Comment by MerrimanInd
19 hours ago
I was in engineering school back in ~2012 when Google Glass came out. One of my classmates got hold of a pair when they were still quite uncommon and wore them to an extracurricular club meeting. Within minutes someone made a comment about him wearing the "creeper" glasses and asked if he was filming. He never wore them to the club again.
I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.
An entire new generation of people have been born and raised into a world that is more accepting of always recording and being recorded since 14 years ago.
Even in an environment where filming (with phones) is common and acceptable, smart glasses can still come off as rude because others find it hard tell if you are recording or not.
To record a video on your phone you need to hold your phone up pointed at the other person, usually not in the same way you would normally use a phone. If you see someone holding his phone steady at face level and pointing at something without making finger movements, you know he is filming. If someone is pointing his phone down towards the ground and scrolling around with his thumb, you know he is probably not.
To record from a pair of smart glasses you just need to look at someone, as you would normally look at any other thing. Yes there will be an LED on, but the person being recorded probably couldn't see it if it is in a bright, busy environment and you are more than a few steps away, plus there will be aftermarket modifications to disable the LED. In short, there is no way you can reliably tell if someone's smart glasses are filming you. You have to assume that worst.
A common fear for younger people has become being recorded and becoming famous in some embarrassing video. I don't see the problem as having gone away.
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And they will soon find out that world's make believe. No one I know, and I know hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of people would allow themselves in a room to be recorded surreptitiously.
And yet we are surrounded by cameras that do this constantly
In Sweden, kids have stopped showering after PE class due to this concern.
The world is not deterministic, and we can shape norms of how we interact with each other. We don't have to accept being constantly recorded just because the technology makes it possible.
And yet, the New York Times reports that all the hottest clubs are banning phones on the dance floor. Perhaps in reaction to having lived the downsides of omnipresent social surveillance, the youngest adults in my life are uniformly sober about the perils of oversharing.
Then again, there may be some selection bias at play…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/nyregion/nyc-nightlife-no...
Yes here in Europe too. I really love this.
You can keep your phone here but the cameras are taped off. Of course that can easily be undone but it avoids the "oh sorry I forgot it wasn't allowed" excuse.
I'm not sure if you have experience with teenagers, but you’ll quickly realize they are even more resistant to this technology than we ever were. For the vast majority of kids today, this is their worst nightmare. They will reject it even more forcefully than we have.
The teenagers I know willing put geo-tracking software on their phones to see where their friends are at any time.
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Really? The ones living on tiktok?
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Unfortunately, the Meta glasses look much more normal, and a person who isn't actively looking for them (and especially one who is unaware of them) isn't likely to notice them.
There is a way to sus them out: https://www.404media.co/this-app-warns-you-if-someone-is-wea...
Not perfect, but better than nothing I guess. I don't think I've noticed the glasses IRL anywhere, but if I start seeing them, I'm definitely installing the app and avoiding any interactions with those people.
they look like big bulky ray-bans that no one would wear unless they were starring in a 50s remake or something . easy to spot
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A family member has one and I didn't notice until they had to charge their pair. The little circles are subtle giveaways otherwise they look like regular pair of glasses. When everything is always on, I'd like to keep my house "off" and those things are a direct violation of that.
they are still very easy to spot. they are very bulky around the rims
If you know what to look for, yes. But the average person doesn't browse Hacker News and watch tech YT videos in their free time and has likely not even heard of them.
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10 years have elapsed, peoples expectations have changed a lot. Back around the time of the first iPhone, it was pretty common to see signs in gym changing rooms akin to 'no cameras permitted'... Now you'd have to physically separate people from their phones before entering the locker room if you are going to enforce that.
And all of that is to ignore that neither gen1 or 2 of Google Glass attempted to look like regular glasses. The Meta frames are largely indistinguishable from regular glasses unless you are very up close.
Unfortunately, "The French-Italian eyewear brand [EssilorLuxottica] said it sold over 7 million AI glasses last year, up from the 2 million that the company sold in 2023 and 2024 combined." from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/11/ray-ban-maker-essilorluxotti... . That's at least 9 million units in the field, probably 1000x more than Google Glass ever sold, and more than 3x growth in sales in one year.
