What is it with Meta and destroying society in general? Zuck buys all the buildings in the block to have his privacy, but now wants to patent everyone else’s privacy who happens to be in the vicinity of his product. Researchers already found a dormant facial recognition pipeline quietly sitting inside the Meta AI app earlier this year, built and shipped without anyone opting in. I hope people have the power to sue if there are any recordings without consent.
Pictures of people, especially once they are identified, are person related data. And there are strict rules on how companies can collect / generate / process / transfer this kind of data.
My friends in the cattle industry told me that one of Bill Gates’s companies is buying up pasture land and driving up prices across the midwest, too. I don’t know exactly how you’d legally prevent it, but it does seem like a problem.
In fairness to Bill Gates, buying a ton of pasture land seems like a reasonable step to diversify his fortune. It's hard to find enough non-tech places to stash that much money.
This is the inevitable result of wealth concentration. The wealthy will spend their money buying up whatever resources they want. Today, most things are for sale, and they're all fungible. Solving this problem in any durable fashion requires not having billionaires.
There will almost always exist loopholes in any scheme. Having wealth effectively buys you new loopholes. It's a (non)virtuous cycle. We need to tie tax to wealth level and be done with it.
You don't have to go as far back as the French Revolution. Labor unions in the late 19th and early 20th century fought pitched battles against the exploitative billionaire equivalents of their day, and it was much easier for the rich to accept t labor's demands when they knew there was real risk of physical harm from the workers they were exploiting. If you work an 8 hour day, or your job can't subject you dangerous conditions with no recourse, thank militant unions who were willing to lay it on the line against greedy oppressors like Zuckerberg.
These days though, you got half the population rooting for the billionaires. They'll tell people if they don't like their working conditions or pay, just find a new job.
The division in our society was created by the ultra-wealthy for the ultra-wealthy. Until more people realize that we'll continue to be exploited by them.
Certainly, but I've seen an alarming number of people that acknowledge this source of division, and yet still rant against workers demanding better conditions and vote for politicians that are very open about not giving a shit about workers.
Rupert Murdoch was/is one of the best, most direct, most prolific (thanks to his massive media ownership) manipulators of public opinion for precisely this purpose. This cartoon nailed it.
I remember reading a recent sci-fi book where oil companies executives, oilgarks and other people who destroyed the environment were hunted down and killed in revenge for fucking up our common environment.
Sooner or later people will decide that enough is enough.
This is the book. I thought that this was a thought provoking book. Sooner or later the world will look like the one described in it if we don't change our ways.
French Revolution is why I cannot respect any AI system.
Some variant of _Sorry, I cannot discus violence_ in some form is what seems to always result with the _French Revolution_ inquiries.
They are pre-programmed bias that are designed to limit knowledge and content consumption.
Another is asking if any employees working at AI company Y are Epstein associates. _No one that works at Y was associated with Epstein." It will keep it up until you give it a name of an actually employee that was an associate.
This is what happens when you take people with impaired empathy for other human beings, nurture that impairment, and then present unfathomable sums of wealth to incentivize the continuation of the impairment.
Currently there's a massive, and understandable, backlash against the Meta/Ray-Ban glasses, but I can't understand how it's not absolutely destroying the Ray-Ban brand?
Influencers and stores are damaging their brands by selling or advertising the glasses, but Ray-Ban seems to go completely free.
I do wonder if we're just moving to shun people wearing glasses with heavy frames in the near future. The glass only seems to appeal to a certain type of people anyway.
Don't forget, Facebook (Meta) owns 3% of Ray-Ban's parent Luxottica group [1]. They clearly are exerting control over the future direction.
Regardless of what THEY do, what WE as consumers can do is to permanently brand these awful glasses as "pervert glasses" [2] and publicly shame them.
I'm here for it.
I didn't know about Meta's ownership. I would love to see some internal discussion if Ray-Ban pushed back and was overridden and forced to make the product.
Ray-Ban is choosing to produce these in a partnership. They don't have to participate and by doing so they're guaranteeing they exist and profiting from the bad behavior. And even making them more stylish and therefore more appealing.
A "reasonable adult" would have no trouble understanding why someone who thinks the existence of these glasses is a moral and privacy nightmare would also seek to punish Ray-Ban.
