The more we ostracise people doing that now, the less likely it will come up in the future.
In any place of business that I patronize, if I see one, I will request that staff should ask the offender to remove them, or remove themselves from the property.
There is no accessibility reason ever for covering up the light or recording. I will accept describing objects in FOV etc but nothing should be persistable or sent to a third party that trains on them and saves them without the consent of everyone in view, a company should build non-criminal glasses without these feature sets and have insurance pay for them.
One of the few rare real reasons to owning and if that's the real reason. In that instance the better approach is that the glasses should be held under a permit.
The camera should be disabled until you obtain a permit.
Drones require a license and agreement to fly, these should be too.
It's much more obvious that someone is holding up their phone to record than someone wearing glasses containing an inconspicuous camera and recording LED that may have been tampered with.
It takes deliberate effort to hide that you're filming with a smartphone. It doesn't require extra effort to disguise the act of filming with Meta glasses as simply looking at someone.
What prevents murder in areas where everyone has a gun?
Consequences.
The consequences of these glasses should be that in any private space, the offender either remove them, or remove themselves. Just like there are consequences to trying to use your phone to record staff or other patrons in many private spaces.
Social mores. The desire of individuals to farm social capital and the desire of corporations to monetize this drive completely displaced "is it okay if I film this?" for a decade or two, but it seems to be coming back somewhat. I'm not holding my breath, though.
> I have heard the middle east has some very strict public filming laws, especially for women and children. Would be very popular globally!
Yeah right, because they respect and value women so much in middle east that they beat women to death for not covering their hair and we don't want that in video
Depends. Is British airways also agreeing not to record as well, or is just one of those paternalistic 'we don't want YOU to have evidence of wrongdoing'?
My guess, given England, is that they double down on more cameras, and conveniently lose recordings they don't like.
In contrast, this is the only reasonable take. Given the extensive history of large multinational corporations abusing the rights of consumers with impunity, letting one of the two parties in any such dispute record the other, but not the reverse, is obviously unfair and unreasonable.
Tell that to someone with bad vision, or wants to listen to podcasts without having in earbuds while walking through the city. There are many reasons this type of technology is useful outside of trying to record people without their knowledge.
I fly BA across the Atlantic every few months, and today for the first time the safety briefing included a specific callout of respecting privacy while filming aboard.
There's nothing new here. European airlines generally prohibit filming the activities of their employees, regardless of technology. In fact, most of them (unlike U.S.-based airlines) try to anonymize their employees. They don't wear name tags, for example.
I've had this be a problem when I was trying to capture a FA's photo while disembarking the aircraft after he rudely chastised me for using the bathroom "too many times" due to a bladder condition.
Airplanes are a great use case for display glasses. They make using a computer or watching a movie in economy class so much nicer. I like using display glasses that don't have a camera. But unfortunately everybody assumes they do have one. Assuming I'm a dork because I'm wearing them is fair. Assuming I'm a creep isn't.
I haven't been bothered over them yet, but I fully expect a conversation where someone yells at me for "filming", I show there's no cameras, and they insist they're simply hidden.
best use I’ve seen for meta glasses have been parties, where the host hands them out and takes your phone as collateral or locks them up in some way
everyone gets content and gets to be present, optionally or mandatory turn in of the glasses when leaving
everyone knows what they're walking into and some level of curation and community lets people still be loose, or know what level of discretion they should have
In the US anyway it feels like the battle for public spaces has been lost. Everywhere I go people are listening full blast to their phones with no headphones - I find this about 100x more obnoxious than filming. I think both should be banned with Singapore-style punishments but I expect even if companies posture about this nothing will happen. United famously prohibited using your audio without headphones but based on my trip with them last week that has done nothing. At this point it’s a societal problem that needs a tougher approach.
I hope it's not fully lost, I hate when people play music in public and don't have a good answer about filming people in public with these glasses but I don't want it.
Honestly making it socially unacceptable is probably the only solution. Not sure how that happens though...
> people are listening full blast to their phones with no headphones - I find this about 100x more obnoxious than filming
Two very different concerns. One is annoying in that very moment and has no lasting consequences. The other can have serious consequences depending on what that person happened to record.
