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?
(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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Think a little deeper. It is already possible for women to record these encounters and many do. It is widely known the police do nothing about it and the videos make no difference.
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 with the implicit threat of a gun to the head..via the state's monopoly on violence of course.
Have you ever examined the idea that, people doing things you don't agree with may not be stupid? And that, in fact, it could be you who is the sheep, angrily shouting in unison with the mob in the midst of a trendy moral panic?
The left-populist turn this website has taken after the influx of reddit-refugees a few years ago is getting increasingly annoying.
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.
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 democratically vote to oppose that. Can you smell all that freedom in the air?
To me this feels like the Japanese soldier stuck on the island still fighting the old war a decade after it ended.
Thanks for repeating the moral panic narrative for me, it’s exactly what I am talking about.
All your complaints have nothing to do with the topic of this thread and are just a replay of the 2010s media caricature of Facebook …which no longer even exists in the same form (the social graph is dead) and has slid into irrelevancy…because it was never as powerful as you claim it was. It’s a dumb social media app, not the source of all the worlds ills as you claim. Nobody is forcing you to use it (I don’t).
You just hate that people are spending their time in ways you don’t agree with and are consuming content that you and your fellow urban monoculture class members haven’t personally approved.
If we’re being honest, the hatred for social media here doesn’t come from a selfless concern for the good of humanity. It’s simply the frustrated flailings of people who were told their whole life they were special and yet the algorithm has unfortunately illustrated they are not. it must be extremely frustrating that other people are getting more attention than you on these platforms, when you believe you are so much smarter and morally superior to them.
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.
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.
At least one can put a radio-equipped tag on many things nowadays, and search for those that way.
If those glasses would be hackable and not tied to shady companies (Meta), and if power budget would allow for that (doubt it), I’d love to use camera for always-on face recognition. (Wait, put that pitchfork down please.)
My brain has difficulty recognizing faces on its own, a face almost never “clicks” (I recognize people by overall appearance instead). I see those glasses as a sign that maybe I can have prosthetics someday, for what others take for granted. No storage or transmission past the companion device, obviously. And a private non-shared database - I literally have no use for faces of people I don’t know.
But seeing all the ignorance with go-to “that’s only for creepy perverts, ban that and punch faces” altitude makes me quite unhappy.
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?
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 $5-15 a piece.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
- 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.
"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."
> Essilor Luxottica has messed up an iconic name and brand.
One can only hope that part of fixing this is the observation that EssilorLuxottica is a monopoly in the markets around eyewear (sunglasses, prescription glasses, lenses) and should be forcibly broken up.
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 audio translation. And unlike Airpods it doesn't tune out the rest of the world, which I like. And the new models have a display as well, which could be useful for stuff like maps.
Release a version 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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 a a primary objective, and to collect vast amounts of data for the LLM "training" as a secondary.
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's a pretty 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.
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.
It'd be fun to adapt copyright law to cover people's physical form. Imagine a huge class action suit against Meta for enabling such copyright infingement.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] thread(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
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’m comfortable with armed security at an airport. I’m less comfortable at a supermarket.
absolute rules only hold in math. in life, almost everything is a matter of degree and of details. that doesnt make it hypocrisy
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.
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.
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?)
1. Women do it. 2. The government does it. 3. Private businesses do it.
What?!
I'm not sure this is helping your argument. Why are some entities given the benefit of the doubt, while most individuals are not?
How?
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.
I'm at a loss for why you brought up the FBI.
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.
They’re probably a pedophile, given we know that freaks already use Meta glasses to peep into people having sex.
Anyone have data on this? Feelin’ doubtful
What’s the story here other than a gruesome image.
I wish their storytelling matched their visual designs in terms of imagination.
A young, authoritarian-minded elitist aiming to force their views onto the rest of us with the implicit threat of a gun to the head..via the state's monopoly on violence of course.
Have you ever examined the idea that, people doing things you don't agree with may not be stupid? And that, in fact, it could be you who is the sheep, angrily shouting in unison with the mob in the midst of a trendy moral panic?
The left-populist turn this website has taken after the influx of reddit-refugees a few years ago is getting increasingly annoying.
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.
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 democratically vote to oppose that. Can you smell all that freedom in the air?
Thanks for repeating the moral panic narrative for me, it’s exactly what I am talking about.
All your complaints have nothing to do with the topic of this thread and are just a replay of the 2010s media caricature of Facebook …which no longer even exists in the same form (the social graph is dead) and has slid into irrelevancy…because it was never as powerful as you claim it was. It’s a dumb social media app, not the source of all the worlds ills as you claim. Nobody is forcing you to use it (I don’t).
You just hate that people are spending their time in ways you don’t agree with and are consuming content that you and your fellow urban monoculture class members haven’t personally approved.
If we’re being honest, the hatred for social media here doesn’t come from a selfless concern for the good of humanity. It’s simply the frustrated flailings of people who were told their whole life they were special and yet the algorithm has unfortunately illustrated they are not. it must be extremely frustrating that other people are getting more attention than you on these platforms, when you believe you are so much smarter and morally superior to them.
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.
If those glasses would be hackable and not tied to shady companies (Meta), and if power budget would allow for that (doubt it), I’d love to use camera for always-on face recognition. (Wait, put that pitchfork down please.)
My brain has difficulty recognizing faces on its own, a face almost never “clicks” (I recognize people by overall appearance instead). I see those glasses as a sign that maybe I can have prosthetics someday, for what others take for granted. No storage or transmission past the companion device, obviously. And a private non-shared database - I literally have no use for faces of people I don’t know.
But seeing all the ignorance with go-to “that’s only for creepy perverts, ban that and punch faces” altitude makes me quite unhappy.
- 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!
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?
That must have cost a lot. To get posters like that made.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Why?
Whatever happened to give me liberty or give me death
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
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.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
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.
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...
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...
- 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 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.
Fixed it for you.
One can only hope that part of fixing this is the observation that EssilorLuxottica is a monopoly in the markets around eyewear (sunglasses, prescription glasses, lenses) and should be forcibly broken up.
Release a version without a camera and people might actually give it a chance.
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.
From what I can tell we aren't particularly close to putting this all together in a consumer usable package.
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.
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.
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.
The more nefarious motive is to inject a layer of AI between humans and nature.
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.
A self-definition as an intrusive peeping Tom is not easily overcome.
But that's a pretty 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.
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.
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.
These things are peak ick
Honestly, just take notes and reread them sometimes, maybe?
How are these things not publicly shamed out of existence?
It feels like each year lately has been a new Black Mirror episode.
How does the ad know from what angle I'm watching? "We're always watching" must be literally true!
Anyway, gotta love British humor.