But they are revolting against those who are advertising the Meta Ray-Bans and the stores that sells them. My confusion is: Why does it stop there? Why isn't the protests aimed at Ray Ban?
My idea that adults can understand other people's ideas is mistaken because the average consumer is a hedonist that doesn't care about ideals? Not exactly sure how that tracks, but okay, bud.
I replaced them with a brand I was able to confirm was a) Not Ray Ban b) Not a Luxotica brand. c) Owned and operated in America (note, that doesn't mean the glasses were made in USA). d) Cost less than 1/4 of previous ray-bans.
Anecdotal but I hear quite a few people talk negative about Ray-Ban related to the backlash. They are the "pervert glasses" brand now. I think there definitely is reputation damage. Also the "banray" [0] campaign for my country is doing well I think (I regularly see their stickers), and this name reversal may also harm the brand if it sticks.
Penalty because it’s based on what people think when they see them. They don’t say Meta Raybands but just Meta glasses. If influential people were to start saying the former enough that it becomes then martins. Also is the question of do other Rayband glasses look like it. If this line is distinct enough than it won’t harm other lines since the visual association isn’t made.
>> "The glass only seems to appeal to a certain type of people anyway."
What type of people is that? I am just a dad who has them and films his kids doing cute things without making the phone camera an ever present intrusion while outdoors.
It's fine, it's Meta, suspicion is warranted, but I'm hoping it can be moderated and directed. People like me are kind of left out right now in what seems to be a runaway narrative.
P.S: Would love a suggestion that doesn't involve angrily telling parents to not take pictures of their kids as an alternative. It sucks that I have to explain that this will be happening anyway.
You say suspicion is warranted, you're still not only charging forward with this but also complaining about other people's perception of you doing so. You're not being left out, you're included in the narrative. You just don't like it.
I hope, for the kids' sake, in addition to normalizing the idea that it's okay for dad to be recording them without their awareness, you teach them that most people find the idea of strangers doing this to be creepy and distasteful (for good reason), so they need to be wary around Meta glasses despite seeing them as a quotidian thing.
If you gave me a non-Meta glass like this, I'd happily switch, and FWIW, if I saw some evidence of Meta doing something untoward with this data, I'd dump them immediately. An unaction'd patent and breathless headlines over "creep glasses" is all I have to go on for now.
"in addition to normalizing the idea that it's okay for dad to be recording them without their awareness"
They're 2 man. You're at the point of questioning whether parents should be allowed to film their infants. Do we think we're off the deep end a bit?
>if I saw some evidence of Meta doing something untoward with this data
going to hold my tongue regarding the majority of this conversation, but i couldn't help myself here.
meta has one of the worst track records of doing untoward things with data. a pattern of abusing its user's data, built over years. if you are still okay with them now, i am doubting your words that anything they could do would make you "dump them immediately".
It's meta - they've been caught doing untoward things at virtually every opportunity. Are you looking for something specific, like the creation of virtual CSAM with them or something? I'm fine with starting out by giving people/companies the benefit of the doubt I guess, but once they have shown you their true colors, you should listen.
I take this story as a clear sign that they are careless & it most likely IS happening at some scale in systems that generate/personalize ad variants, chatbots, suggested interactions, etc. For another example of shipping very inappropriate things:
Back to the original inference, anyway… generative ad Personalization instances DO NOT (afaik) appear in the public repository of ads. Researchers can't see it, but do we have to strain our imaginations to think that things like nudify apps aren't taking advantage of tools that do things like drop user avatars into their pitch? e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1uhy9yn/instagram_...
I don't have a specific citation to offer, but tbh I've seen enough.
Which is true for all parents recording all kids with every kind of camera, also in a way that is totally un-actionable.
Good faith question:
If your worry is, "I don't know you're recording", what did you do with that information when someone was using a digital camera to video record their kids 15 years ago, with you in the background?
P.S: if your answer is just "you could be a creep", I totally empathize, but this is for the situation where I am actually just a parent.
There have already been stories about meta contractors being able to watch the footage people are recording with the glasses. Recordings included people undressing, on the toilet, and other explicit stuff.
Yes, That’s an opt-in feature. You can record all the footage you want and keep it on your phone, and they won’t see any of it, unless you ask for it be analyzed by their AI (as laid out in the article you shared). Of course if there was evidence they’re doing it when I haven’t opted in I’d dump em.