Public space is precious, but I’d just like to make it clear for the casual HN reader that suggesting “Singapore-style” punishment for antisocial behavior implies a pro-caning stance. Caning is a violent, abhorrent, and cruel practice that violates the fundamental human rights of the convicted person. It leaves the victim of state violence with permanent scars and long-lasting trauma. Time and again it has been shown that capital punishment is not any more effective at preventing recidivism than rehabilitation or compulsory community service.
If you want positive, lasting change, you have to start at the start, modeling positive social and emotional programs in public schools and community programs. Our society is only as healthy as the core beliefs that are willingly held and practiced by its population. Raw state power through fear and intimidation does not change people’s minds as much as widespread belief about what is inherently right and wrong.
> Time and again it has been shown that capital punishment is not any more effective at preventing recidivism than rehabilitation or compulsory community service.
I think you meant corporal punishment, not capital punishment. The latter is when you lose your life.
Do the same studies hold true for corporal punishment? I am not familiar with the literature.
I would suspect that they do. My understanding is the vast number of people who commit crimes do not consider the ramifications of their actions, so there is no amount of punishment that materially changes their behavior.
I struggle with this. Growing up, I was spanked and it was highly effective at changing my behavior, but my older brother was very impulsive and he would get spanked a lot and it never seemed to chang his behavior. He settled down in his 20's after a lot of legal consequences, but I do wonder is there would have been any change for him if my parents went with a different style or if I would have turned out differently.
There's the complication that once a set of people have the power to inflict violence on others, they will be abuses. So how many innocent people is ok to cane? Checks and balances could be put in place to lower the innocent caning rate, but these will be expensive and massively opposed by those doing the abuses which leads to them be performative and ineffective. We see this with policing generally. There are also the exempt classes which has enough status to never have to worry about being caned. So then only lower status people are getting caned, and likely with the highest innocent rate as they have the least power to defend their rights. It's a path to dystopia.
> listening full blast to their phones with no headphones
There's something even worse, taking my 97 year old mother to her gerontologist :-). Her HMO has a group office of 8 gerontologists with a shared waiting area which easily seats >60, but is always packed since most 80+ year-olds treat doctor appts like plane flights and arrive an hour early. Most of the patients can't hear well and take calls on speaker phone at FULL VOLUME, then constantly remind the caller to talk louder.
It's maddening enough when I go maybe once a quarter and sit there for an hour but imagine working in that room every day. Last year the reception desk relocated closer to the elevator and a very solid wall with thick auto-close door was constructed in-between. Perhaps OSHA has a 'cruel and unusual' designation :-)
[Empathetic side note: hearing loss in the elderly is a serious hardship which not only socially isolates but also accelerates cognitive decline while decreasing independence. According to several audiologists we've consulted, my mom isn't an outlier. It's normal that even state-of-the-art, high-end (>$5,000) hearing aids, properly calibrated, only help a limited amount at >80+ yrs old. My mom, despite occasionally struggling to remember an infrequent word, is still mentally sharp. Yet it's rare she can understand people on the phone well enough to make her own appts etc. I'm really hoping DSP, MEMS and AI offer better hearing solutions before I need them.
Inevitable hearing loss combined with forced 'app-ification' and mobile UX trends are increasingly making the modern world inaccessible to the very elderly, cutting off even those who are mentally capable. Talking to the staff at my Mom's independent living facility, it's a shit show and getting worse with every major OS update. They've been forced to staff a Mobile Phone Support Desk. I really wish Apple & Android UX teams were required to work a week at that desk.]
> I think both should be banned with Singapore-style punishments but I expect even if companies posture about this nothing will happen.
SG fines/punishments are overrated, more of an urban myth, I remember visiting and chuckled when I saw local fishing right under the sign No fishing and mind you this was in very frequented touristy place close to Singapore Opera house.
In my building, people walk into the elevator with their speaker on full blast without paying any attention to the rest of the riders. Same in stores or gyms, just blissfully yada-yading. I blame the Kardashians.
It's really unfortunate that to make the world visual-legible to a machine we have to permit recording in a high-fidelity format. I'd love to have an AI assistant perceive the universe around me and assist but I prefer to give people a measure of discretion in personal interactions. I've used the Meta Glasses in public, though, and they're really fantastic. You can ask about fish you can see, or you can capture your kids in a moment. Such a pity about this perhaps immutable property of life.