[EDIT] I really shouldn't need to say this on Hacker News but don't shoot the messenger for messages you don't want to hear. Reporting a fact does not imply approval or disapproval of it.
I have a strict policy of no Meta glasses for guests in my house. Socially, they're poison.
We have "NO meta glasses" rule at my workplace.
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There is almost always an appropriate XKCD...
https://xkcd.com/1807/
People who get shamed with a comment like that are usually not the "creepers" in public. You don't need social pressure. You need actual safeguards.
Safeguard?
No, we need to make this as socially radioactive as possible. We don't need to establish a permission structure to allow Facebook to continue doing this without repercussion.
You're already in that world. Phones have ubiqitous cameras and they are normalized at this point. It's a common scene in a movie where instead of helping someone who was hurt, people just pull out their phones and film.
Cameras on glasses will be normalized too. A few HNer types will scream. The rest of the "nothing to hide so nothing to fear" group will just wear them. (not saying I agree with "nothing to hide so nothing to fear". Rather, I'm saying that's common way of thinking. Common enough that it's likely people will wear these eventually.
How about this marketing approach: "College woman, tired of creepers trying to hit on you. Worried about getting roofied. Wear these glasses and turn the creeps in".
Judging from the examples reported on in the article, Meta's smart glasses are either very easy to accidentally trigger or quite popular with actual creeps
There are a lot of creeps out there. In summertime I'm pretty often tanning in nude beaches. Almost every time, somewhere there is a guy around with a cellphone or such a spy glass.
I don't know. I clearly remember a time when phones first got cameras and there were debates on whether or not we should prohibit phones in public bathrooms. Perceptions changed. Fast.
I think the social contract is still such that your phone’s camera should not be used in the bathroom.
I’ve seen stories of people banned from gyms for taking selfies in the locker room as people were walking by.
Yeah sometimes the younger gym bros are in the dressing room at my gym taking pictures of themselves in the mirror. If they accidentally include my ~60 year old ass cheeks in the background, IDGAF. Probably ruins the photo for them.
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There is a world, because when the displays are high quality and they're thinner and lighter, they're going to replace phones, and almost everyone will be wearing them.
Nah, I don't see it. They've been trying to make smart glasses a thing for over a decade and it's not working. Nobody wants them. I don't think it's necessarily a privacy thing, it's just that smart glasses don't solve a real problem. Same with VR.
i actually agree with this take; i dont see the problem that smart glasses solve. what, my phone screen isnt literally in front of my eyeballs 24/7? i have a need to be absolutely plugged into scrolling social media and consuming content so much that i just have to have the screen in my glasses? this feels much more like what tech companies want people to want rather than what people want.
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VR most definitely solves a real problem, but the issue with VR is the absolute setup complexity to get it performing 'correctly'. I spent 3 years tweaking mine and writing OpenXR layers to get it functioning how I wanted it to in iRacing. It's nearly a full-time job. VR right now is like if you went to buy eggs but instead of eggs they're grenades and opening the box pulled all the pins. Out of the box experience is beyond dog shit and impossible for casual users, leaving a very small avenue for VR enjoyment for regulars (PSVR and the like). I cannot think of a technology more diametric to 'plug n play' than VR, which is very unfortunate.
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navigational overlay and real time translation/subtitles would be huge, just off the top of my head
Come on, it's obviously a hardware problem. If phones weighed ten pounds I wouldn't carry that around either.
Great glasses would solve a problem, I could take my stupid phone out of my hand.
And glasses will get replaced by contacts, which get replaced with brainwave tech.
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I think that since the input modalities are (seemingly) restricted to eye movement and sound, that it is impractical to replace a phone, where someone can engage privately.
I think you have missed the wristband input device then. It gives the user fairly subtle finger gestures to interact with the device. I wonder how far that input tech can be pushed, not necessarily (only) in comination with glasses.
The point isn't to allow people to do more with the glasses, the point is to interpose between the user and the physical world so you can control what they see and hear and so you can see what they see. You could see the same thing with Apple's VR headset -- if you can hide certain things from your own view in the headset, then Apple can hide things they don't want you to see too.
