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Show HN: Real-time privacy protection for smart glasses (github.com)

42 points by tash_2s ↗ HN
I built a live video privacy filter that helps smart glasses app developers handle privacy automatically.

How it works: You can replace a raw camera feed with the filtered stream in your app. The filter processes a live video stream, applies privacy protections, and outputs a privacy-compliant stream in real time. You can use this processed stream for AI apps, social apps, or anything else.

Features: Currently, the filter blurs all faces except those who have given consent. Consent can be granted verbally by saying something like "I consent to be captured" to the camera. I'll be adding more features, such as detecting and redacting other private information, speech anonymization, and automatic video shut-off in certain locations or situations.

Why I built it: While developing an always-on AI assistant/memory for glasses, I realized privacy concerns would be a critical problem, for both bystanders and the wearer. Addressing this involves complex issues like GDPR, CCPA, data deletion requests, and consent management, so I built this privacy layer first for myself and other developers.

Reference app: There's a sample app (./examples/rewind/) that uses the filter. The demo video is in the README, please check it out! The app shows the current camera stream and past recordings, both privacy-protected, and will include AI features using the recordings.

Tech: Runs offline on a laptop. Built with FFmpeg (stream decode/encode), OpenCV (face recognition/blurring), Faster Whisper (voice transcription), and Phi-3.1 Mini (LLM for transcription analysis).

I'd love feedback and ideas for tackling the privacy challenges in wearable camera apps!

21 comments

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tash_2s
I think mainstream adoption of smart glasses could be slowed more by privacy concerns than by hardware limitations. Remember Google Glass? While the hardware keeps improving, I want to make sure we're also addressing the software side.
abcd_f
Your solution does absolutely nothing to address privacy concerns with "glassholes".
TakaJP
Smart solution for wearable privacy. Consent-by-voice and offline processing make it practical, and I’m curious how you’ll expand beyond face blurring.
sxp
> Real-time processing – 720p 30fps on laptop

Have you tried running this on a phone or standalone smart glasses? 30fps is horrible performance on a laptop given that it's probably 10-100x more powerful than the target device. And what laptop? Based on your screenshot, I'm guessing you're using a new Apple Silicon mac which is practically a supercomputer compared to smart glasses.

zamadatix
Real-time self privacy protection people might buy into. They can trust what they are doing and they get the benefit. E.g. automatically not recording during certain periods without having to explicitly signal it each time is a convenience. I don't want my big post Taco Bell Shit to waste my storage or accidentally stream it somewhere. At the same time, I also don't want my smart glasses to be tethered to something which can run AI and video processing models all the time, or to be dumping it all to the cloud 24/7 live either, as battery is already one of the big problems with the tech currently. At least that's something the advance of technology in general may be able to solve though, so I like the concept for self-application.

I don't know this would actually make others any more comfortable/guaranteed, which is where the bulk of the privacy concerns around smart glasse lie. I'm also not sure if that's actually a problem for more technology to be able to solve. The nice thing about e.g. recording consent is you do it on your device, or in some cloud device by a 3rd party. The moment you do it through the other person's device it's no different (from a trust/easiness/guarantee factor) than just asking the person themselves to not record you (again, beyond the benefits to the operator themselves around that). If some guy walked up to you with a literal video camera pointed at you and said "it only records your face if you give it consent":

- Do you even trust the person is telling the truth?

- If you do, do you trust the technology to work 100% of the time?

- If it is a lie or doesn't work and they post something, are you any better off than if you weren't asked for consent and said no? (note: separate this from the value to the person operating the camera, who does get value from those that say yes).

- If you say no, are you really not going to feel awkward compared to not having someone recording the rest of the situation?

Maybe the answer for you to all of these is "Absolutely!", I'd bargain to bet it's not the case for the vast majority of those concerned with the privacy implications of the technology though (which I don't consider myself a part of that group necessarily, I'm just putting myself in their shoes for a second).

.

So I'd split my thoughts into two main sections: I'm not sure technology is going to solve any external privacy concerns here, but I think it's an interesting approach to internal privacy concerns with the tech.

arkadiyt
I don't need something to protect the privacy of others from me, I need something to protect my privacy from others. The majority of people who use smart glasses are not going to be using this - where is the product that will protect me from them?
jMyles
There is a strange ingredient in the ether right now - confounding privacy with censorship. If I can see something, and hear it, then blurring it is not "privacy", it's censorship.

I fully expected this to be about solutions for empowering the user to ensure that her audio and visual experiences weren't being exfiltrated to a third-party, not that they were being censored before even getting to her.

sillystuff
I appreciate your intent, But...

This does nothing to alleviate my privacy concerns, as a bystander, about someone rudely pointing a recording camera at me. The only thing that alleviates these concerns about "smart" glasses wearers recording video, is not having "smart" glasses wearers. I.e., not having people rudely walking around with cameras strapped to their faces recording everyone and everything around them. I can't know/trust that there is some tech behind the camera that will protect my privacy.

A lot of privacy invasions have become normalized and accepted by the majority of the population. But, I think/hope a camera strapped to someone's face being shoved into other peoples' faces will be a tough sell. Google Glass wearers risked having the camera ripped off their faces / being punched in the face. I expect this will continue.

Perhaps your tech would have use in a more controlled business/military environment? Or, to post-process police body camera footage, to remove images of bystanders before public release?

troyvit
Seriously. There has been so much progress in the area of non-consensual recording and processing of data, and so little in the area of countermeasures. You can do a web search for the former and find tons of hardware and software that'll help you spy on folks. Searching for adversarial design gives scientific papers. It implies that there is little-to-no measurable demand for privacy (at least of this sort) in the marketplace.
throwawayoldie
Still much less effective than spray paint liberally applied.
UltraSane
This reminds me of the Quantum Thief series of novels by Hannu Rajaniemi and its concept of Gevulot. It is a system that allows people, to set the desired level of privacy in every social encounter, to share memories and to access the exomemory. People can obscure themselves from being seen by others
sitkack
I think this is interesting research. I could see BLE beacons that announce what level of sharing one is comfortable with. Not unlike systems used at conferences to denote if someone can take their picture and what they can do with it.
sMarsIntruder
At some point we’ll probably have smart glasses that actively block or scramble cameras, so random people can’t record you just walking down the street.
Szpadel
I'm curious how do you handle case when camera sees multiple people and you detect consent.

If I understand correctly how this works consent can come from camera operator and be attributed to recorded person

bargainbin
This is like creating a t-shirt that says “don’t shoot me”.

The problem isn’t consent, the problem is that the gun is being needlessly pointed at you in the first place.

netsharc
I wonder if I can make a device that recognizes Meta, etc, glasses and aim and shoot laser at the camera lens (and send my users to jail after the device misses the lens and hits the glasshole's eye instead). If there are many glassholes, the laser would just shoot at them alternatingly at eg. 30 shots/seconds.. and make pew-pew noises each time.
paul7986
Meta introduces these and sells a few million so far. Apple releasing theirs in 2026/2027 will increase adoption by ten fold. I thought they might add soomething like this where it blurs out those in public and or changes their face to a celebrity or no name faces.

Note i love my Meta Ray Bans yet they aren't durable and after 2 breaking after 20 months Im not sure I will buy another pair (maybe the upcoming Oakleys but still same not reliable to non-durable tech in those). But for me they are great for taking pics and videos (asking the time too when my phone isnt on me) of my life and when traveling solo using the Live AI feature to learn more about my surroundings. Like what's the history of the train tracks Im walking alongside.