I have decidedly mixed feelings about this. In general, I don't think people should just be allowed to record and post other people's private moments. I think we don't want to live a life where we are at risk of every single thing that we've ever done being posted as video.
On the other hand, I travel a lot, and I take videos frequently to protect myself. Almost invariably, what I'm talking about here is walking around a rental car when I pick it up and drop it off. But there are other scenarios, like documenting that I was at a gate on time if they're claiming I was late and denying me boarding.
Of course, there are the ones that are contemplated by this article, like a dispute with another passenger or someone about what happened or what's happening, since the consequences of that stuff can be so severe.
I think a lot of European countries have laws around this that usually have exceptions for scenarios like that. For example, I was once recording the condition of a drop-off rental car in Italy. The rental car employee started screaming at me, claiming that, since he had been in the frame at some point or another, what I was doing was illegal. Meanwhile, he was refusing to give me a written receipt or some other proof that I had actually returned the car. If you know anything about rental cars in Italy, you want that, so I just took the video to confirm that I had, in fact, given them the keys and the car.
After it blew up and some research was done, it became clear that, while Italian law does have very strict restrictions on publishing recordings of people, recording your own customer service interactions for purposes of protecting yourself is clearly allowed.
I think a fairer policy here would be sharing, publishing, or distributing any recordings is very strictly prohibited, but merely possessing them can be permitted if the recorder can make a bona fide assertion that it was done for purposes of recording or protecting themselves and their rights as a customer.
Assuming that nobody is gonna exploit it for marketing or other nefarious ends. A society that constantly videos everything would be kindof great. Everything documented. Everything searchable. Crime might become impossible. Like, no more murder or illegal dumping.
So if someone acts up and starts screaming it's suddenly ok to film, or even when people are committing crimes on board it's not ok? Who's to say when this is happening or not?
If filming is banned there will be less evidence for when this does happen, and people could get away with more crimes (although admittedly the bar is higher on a plane and the flight staff's testimony will carry lots of weight).
I think planes are public places (because 200 people are crammed into a tiny tube of metal) and your expectation of privacy should be diminished there. There are too many potential things that could happen on a plane. People are too close and vulnerable while on a plane. We cannot run or protect ourselves as well.
And as far as flight attendants, unfortunately they are at least partially responsible for both the safety and wellbeing of those on board. That is literally their job.
Banning filming of them will reduce their sense of urgency and responsibility, just like it would of cops if we were not allowed to film them.
There are just too many things that need to go right and also that could go wrong on a flight.
Just recently someone took a photo of an ostensible pedophile while on board conversing on a website for pedophiles and now the world knows. If all photography or filming was banned then this wouldn't have happened.
They literally aren't, though. They are the airline's private property, and you've entered into a contract of carriage with them to temporarily have access to their property under the terms of the contract. To some extent these terms are constrained by law, but in the absence such law, you are bound by whatever terms you agreed to in the contract. If you don't agree not to film in the plane, you're free to not accept the contract.
There are enough structural constraints in launching airline alternatives that they might as well be, especially the national carriers.
Do you expect the masses to fly private jets or Cessnas to cross the channel? It's like saying electrical companies shouldn't be regulated too much in certain jurisdictions because the generators are privately owned rather than being publicly owned. People will laugh you out of the court of public opinion. Your point is a distinction without a difference.
I think their quasi-public status means that contracts of carriage should be tightly hemmed in by law and not have as many degrees of freedom as ordinary contracts, but they are still contracts regarding the use of private property, and in the absence of such hemming, the terms and conditions still apply.
If you want to launch a public campaign to change the law and add "you can always surreptitiously record people on airlines" to the set of unenforceable contract terms, go ahead and attempt it. You'll deserve the furious blowback you get, though.
They literally are. They are common carriers, which is a legal concept with a lot of precedent. The UK term for this, ironically, is "public carrier" and while yes it's a privately owned it has distinctly public characteristics encoded in law that sharply distinguishes these spaces from genuinely private areas.