There isn't really a counter to that because most people will buy these things to watch movies on the airplane or the train, and they won't see the yoke until it's too late.
Are they going to be as hard to keep clean as glasses. Honestly it’s the biggest problem I have with sunglasses, it’s that as soon as you get a speck of dirt on them they’re annoying. And if it starts raining you can’t see anything (and you look like a tool).
It doesn't matter how high quality, convenient, or light they are, as long as wearing glasses isn't inherently cool, normal people aren't going to choose to wear them.
Remember those dorky Bluetooth earpieces? The ones only MBA nerds wore? They were uncool until the AirPods came along.
The tail wags the dog. Wearing glasses may become inherently cool if all the cool people in your insta feeds are wearing them.
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I’ve had meta ray bans since the week they came out
My friends always have a cheap shot when I wear them but are completely fine now and appreciate fun candid videos I send them
Amazing for vacations with the kids
As much as I disagree with the cameras, you should not have been downvoted. If anything, people who are against the cameras need to see your anecdotal experience so that they can see how easy it will be for these cameras to proliferate.
These glasses are doing incredibly well from a sales perspective. Social norms have shifted, user generated content is huge, being a video influencer is a real job - so seeing people filming is more accepted than 12 yea ago. It doesn’t mean I like it but these are not going away. I do think they lack a killer app, but there’s a part there with conversational AI that can act on your behalf
> I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.
People widely accept mass surveilance and facial recognition, including by doorbells, phones, cameras on the street, etc. They post images and videos online to corporations that perform facial recognition. They accept government collecting data broadly by facial recognition.
People accept all sorts of horrors and nonsense, unrelated to and many times much worse than privacy violations, because (I think) they are normalized on social media, which is controlled editorially by Zuckerberg, Musk, Ellison, etc.
I'm not saying we're doomed. I'm saying nobody else will save us. We have to make it happen.
Unfortunately the frog is boiling and some people already think that "in public" means "it's okay to record people and post it on the Internet."
In the US, at least, it's pretty much legal to record the public as long as people have no expectation of privacy (IANAL, exclusions apply, non-commercial use, etc)
It's difficult to draw a bright line between these activities:
- I told someone else something I saw the other day
- I painted a picture of the public square or wrote a book about specific activities that I witnessed
- I specifically remembered an individual based on their face, visible tattoos, location, license plate, or some other unique factor and voluntarily testified to that fact in a court of law
- I spent every day at the same corner making note of the various people/vehicles that I saw
- I stuck a camera at that same point (perhaps on my private properly directly abutting a public space) and recorded everything, posted it publicly on the internet, and used automated technology to identify people, text, vehicles, etc
- I paid a different person every day to follow someone around and record what they did
- I developed a drone system that could follow specific individuals/vehicles from airspace I'm allowed to occupy
Pretty much everything I described above is legal in most of the United States. Obviously it gets creepier and more uncomfortable going down the list (I don't really like it when I'm the subject of any of these activities) but how do you stop this?
I'll at least throw out some options
- Implement some form of right to forget
- Forbid individuals or organizations from doing any of these
- Enact actual "civil rights" level privacy protections (extend HIPAA? automatic copyright for human faces? new amendment?) that include protection of individual's DNA, unique facial features, and other "uniquely human" attributes
Legal doesn't mean socially acceptable. Neither does it mean good.
The last two items on your list (person, drone) likely constitute stalking outside of specific limited situations.
> Implement some form of right to forget
The passive voice here is deceptive. When rephrased as the right to make others forget it suddenly seems quite nefarious (at least to me).
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It's not a legal problem but a cultural one. Piracy, for example, is already illegal, but everyone does it.
Smartphones and social media apps made it frictionless to post public videos on the Internet. The only legislation that could be effective would be to forbid social media from hosting videos of public places somehow, and I'm not sure how effective or practical would that even be.
We live in a world where people have a literal phone in their hands and they would rather make a video call than a simple phone call. Something needs to happen to fundamentally change people's habits or it will only get worse in the future.
The google glasses deliberately looked distinct from normal glasses. The facebook glasses don't. That has a massive impact.
