Yesterday I saw someone with Meta smart glasses in public for the first time. Even just standing near him was unpleasant. It doesn’t matter whether it’s recording, pointing a camera and mics at somebody who didn’t agree to it feels rude and a bit shocking.
I worry that this is becoming more acceptable or do others feel the same way? Companies keep pushing forward, now with smart neckleses, smart headphones, (all equipped with camera and mic). Are these all doomed to fail? What feature would convince me or others to actually start using them? It’s certainly not chatgpt strapped on your face, or a shitty quality spy camera either.
If any of my friends or family wore these, I wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking to them.
Im interested in your experiences. Thanks for reading.
Are there any glasses that block smart glasses available? Like a localized jammer, or like shining an IR light at a camera, sort of thing?
One project that can help with this is the OUI-SPY, a small piece of open source hardware. The OUI-SPY runs on a cheap Arduino compatible chip called an ESP-32. There are multiple programs available for loading on the chip, such as “Flock You,” which allows people to detect Flock cameras and “Sky-Spy” to detect overhead drones. There’s also “BLE Detect,” which detects various Bluetooth signals including ones from Axon, Meta’s Ray-Bans that secretly record you, and more. It also has a mode commonly known as “fox hunting” to track down a specific device.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/how-hackers-are-fighting-back-against-ice
What an absolute Stacy, massive respect
21st Century Bernie Goetz.
This is the next logical iteration of “if you aren’t doing anything wrong then you have no reason to be concerned with people filming you without your knowledge/consent!”
It was never a good argument, but too many people seemed to believe it and now we’re here…
Take away their bathroom door and their houses front door. Nothing to hide right?
If they don’t have anything to hide, then maybe they’ll consent to an unwarranted search. Who needs constitutional rights when you have nothing to hide? /s
Since these types never understand anything until it directly affects them, we should all ensure it does quickly and at all costs, because eventually it will cost us everything.
New rule: recording someone else without their consent gives them partial ownership of your device: enough that they can rightfully destroy it if they so choose.
Glasshole indeed!
If I ever see someone with those glasses I will straight up punch them in the eye. I am not kidding. I would rather have someone walk around with a gun than those (and guns are illegal here)
I recently asked a friend to remove their meta glasses while we were out to eat. It was awkward for a moment but they were understanding, and we had a good talk about privacy and tech after.
Only an absolute tool would wear that crap.
Let me introduce you to my friend who thinks Fucker Carlson has good ideas, and that Musky is Iron man.
His glasses arrive tomorrow.
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If any of my friends showed up with facebook glasses, they would be ridiculed to the point of them either getting rid of them or us no longer being friends.
Ok
I’m not here for your entertainment, or whatever you’re going to use that footage for. That’s your deal, not mine. Take them off, or not coming in the house.
You can always cover your face in public. Islam is the light.
I would get a very powerful magnet and ruin their devices. That works right? Otherwise I’ll get a device that scrambles smart devices. Fuck Zuckerberg.
Does it? Would be keen to know about this. Gonna have to keep some in my bag 🤣
If you hit the glasses hard enough it will to the job as good as a hammer… failing that it takes a tad too much power for a « magnet » to affect electronics at a distance.
Is there any song or maybe some audio that could be played out loud to discourage sharing of content or maybe get them on a list or something?
😄 I’m a millennial so back in the day we learned that magnets ruin some electronics, but things might have changed now. So we need a knowledgeable tech person to let us know.
Magnets mostly messed with tapes, floppies and hard disks. I believe you could also mess up a CRT’s calibration with one.
None of those technologies are particularly commonplace these days, especially not in those glasses.
I mean an MRI level magnet could crush them, but you’re gonna struggle to move that around
And it’s very expensive.
I guess CRTs were fine. I used to play a lot with that. If it’s looking funny, use degauss and watch the magic.
DONKkk vvvvvvvvvvrrrrrr click
Magnets have no effect on flash memory or storage.
I worry you might not have a representative audience here, as most of Lemmy is privacy-savvy. I guess most people just don’t care, and if it keeps this way, it will be no different than smartphones (which are primarily spy devices most people carry around all the time and no one notices anymore).
Don’t worry, he’s just making videos to jerk off to later.
To be fair, you should have no expectation of privacy when in public. You’re constantly being recorded when in public whether you know it or not. If you keep this mindset then you can take steps to secure what little privacy is possible. Masks, hats, and IR blocking eyeglass lenses or sunglasses would be my protocol. And mindfully avoiding unscrupulous cameras. Also don’t discredit the power of blending in, become an unnoticeable object that blends into the background.
In private, if a friend was wearing them, you should have more expectation of privacy and should voice the concerns to the friend. And if they don’t care then walk away, they’re not a good friend anyways.
I can absolutely see the appeal, it would save me SO much awkwardness, it’s not even funny.
I am also very glad that (at least current) EU privacy legislation bans anything of the sort.
Save you awkwardness? People would treat you like shit, and there’d be a permanent weird vibe around you. How is that going to save you ANY awkwardness?
Ideally of course, nobody would mind because everybody’s using them and any data is deleted immediately so there are no privacy concerns. Did you read the second paragraph? I realise very much that what I’m imagining is unrealistic nonsense and shortsightedness caused by my own selfishness.
Meta deletes the data… yeah, right.
Hence, “ideally”.
