actual number arrested for "posts they make online" that should really be considered free speech is unlikely to be anywhere near that, and as such the statistic itself is useless. It's like looking at the overall death rate for the US (approximately 3 million) and proclaiming to be shocked at the results of gun ownership. But it will continue to be thrown around because it fits a specific narrative.
>they do not arrest thousands of people a year for being mean on twitter, no
They arrest thousands of people for posts they make online. The public data does not break down what site it the arrests were from.
They arrest thousands of people under the communications act, which covers everything from the mail to Whatsapp. If I was your neighbour and I called you up on the phone and threatened to break your legs if your dog didn't stop barking, and you called the police on me, I'd likely be in those stats.
It's clear they arrest some people for posts online, and that is bad. But the numbers aren't clear at all, and the one bandied around most in public at the moments is so not informative that its use is basically propaganda.
Advanced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism potentially? (Maybe I’m being unfair)
glassholes never change
Help me understand this attitude, because I've mostly seen women wearing these types of products, and they stand to gain a lot in terms of security from wearing them. So why the ad hominems? What is your best argument against these devices? When I go to a coffee shop I do so with the understanding that the establishment is likely recording me, are we going to accept this same rhetoric for anyone that films others in public and/or commercial spaces?
Generally public places do not have cameras that record your interactions with others in detail (including sound) and the owners of the establishment generally do not interact with you for the sole purpose of generating footage they can monetize online.
Additionally there are laws and expectations around cameras in places like bathrooms. Those laws still exist for smartglasses-wearers, but it can be hard to police if it is not obvious that the glasses have cameras and are recording.
> Help me understand this attitude, because I've mostly seen women wearing these types of products, and they stand to gain a lot in terms of security from wearing them.
How? This is just going to give a bunch of creepy men an easier way to film me. I'm dreading these getting mainstream adoption.
I'll give a personal example. At a coffee shop I go to, someone repeatedly threatened to kill me. The owners would call the police, and they'd take a report, but without direct evidence the police claimed to have no power other than to trespass this individual. Which they did. Since that first time, he's threatened to kidnap, torture, and then murder me on several occasions. For my own safety, it would have been nice to have a video/audio of these events. As you might imagine, pulling out my phone and filming it seems like a dangerous option.
I'm sorry, there is a guy in a coffee shop that routinely threatens you, and it's still is your go to place?
Damn, just how good is that coffee?
(if that's real, and pulling phone out really is dangerous, can't you just ask the employee to film next time it happens for 10 bucks?)
The coffee isn't why I go there, it's where my friends meet up, and I go to the gym next door. He's also threatened employees, one quit. I'm not sure why you're making jokes, but since you are it seems like I should double down and insist that I have the right to film such encounters.. especially when my account of these events isn't taken seriously.
you genuinely dont see a difference between
(1) a single or handful of security-angled cameras controlled by a local business for security purposes
(2) any individual possibly recording you at eye level at any second without you knowing, and having the ability to use and manipulate that footage and upload it to the internet
Plus: (1) the security camera footage is constantly overwritten. (2) the video from the glasses is being uploaded to Meta.
Ok, let's not assume (1), plenty of cameras are connected to law enforcement, upload everything to a random cloud service, are trivially accessible by others online, or are made by sketchy Chinese companies.
Not a substantial difference, recordings of both kinds are uploaded to the internet all the time. So if we're not going to forbid one, then I don't see a significant enough reason to forbid the other. What it seems like is that you offer your trust for one situation, because you benefit from it, but are unwilling to trust the other, because you don't. This seems like selfishness, especially after years of being told there is no presumption of privacy in public spaces.
From my vantage, this appears to be a "rules for thee but not for me" situation. If you support filming in public spaces, but believe restricting that to only those you trust, then this is hypocrisy.
>I've mostly seen women wearing these types of products
Anyone have data on this? Feelin’ doubtful
> I've mostly seen women wearing these types of products, and they stand to gain a lot in terms of security from wearing them
How?
Sounds like Flock CEO thinking. If everyone wore a bodycam, the world would be crime free. (The thinking must stop before downsides are considered.)
How does having a video record of encounters benefit women? I'm sure you can figure that out. You only have to remind yourself of what catcalling is.
> You only have to remind yourself of what catcalling is.
What do you think all these glasshole-women are going to do with bunch of (poor quality, grainy night) videos of some drunk bro on the street telling them "nice rack you have there, sweetheart"? Call FBI so they would give chase on a helicopter immediately?
> glasshole-women
Please stop using ad hominem attacks, this is not the appropriate forum for such remarks.
> "nice rack you have there, sweetheart"
I assume that would be considered sexual harassment in most jurisdictions, which local police should concern themselves with, especially if it's happening to minors.