It can happen if it’s not easy to tell immediately what they are.
>>I just don't see a world where that doesn't happen with Meta glasses.
Apparently they sold 7 million of these. So I think a whole lot of people don't care about this aspect.
It seems like a more polite way of handling this in private spaces is just to ask that people take them off - just like we do when a pig farmer walks into our house with their boots on.
I get why people are creeped out by them, but we get filmed or photographed hundreds of times a day in a big city when we are in public spaces. Gatekeeping a potentially useful technology for being filmed in public -- well, everyone is _already_ filmed in public. ATM cameras, stoplight cameras, drone cameras, smartphone cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras. You are on camera every time you step out of your house. You are on camera every time you open your work computer. Singling out cameras in eyeglasses as "creepy" is kind of worrying about a drop in the ocean. Cameras on self-driving cars. Nanny cams. Closed-circuit cameras. The things are everywhere, and they are always invasions of privacy. Why is the line the "creeper" glasses?
I'd be ok with it if we were for banning all non-consensual recordings in all spaces. But we're very much not.
And if we're not, then having a personal heads-up display that is contextual to your current surroundings or has augmented reality capability is too useful to not use (eventually). I'm bad with names, and good with faces. That use-case alone would be worth it for me, if it were available.
> well, everyone is _already_ filmed in public. ATM cameras, stoplight cameras, drone cameras, smartphone cameras, security cameras, doorbell cameras.
And we probably ought to regulate how all such footage is handled.
> banning all non-consensual recordings in all spaces
It's a false dichotomy. Even if recording is permitted that doesn't mean the systemic invasion of personal privacy needs to be.
Great, let's regulate it! And why are glasses more offensive than cell phone cameras, or go pros, or drones? I genuinely do not understand why people don't worry about the other form factors, but draw the line at the glasses, so help me here. To be clear - I understand why people find being recorded creepy. I don't understand why the glasses form factor is creepy but random cell phone recordings that are shared on the internet all the time without the consent of the recorded people aren't.
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"It seems like a more polite way of handling this in private spaces is just to ask that people take them off - just like we do when a pig farmer walks into our house with their boots on."
Just FYI, they do heavily market this towards RX glasses wearers. So, you wouldn't quite be able to just as simply ask someone to take off their glasses and no longer be able to see.
I'm going to guess that someone who can afford smart glasses can afford to have another pair of unsmart glasses. What is it about the _glasses_ that people find creepier than a smartphone that can literally do even more invasive things than the current glasses technology?
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It’s just going to be accepted. Or there is going to be some sort of Japanesque requirement that there be some light on when the camera is filming.
They do have a light that’s on when recording
Well, then they gonna offer implants in another 5-10 years later.
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2026 is not 2012
You're right, it's much worse and we should be doing everything we can to turn it around.
I propose we just assume people with meta glasses are recording others in public and we call them creeps. Shaming works, we should use it more.
Agreed, it is creepy and I tell people to take them off if they come to my home.
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They're okay in your circle today? Not mine.
Anecdotal screeching aside, they’re objectively selling far better than any headgear ever made. The sales figures show they’re pretty popular as far as wearables go. That leads me to believe we’re not in the same world as Google glass especially when back then folks were far more trusting of tech (let alone the fact that it’s meta).
The times I do I see folks wearing them the normie reaction is typically “oh cool” and not some libertarian allergic reaction to technology.
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It's strange to me that that's the line society seems to have drawn in the sand. Body cam, no problem. Doorbell cam, practically universal. Body cam worn on the face? No way. I wonder why.
Police body cams are typically only used while on-duty and in public, where there is no expectation of privacy. They also don't automatically send video into the cloud to be analyzed by a human for AI training, as mentioned in this article. Video is usually only retrieved if needed on a case-by-case basis.
Doorbell cameras are also typically pointed toward public streets, where again, there is no expectation of privacy. Even then, many people have been removing Ring cameras after they were shown to automatically upload video without user's knowledge.
> They also don't automatically send video into the cloud to be analyzed by a human for AI training,
Yet.
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In Spain the typical doorbell camera is illegal. In an apartment building it is illegal to have a camera on the door that points into "common" areas even though these are still private areas vis-a-vis the general public.