What is banned in EU?
Filming people in public without their consent. I can’t even install a camera on my door (a minor inconvenience to me that I accept because I see why these laws exist).
Its not the same. Filming people in public is legal if it’s for personal use. Your security camera is illegal if it’s continuously recording and it’s pointing at the street with neighbor doors visible for example.
It’s not pointing at the street, I live in a flat. I’ve looked for ways around it, it’s not legally possible.
I see, it’s because its not your property and it’s continuous, but GDPR does not stop you from taking pictures in public.
Not if I’m taking pictures of the general surroundings and people happen to be there. If I’m pointing the lens at someone’s face, it does stop me.
I feel the same way about smartphones but it’s now completely normalised. Glasses are less paranoia-inducing since you can clearly see where it’s pointed and it’s at eye-level. I’d rather discourage smartphone use than smart-glasses use.
LoL @ the downvotes. Step one is acknowledging one’s addiction.
The law should be that the recording can only be used in private, by the owner of the device, not a company. If anyone shares the imagery or steals it, they should be subject to some kind of day-fine.
That would be nice.
That presumes the law works for you.
The police state loves that they can just buy the data the big tech companies are happily farming. No warrants, no judges, no pesky civil rights to get in the way. Just full time monitoring.
So true, well said and thx for saying it
I’m usually against punching people in the face from behind then running away…
From behind? How many elbows do you have?
There should be a law brought in so that any glasses fitted with cameras/microphones have to be clearly labeled (as in etched so it cant be removed) with a warning along the front face of the glasses and also make it to they can only be bright obnoxious high visibility colours like neon green/orange.
Lets see how “fashionable” they are when they make you look like a member of LMFAO.
The meta glasses supposedly are designed with a bright led on the front that comes on when the camera or microphone is recording.
Edit: I had forgotten when I wrote this that there are companies already offering services where you can send in your meta glasses and they claim they will somehow disable/bypass the LED indicator.
Yeah and people put little pieces of black tape over it that blends in with the black sunglasses and render that LED meaningless.
I don’t think that works anymore because I believe the LED is also a sensor that when covered (no light in) prevents recording.
And that doesn’t work because you can place your hand over the camera which will trick the glasses into thinking you are in the dark which will allow you to start recording, then you just take your hand away.
Youtube is full of videos that show people how to circumvent the LED on the these glasses. Its not rocket science.
I’m not saying that it’s not feasible, I’m saying the hardware changed since those first “hacks”.
Are you saying you tried on the latest version and covering the light sensor within the LED allow recording?
Because my best is that the videos are showcasing this on older models which precisely did not included that sensor. Here is a 404 episode on that https://www.404media.co/how-to-disable-meta-rayban-led-light/
Well they’re saying despite there being a light sensor it still can be easily circumvented by also covering the camera, not the LED, with your hand when starting to record and then just moving your hand away from the camera once the glasses are recording. I’ve definitely seen this tip shared and I think even an video of it in action.
They probably realize there’s no airtight way to prevent it anyway so they’ve added just some simple ways to make it a bit more difficult. It’s not like you couldn’t get camera glasses from some other company without these restrictions anyway if you’re determined to record without the light.
Sure, I’ve even made my own with a RPi0 and 3D printed frames at home https://twitter-archive.benetou.fr/utopiah/status/1449023602079240194/ so my point isn’t that Meta is fine (it definitely is bad) or that finding workarounds isn’t easy, solely that they seem to legitimately try to prevent circumvention measures despite picking bad designs, like removing a flashing red LED lights like ALL cameras did until now.
Literally the first video i found on youtube shows how to bypass the LED on Meta Gen 2 sunglasses. And the video is from only a few weeks ago.
https://youtube.com/shorts/RXQsBRQc7RU
EDIT:
And the second video i found shows the exact same “hack” working on the newer Meta Ray Ban Display. And that one’s from November.
Are you saying you tried on the latest version and covering the light sensor within the LED allow recording?
I’m saying a dumb little LED (whether it can be bypassed or not) is not enough. Recording with a regular camera, a webcam or a phone is an overt action, if you want to hide it you have to go out of your way to hide what you’re doing. Recording with these kinds of glasses is covert by its very design and should be held to different standards.
Related article https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go on how such glasses are actually used, sadly.
Ugh, hopefully they fix this. Or maybe then don’t and the whole glasses get banned, I’m fine with that.
That being said, as I mentioned in my other answer building such glasses is pretty trivial. Sure it might not look as inconspicuous as the Meta ones (or at least popular… which might lead to people better identifying them in fact) but recording covertly is indeed now trivial.
It’s wrong though and AFAIK in the EU at least it’s illegal without consent, you can’t publish the recording so the technical implementation is not really the problem, it’s the usage.
If at any point it seemed like I justified the usage of such glasses for covert filming let me clarify : no, it’s wrong, regardless of how technically feasible it now is, without or without Meta.
Some laptops have that. They’re completely impossible to circumvent, right?
Depends entirely on the implementation. If it’s wired right into the power line for the camera/mic, then it comes on when power goes to that hardware, but without extra engineering you could just pull off the LED and solder over the gap in the trace/wire.
And I have to apologize, I had forgotten that there are already third party companies advertising services to bypass/disable it on the meta glasses. Have to edit my last comment.
met up with a family member once who was wearing them and i immediately put on a face mask.