It’s made clear during onboarding, but I’m sure it could be better.
People don't like to be watched and recorded. That's it.
This data - which includes their facial features, geolocation, and activities is not yours to take and immortalize.
This should be intuitive to any empathetic human being. One person saying "this breaches my sense of safety and privacy" should be enough for you to understand.
Meta was caught so many times on stealing user data and bypassing privacy controls that I don't even know how can you suggest believing them with straight face.
> what did you do with that information when someone was using a digital camera to video record their kids 15 years ago, with you in the background?
I'm the asshole that covers his face while flipping off the person with the camera. I've done this for years. It used to be for news or other TV based content that they would blur out the finger gesture which meant blurring out my face. I've also noticed a camera in public places and deliberately stepped behind someone else as a blocker, or just moved to be behind the person with the camera. These are easy to do when it's obvious there's a camera. Glassholes are much more difficult to notice. Comparing these as equivalent is just a lack of being rational.
The glasses are a trust destroying device that degrades privacy.
If someone shoves a camera in my face in public I am going to move away from that person. If I see them filming someone with me in the background at least I know what is going on and can judge the situation accordingly.
Now I don't know. Everyone with glasses is a suspect. It's more public tension, hyper vigilance and uncertainty.
To say a phone is intrusive but Meta glasses are not is an interesting choice of words. As a parent, I get what you mean but as a privacy aware member of the tech community I think the word you want is "disruptive" or "distracting."
Why shouldn't I tell you not to take pictures of your kids. They're too young to opt into having their faces enrolled in Zuck's facial recognition database.
Meta has a history of siphoning any data they technically can. Do you really think those "local only" photographs are going to remain so? There will never be a point where you miss the EULA change and don't opt out in the 45 seconds before the data are all uploaded?
I would not trust my kids safety to "Zuckerberg will be restrained by the possibility of bad press".
And at this point, let me say you seem to care about your kids and probably have the technical skills and attention to make sure they never end up in his database. But you are an exception, and society needs to protect the children of parents who care less.
You liberty is worth nothing. You could hold a camera in your hands. Get a go-pro that records locally, or choose any other option. But nope, you're hoping you can record your child, put their faces in a recognition database associate precise location data, and then hope that Meta does not use this data in ways you don't approve of. (or merely sell it to an endless string of data brokers)
Just so we're clear and can read past the headlines. This database doesn't exist and there has been no evidence that a database built off of meta ray-bans exists. And I would obviously dump the ray bans if this was actually a thing.
There is no Rayban data in Facebook. There is no connection and no way to use one with the other (other than voluntarily posting your own video to FB/Insta)
You're arguing really really hard in favor of Meta Raybans, even to the point of coming up with excuses and false analogies. It's almost like you're arguing in bad faith and claiming ignorance of Meta's bad faith implementation of all the surveillance features they've been pushing.
Why?
Given Meta's history of disregarding everyone who's not Zuck (and him being a sociopath), why give them the benefit of any kind of doubt? Right now, everyone should assume malice as the first explanation, and then accept that maybe there was some ineptitude once evidence appears.
The database is literally Facebook, you upload a picture or video and there it is, on the database, which is Facebook itself, that's why it's called "Face" book: because it is a database of Faces named after an actual book of photos of faces.
The Meta glasses, like everything Meta does, is marketed as a tool for interacting with Meta's services. Including Facebook.
“There has been no evidence that a database built off of meta ray-bans exists.”
This was my only claim. Which remains true. Videos off of the glasses voluntarily posted on FB is no different than iPhone videos posted on FB so it has nothing to do with the glasses themselves. If your claim is “posting videos in FB is a bad idea”, I agree, I don’t do that but again, that has nothing to do with the glasses either. It doesn’t make posting easier or force me to opt-out of automatically posting or anything silly like that
And you can’t do any “facial recognition” against Facebook either. I’m glad meta figured out that was a pointless bad idea.
and the technology exists to spy on everything you do in every single way, ignore gdpr, ignore all kinds of privacy acts, in fact you can also stalk people and find out where they live and break into their homes and look through their stuff and plant hidden cameras and other fun stuff
you can do that, but you have no clue as to why people/companies don't tend to do those things?
it is sort of funny that most of your examples of things companies "tend not to do" end up on the news fairly regularly.
big tech ignoring gdpr, ignoring or working around privacy protections, their technology being easily abused for stalking or harassment with no effort put into curtailing bad behavior, location data being bought and sold, etc.
i think the only thing from your list i haven't seen in the news in the last couple of months is employees of big tech doing break & enters.