The important question, though, is whether being a common carrier implies that the airlines cannot forbid customers from taking photos or videos inside their aircraft. That hasn't been established.
I think when you're asking normative questions, what you're saying is that it should be established. And that it should be established in the way that you're proposing.
Oh they are trying their very best to go the way of policing. For example just last week Delta's PR team has been working overtime to make sure one of their South American customer abuse cases don't get picked up by the English speaking media. You won't see this anywhere on major newspapers because the victim was a foreigner from a poor country like Colombia. If they tried this with a rich French or Chinese they would have been raked over the coals and on their knees apologizing.
You’re giving way too much credit for Delta’s PR team. I think it’s just more likely that this story is boring. There’s not a lot of sympathy for people who won’t stop recording when asked multiple times to stop. It’s Delta’s plane; their rules.
We have had convenient, ultra-portable, widely available video taping for what, 20 years now? Closer to 15 years for any resemblance of quality or faces being recognizable. Commercial flying has existed for over a century now, and somehow it all worked out for decades upon decades before portable digital video cameras (like what we have now) became cheap. It's funny how once we gain some extra convenience, no matter how marginal in the given situation, it only takes a few years for it to be considered indispensable, the right to use it utterly essential.
No one's getting away with a crime on a commercial flight, there are hundreds of people around you and upwards of a dozen or more flight crew on board, with a button to call over one of them in short reach of every passenger.
This is unsupported, but I feel like the vast majority of people filming flight attendants are not doing it for any valid reasons, but to try to start a harassment or doxxing outrage campaign online because they've caused them some brief inconvenience. 90%+ of flight attendant interactions with passengers are about convenience and not safety, and people should not have a right to hold a stick over these largely underpaid and overworked employees because they've not topped up their drink in 5 minutes. For the remaining minority of reasons, recording their voice should cover most cases.
However, the strongest argument against this is that it is possible for things to be banned in general but allowed when doing the banned thing would prevent a greater harm. This idea already exists in legal system. Zero-tolerance and free-for-all are not the only options, you could be allowed to film in emergencies or to prevent worse things from happening.
While you're right that your expectation of privacy is obviously lower in a place like this, the blurry term here is 'privacy'. Is 'you expect yourself to be seen by others' the same kind of privacy as 'you expect anyone to be able to get a permanent record of you without your knowledge or agreement'? What about when these glasses start doing facial recognition? Wouldn't you also have to steelman the 'you should expect anyone to be able to know exactly who you are and to upload your identity, location and appearance to a megacorporation' kind of privacy?
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 15.3 ms ] threadIn any place of business that I patronize, if I see one, I will request that staff should ask the offender to remove them, or remove themselves from the property.
What does covering the light has to do with the glasses in general?
That should be a crime?
The camera should be disabled until you obtain a permit.
Drones require a license and agreement to fly, these should be too.
Yes, it’s the real and ONLY reason I have these. When my flight is over I take them off and revert to regular shades.
I would hope the same.
And what next? The answer is it’s not true? What’s even the point?
I am saying that the glasses should be under permitted use.
You can fly a drone on your own land. You can wear meta glasses on your land.
If you want to wear the glasses in public get a permit. Why are you getting so defensive?
I have heard the middle east has some very strict public filming laws, especially for women and children. Would be very popular globally!
Yeah right, because they respect and value women so much in middle east
Consequences.
The consequences of these glasses should be that in any private space, the offender either remove them, or remove themselves. Just like there are consequences to trying to use your phone to record staff or other patrons in many private spaces.
Yeah right, because they respect and value women so much in middle east that they beat women to death for not covering their hair and we don't want that in video
I joined many others in giving him a “shit on a shoe” look.
My guess, given England, is that they double down on more cameras, and conveniently lose recordings they don't like.
[1] If legally permitted in your jurisdiction
This policy change isn't that new, should have been included in the briefing since April/May 2026?
I've had this be a problem when I was trying to capture a FA's photo while disembarking the aircraft after he rudely chastised me for using the bathroom "too many times" due to a bladder condition.
everyone gets content and gets to be present, optionally or mandatory turn in of the glasses when leaving
everyone knows what they're walking into and some level of curation and community lets people still be loose, or know what level of discretion they should have
can't tell if it's a joke or not, if not, i'd turn right back and walk away
"optionally?" What sort of parties are you going to where the host casually hands out Smart Glasses as party favors? :)
I don't even know what I'd do with a pair but I definitely want to be invited to parties hosted by folks who have this kind of wealth!