I'm at a loss for why you brought up the FBI.
> Please stop using ad hominem attacks, this is not the appropriate forum for such remarks.
I feel quite strongly about people nonconsensually filming other people in public spaces. The proliferation of guides about disabling the indicators of active camera on smart glasses make me even more hesitant to normalize or condone such behavior.
> I assume that would be considered sexual harassment in most jurisdictions, which local police should concern themselves with, especially if it's happening to minors.
Stealing an Amazon package from your porch is also illegal in most jurisdictions yet police won't do anything with a video from your Ring doorbell showing some generic young-dude-in-a-baseball-cap-and-a-hoodie taking it away. They are only interested in such videos when investigating (what they consider) serious crimes.
> especially if it's happening to minors
You want minors to wear Meta glasses and film all the time? I shudder imagining growing up in such dystopia.
> I'm at a loss for why you brought up the FBI.
Sorry, that was a snark about how people who support installing smart doorbells and Flock cameras everywhere imagine police would react to a video showing someone stealing a bag from their car or a package from their porch.
I suspect the OP is being somewhat sarcastic because it is widely known that the police will do absolutely nothing about a report of catcalling, video or not.
> … are we going to accept this same rhetoric for anyone that films others in public and/or commercial spaces?
yes, please.
i think that is exactly the direction we should be pushing. this creepy compulsion to record random people is weird af.
I would be satisfied with that, what bothers me is hypocrisy. If we want to do away with all of this behavior, then let's do so, but failing that then we're simply making up rules that some people have to follow, but others don't.
Is there a better way to modulate others’ behavior?
Before, when it was he said, she said, it was always tenuous for the person with less power to pursue the issue. Now, they can finally access consequences for people violating their freedoms.
Same can be said about what is going on in bedrooms but I don't think that having stronger evidence for home abuse justify the invasion of privacy. And I don't think random people filming everything in bars/restaurants/night-clubs is a price I'm willing to pay just to make it easier to prosecute some crazies or drunken catcallers.
Social expectations, upbringing, interpersonal ties that make social behaviors potentially costly on a personal level to do wrong, all things the same people making the glasses made all of their money degrading?
It's okay to record everyone around you all the time because:
1. Women do it. 2. The government does it. 3. Private businesses do it.
What?!
4. Dash cams do it 5. News agencies do it 6. Parents with babysitters do it
I'm not sure this is helping your argument. Why are some entities given the benefit of the doubt, while most individuals are not?
Easy - covert recording of other people in public is not OK.
This ridiculous idea that "it's in public so you have no expectation of privacy" is a semantic retcon, the pervasiveness of cameras is new and fundamentally changes your level of exposure in the public sphere. Overtly recording people in public is not really OK. Face-mounted, covert recording is another step too far and offensive to most people.
If you genuinely wish to understand the attitude, may I recommend doing a deep dive into the many fine articles written about this back in 2013-15, when Google failed to launch the original glasshole-wear.
> covert recording of other people in public is not OK
This rules out the use of dash cams then.. but I'm sure you realize the public benefit those offer, so I'm reluctant to accept this argument.
I think it can be a general rule without being a concrete one, and is heavily context dependent.
I agree that dash cams are for the most part OK, because for the most part they're recording for safety reasons and evidence in case of accidents. But sitting in a coffee shop as a private citizen, recording everyone that comes in without any particular justification would not really be OK, covertly or overtly. Even though the owner might be doing the same thing for security.
So perhaps "covert recording of other people in public without an accepted, socially justifiable reason, is not OK"
I'm not a fan of rules that aren't concrete, especially when the opposition tends to muddy the water and use ad hominems to justify their opinions. Lacking a clear set of rules has never led us to a safer community.
> I'm not a fan of rules that aren't concrete
Then you are going to have a hard time in a society filled with other humans, or living with a legal system that takes human complexity and grey areas into account in so many different ways.
Outside of a parser or a maths class, rules are rarely that concrete.
(Reading your other comments, I am sorry that your experiences have lead you to be so scared going about your day to day life that you think recording every interaction is a necessary thing to do. I'm afraid you're not going to find a lot of people who agree with that, and many who will find the idea very intrusive, though I suspect you're far from the only one in your position.
FYI if you go down this route, in some countries it is a legal, not just social, requirement that people be notified that you're recording them, particularly when it comes to audio, see one-party or two-party consent jurisdictions etc, while recording of direct threats may be legit, blanket recording of all interactions or of other people's conversations, as a precautionary measure, may not be)
What was your favorite article on Glassholery?
Honestly it's been so long I'd be a liar if I told you I remembered anything specific at this point!