(and this is all before we even approach the topic of data breaches!)
they still don't just completely ignore regulations, like do we really think they just don't apply to them?
we're talking about meta supposedly using facial recognition on the glasses to build a master database of faces or something
like if I was Zuckerberg I would not want to do that, it would lead to a congressional hearing and all kinds of lawsuits I'd imagine.
like where do we draw the line on plausible?
or do we just go and say yeah meta must be spying on everything and feeding everything to a database where they sell everything about you
like what about CCTV backups or robo vac camera feeds? should we assume that companies are deliberately sending all the data so they can sell raw video feeds and they just don't tell you?
I'm not counting in incompetence and data breaches, I'm talking about intentional stuff
> without making the phone camera an ever present intrusion while outdoors
You don't have to be constantly filming your kids, that's optional.
This is a cute spin, but what you're saying is "I like the glasses because I can film people without them knowing" it just happens the people in this case are (mostly) your children.
>> what you're saying is "I like the knives because I can cut things" it just happens the "things" in this case are (mostly) your vegetables.
Again, I'm not saying this out of some bad faith, I just think this argument doesn't work the way you think it does. We actually have no data as to what its most commonly used for, apart from the headlines. Anecdotally, all my friends who have them use it for the exact same reason I do.
Good analogy. If there was a tool that could do everything a knife can do without being able to cut people, knives wouldn't be nearly as common and anyone who insisted on carrying one in public would be suspect. "I need it to cut vegetables," would not be a reasonable excuse, because there's an alternative.
There is an alternative to your stealthy camera glasses, which you are aware of, and your admitted use case for them is filming people who are unaware that you are filming. Yet you can't imagine other people use them for the same purpose? I'm trying to assume good faith but you're not making it easy.
So because you use them to stealthily film your 2 year old, there's no way other people use them to stealthy film other people in less acceptable ways?
This confirms it, you're being deliberately obtuse.
So its either the "ever present intrusion" of camera or the ever present intrusion of the glasses? Cant you just live your fucking life without recording everything?
People still keep using Instagram and X and until that changes there is no backlash. Customers and users have signaled over and over there is nothing that can be done to make them leave, so Mark and Elon get to do whatever they want.
Luxottica, the owners of Ray-Ban since 1999, realized after they survived the expose on their blatant monopolistic price gouging that none of this sticks. People just see something they recognize and go with it.
> I do wonder if we're just moving to shun people wearing glasses with heavy frames in the near future. The glass only seems to appeal to a certain type of people anyway.
You're mistaken; in my family _everyone_ has heard of and read about the "creepo glasses" and that they're associated with Facebook, and want absolutely nothing to do with them or anybody who would voluntarily wear them. Plus, they have zero problem telling anyone wearing those glasses around them to either take them off or leave.
Yes, I would consider that "massive" since none of them are HN readers nor work in any tech or media related fields.
out of all of the semi/actually-obscure issues that people on HN talk about, meta glasses are not really all that obscure.
my local gym has posters up forbidding them. my non-tech daughter has asked me about them. the college i teach at has policies about them.
their banned in courts in various countries. they've been criticized in mainstream outlets like the guardian, BBC, CNN, business insider, national post, yahoo, and the independent. (i dont think any of those outlets are reasonably considered "tech pubs read by a statistically insignificant number of people")
useful heuristic: every comment I've seen with excessive 9s was nonsense
You really think if I asked 200,000 people in my city, only one would have heard of Meta RayBans? when there are billboards, magazine ads, and window stickers in every glasses store? Couldn't tell you the real number but it's probably closer to 1 in 5.
Not uncommon, in comments like these, for there to be so many 9s that the population of Earth is exceeded.
These patents are completely worthless. These glasses will never become socially acceptable and certainly not when they're coming from Meta, a known privacy thrasher/intruder/molester/rapist/violator.