I'm amazed you can't see the difference.
Body cam - used to protect the police and people being policed in a potentially hot conflict. Recording is scoped to these specific interactions that rarely occur for most people.
Doorbell cam - highly controversial. See response to dog-finding superbowl ad.
Body cam wore on face - Mass surveillance in potentially every conceivable social context. Data owned by Meta, a company known for building a profile on people that don't even use their products.
Door bells also had a popular movie made that revolved around their use: Weapons.
And that didn’t raise an uproar of suspicion even as one character went door to door asking if he could look at his neighbors recordings.
People are comfortable with the idea of being recorded, so long as accessing many recordings is a drawn out and manual process.
Eh, doorbell cams aren’t that controversial (ad aside). A lot of people have them already, both from ring (with the concomitant privacy issues) or from other providers (with different but similar issues).
They’re controversial on hacker news but I don’t think people in the “real world” care all that much.
How that connects to the meta glasses is certainly up for debate —- the doorbells provide a lot of value to the user (know who is at the door remotely!), the glasses are more of a mixed bag.
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Body cameras aren't hidden and are worn by public officials while on duty, doorbell cameras are no more invasive than an CCTV camera a home owner might have installed on their premise.
I think the difference is that these cameras are relatively concealed, and can be used to record every interaction, even in pretty intimate/private settings. Yes you could do this with a cell phone but it would be pretty obvious your recording if you're trying to get more than just the audio of an interaction.
Body cams are directly visible, and are there to add accountability to the actions of law enforcement. These glasses are covert cameras. Someone that doesn't know what they look like isn't going to know someone might be filming. That's a big difference.
Not sure how it is where you live, but doorbell cameras are commonly criticized where I live. With many people claiming they don't feel comfortable walking around anymore knowing that the entire neighborhood is filming them.
Cop body cam footage is more likely to help you vs a cop than get you into trouble because a cop is already there watching what you’re doing. IE: Thank god the cop’s camera was off when I was buying crack, I might have gotten in trouble otherwise… fails because a cop was already watching you.
Cops also announce their presence in uniforms and are operating as government agents. People already moderate their behavior around cops so being recorded isn’t as big a deal.
> body cameras had no statistically significant impact on officer use of force, civilian complaints, or arrests for disorderly conduct by officers. In other words, body cameras did not reduce police misconduct . . . 92.6 percent of prosecutors’ offices in jurisdictions with body cameras have used that footage as evidence to prosecute civilians, while just 8.3 percent have used it to prosecute police officers[1]
Cops control when the cameras are filming, if footage is retained and what/when/if footage is released. Body cams are just yet another surveillance tool against the population.
[1]https://www.aclu-wa.org/news/will-body-cameras-help-end-poli...
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What do you mean bodycam isn't a problem? Do people wear body cams to normal social occasions?
People are more okay with cameras in public areas and less okay if it's in intimate, social, private situations, inside apartments, individual offices etc.
I also don't like having doorbell cams everywhere, at least not the ones that upload all their footage to the ~great mass surveillance network in the sky~ Cloud(TM). I don't think that's an uncommon point of view. And body cams are only worn by cops and at least provide some concrete benefits in terms of increasing police accountability.
"Surveillance Camera Man"[1] makes a good practical example of it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9sVqKFkjiY
It might be the line in the sand now, but it probably won’t be for long.
A body cam is worn by a trained police officer and lights up with a big red flashing light and audible warnings. It is used to record serious crimes.
A face camera has no light or warnings (you just put tape over the small light), and is operated by a pervert.
Some doorbell cams film other people's homes.
Lines were and are always weird, all the time. Americans killing 150 girls yesterday in a school, just a footnote in the news, already gone today. Some rando killing 10 people in a university in my country, endless discussion, politicians, punduits all up in arms spewing their opinions for months, discussing it to no end. Only difference? I don't know. I don't know almost anyone in my country, they're all as foreign to me as some girls in Iran. There's no difference to me.
There's very little sense to me in searching for meaning in any of this. It just is, people are that way. There are no lines and boundaries based on anything but just whims.
People want to be deceived.