Honestly making it socially unacceptable is probably the only solution. Not sure how that happens though...
Two very different concerns. One is annoying in that very moment and has no lasting consequences. The other can have serious consequences depending on what that person happened to record.
If you want positive, lasting change, you have to start at the start, modeling positive social and emotional programs in public schools and community programs. Our society is only as healthy as the core beliefs that are willingly held and practiced by its population. Raw state power through fear and intimidation does not change people’s minds as much as widespread belief about what is inherently right and wrong.
I think you meant corporal punishment, not capital punishment. The latter is when you lose your life.
Do the same studies hold true for corporal punishment? I am not familiar with the literature.
I struggle with this. Growing up, I was spanked and it was highly effective at changing my behavior, but my older brother was very impulsive and he would get spanked a lot and it never seemed to chang his behavior. He settled down in his 20's after a lot of legal consequences, but I do wonder is there would have been any change for him if my parents went with a different style or if I would have turned out differently.
seems pretty straightforward
There's something even worse, taking my 97 year old mother to her gerontologist :-). Her HMO has a group office of 8 gerontologists with a shared waiting area which easily seats >60, but is always packed since most 80+ year-olds treat doctor appts like plane flights and arrive an hour early. Most of the patients can't hear well and take calls on speaker phone at FULL VOLUME, then constantly remind the caller to talk louder.
It's maddening enough when I go maybe once a quarter and sit there for an hour but imagine working in that room every day. Last year the reception desk relocated closer to the elevator and a very solid wall with thick auto-close door was constructed in-between. Perhaps OSHA has a 'cruel and unusual' designation :-)
[Empathetic side note: hearing loss in the elderly is a serious hardship which not only socially isolates but also accelerates cognitive decline while decreasing independence. According to several audiologists we've consulted, my mom isn't an outlier. It's normal that even state-of-the-art, high-end (>$5,000) hearing aids, properly calibrated, only help a limited amount at >80+ yrs old. My mom, despite occasionally struggling to remember an infrequent word, is still mentally sharp. Yet it's rare she can understand people on the phone well enough to make her own appts etc. I'm really hoping DSP, MEMS and AI offer better hearing solutions before I need them.
Inevitable hearing loss combined with forced 'app-ification' and mobile UX trends are increasingly making the modern world inaccessible to the very elderly, cutting off even those who are mentally capable. Talking to the staff at my Mom's independent living facility, it's a shit show and getting worse with every major OS update. They've been forced to staff a Mobile Phone Support Desk. I really wish Apple & Android UX teams were required to work a week at that desk.]
SG fines/punishments are overrated, more of an urban myth, I remember visiting and chuckled when I saw local fishing right under the sign No fishing and mind you this was in very frequented touristy place close to Singapore Opera house.
BA sells the accent folks. not service.
On the other hand, I travel a lot, and I take videos frequently to protect myself. Almost invariably, what I'm talking about here is walking around a rental car when I pick it up and drop it off. But there are other scenarios, like documenting that I was at a gate on time if they're claiming I was late and denying me boarding.
Of course, there are the ones that are contemplated by this article, like a dispute with another passenger or someone about what happened or what's happening, since the consequences of that stuff can be so severe.
I think a lot of European countries have laws around this that usually have exceptions for scenarios like that. For example, I was once recording the condition of a drop-off rental car in Italy. The rental car employee started screaming at me, claiming that, since he had been in the frame at some point or another, what I was doing was illegal. Meanwhile, he was refusing to give me a written receipt or some other proof that I had actually returned the car. If you know anything about rental cars in Italy, you want that, so I just took the video to confirm that I had, in fact, given them the keys and the car.
After it blew up and some research was done, it became clear that, while Italian law does have very strict restrictions on publishing recordings of people, recording your own customer service interactions for purposes of protecting yourself is clearly allowed.
I think a fairer policy here would be sharing, publishing, or distributing any recordings is very strictly prohibited, but merely possessing them can be permitted if the recorder can make a bona fide assertion that it was done for purposes of recording or protecting themselves and their rights as a customer.
So if someone acts up and starts screaming it's suddenly ok to film, or even when people are committing crimes on board it's not ok? Who's to say when this is happening or not?
If filming is banned there will be less evidence for when this does happen, and people could get away with more crimes (although admittedly the bar is higher on a plane and the flight staff's testimony will carry lots of weight).
I think planes are public places (because 200 people are crammed into a tiny tube of metal) and your expectation of privacy should be diminished there. There are too many potential things that could happen on a plane. People are too close and vulnerable while on a plane. We cannot run or protect ourselves as well.
And as far as flight attendants, unfortunately they are at least partially responsible for both the safety and wellbeing of those on board. That is literally their job.
Banning filming of them will reduce their sense of urgency and responsibility, just like it would of cops if we were not allowed to film them.
There are just too many things that need to go right and also that could go wrong on a flight.
Just recently someone took a photo of an ostensible pedophile while on board conversing on a website for pedophiles and now the world knows. If all photography or filming was banned then this wouldn't have happened.
They literally aren't, though. They are the airline's private property, and you've entered into a contract of carriage with them to temporarily have access to their property under the terms of the contract. To some extent these terms are constrained by law, but in the absence such law, you are bound by whatever terms you agreed to in the contract. If you don't agree not to film in the plane, you're free to not accept the contract.
There are enough structural constraints in launching airline alternatives that they might as well be, especially the national carriers.
Do you expect the masses to fly private jets or Cessnas to cross the channel? It's like saying electrical companies shouldn't be regulated too much in certain jurisdictions because the generators are privately owned rather than being publicly owned. People will laugh you out of the court of public opinion. Your point is a distinction without a difference.
If you want to launch a public campaign to change the law and add "you can always surreptitiously record people on airlines" to the set of unenforceable contract terms, go ahead and attempt it. You'll deserve the furious blowback you get, though.
> They literally aren't, though.
They literally are. They are common carriers, which is a legal concept with a lot of precedent. The UK term for this, ironically, is "public carrier" and while yes it's a privately owned it has distinctly public characteristics encoded in law that sharply distinguishes these spaces from genuinely private areas.
See for yourself. https://viewfromthewing.com/delta-passenger-got-kicked-off-a...
https://www.reddit.com/r/delta/comments/1x0ej7v/passenger_re...
No one's getting away with a crime on a commercial flight, there are hundreds of people around you and upwards of a dozen or more flight crew on board, with a button to call over one of them in short reach of every passenger.
This is unsupported, but I feel like the vast majority of people filming flight attendants are not doing it for any valid reasons, but to try to start a harassment or doxxing outrage campaign online because they've caused them some brief inconvenience. 90%+ of flight attendant interactions with passengers are about convenience and not safety, and people should not have a right to hold a stick over these largely underpaid and overworked employees because they've not topped up their drink in 5 minutes. For the remaining minority of reasons, recording their voice should cover most cases.
However, the strongest argument against this is that it is possible for things to be banned in general but allowed when doing the banned thing would prevent a greater harm. This idea already exists in legal system. Zero-tolerance and free-for-all are not the only options, you could be allowed to film in emergencies or to prevent worse things from happening.
While you're right that your expectation of privacy is obviously lower in a place like this, the blurry term here is 'privacy'. Is 'you expect yourself to be seen by others' the same kind of privacy as 'you expect anyone to be able to get a permanent record of you without your knowledge or agreement'? What about when these glasses start doing facial recognition? Wouldn't you also have to steelman the 'you should expect anyone to be able to know exactly who you are and to upload your identity, location and appearance to a megacorporation' kind of privacy?
The parent poster gave a specific example of someone who was allegedly committing a crime mid-flight.
> This is unsupported, but I feel like the vast majority of people filming flight attendants are not doing it for any valid reasons
Sometimes that will happen. But to ban recording them for any reason, even a legitimate one, throws the baby out with the bath water.
> Zero-tolerance and free-for-all are not the only options, you could be allowed to film in emergencies or to prevent worse things from happening.
100%.