Ten years ago people would have said the same about a lot of the surveillance tech we have today: TVs that sell your viewing data, always on microphones that listen to everything in your house to send to big tech so you can easily set a timer, doorbells that record your neighbors house and upload everything to the police 24/7, etc
I think the difference is people being comfortable with giving away their own data for convenience, vs. someone recording them without their permission (who they can immediately confront, unlike Flock and the like).
You will confront, they will record the confrontation and post it online to farm clicks. Few people will sue, there will be a slap on a wrist and voila, its normalized.
Now people will not confront because they would only provide content and see themselves in new viral video.
Not so long ago this was also the thought about mobile phones, now everyone is walking around with them so they can film/pic anyone all the time while 'faking' to be doing something else. If there is any convenience for people to be had, they will go for it. I think the convenience part over phones is just not there (yet). The experience is just not yet anything worthwhile / good / smooth so it's just lame, cringy and clunky, outside of filming. Maybe someone will make something that works, maybe it will be something completely different.
But if it gets a smartphone moment, no-one will talk about the privacy and the cameras anymore and that's why they keep trying.
There is a reason why they are partnering with Rayban; meta has no brand name it can use. Which is pretty wild, because every other big tech company has _some_ kind of brand a non trivial number of people — paying money — who would say something like: "I really need/want to use it every day because it is useful to me, my work would be severely hampered without it"(or some syntactical variation of that sentence with varying amounts of affection towards the brand)
Unfortunately, they don’t have to be very successful to have an impact. Even just their introduction to the marketplace normalizes the concept, just a bit. Google Glass failed and so have other camera-equipped glasses, but notice that they keep popping up. Look how many companies have made them, and for how many years. Collectively, it’s moved the needle. I know someone who uses them regularly, mostly for recording rollercoaster rides, but that’s still plenty for a surveillance company.
Facial recognition is becoming common enough that it’s no longer very surprising if you’re in a crowded public space. Malls argue they need it to catch thieves, airports argue they need it to catch terrorists, and so on and so forth.
Privacy is like Humpty Dumpty, except he’s being poked to death.
saw an ad today for some ear pieces that look like audio speakers but theyre actually cameras as well, so it seems manufacturers realise glasses will annoy people but arent giving up.
All they have to do is create a new child company with the same tech (new name new trust) and give the glasses away for free if capturing the data is more valuable than the hardware sales. People don't have the time or energy to research every single company and product they want to buy so corporations (and politicians) take advantage of this.
Things have become normalized which just a decade ago would have been thought to never be socially acceptable. Frame it differently, make things convenient and offer something "for free" and everybody around you will forget their concerns, if they ever had any.
Its perfectly possible that AR glasses could be _more_ privacy preserving than mobile phones. THe problem is, either the market needs to make it financially advantageous to be privacy preserving (yes I can hear the laughing from here) or the legal mechanism by which the end user can request damages from either the user of the glasses, or the maker ofthe glasses, or both.
In this future you describe, you forgot the key feature: that "everyone" is not really "everyone", because if you are not an individual in the system with all this augmentation, you are "no one" and effectively cut out of the economy. so, sure "everyone" will have this, because society will create an environment where the tech have nots are treated as if they do not exist.
What isn't? It is increasingly impossible to do anything without being monitored and tracked, and that data is aggregated more and more. Cars, TVs, random appliances...
Facebook started on the same day DARPA lifelog project was cancelled, it’s just a rebrand, I hope no one believed the story of zuck being innovative in his dorm and made billions out of sheer dedication and grit.
Hope lawyers eat him alive ... ZUCK IS PUBLIC ENEMY #1, PUBLIC PERVERT #1.
How many male users of these pervert glasses are secretly recording attractive women at gyms, at beaches, in scantily clad clothing wherever, so they can go back home and "spank the monkey"? Our taking the video clips and running it through ai to create nudy content ?
Is the misspelling of "reel" -> "real" in the first sentence a sign that this was written by a human or a trick to make me think it was written by a human? I think it is the former.
You can create a patent that builds on other patents. You can make up all kinds of "what if" "inventions" and spend a lot of money acquiring patents for them, if you have the money to do this originally. Then it is a game of having the financing to "protect" those patents from infringers. If a corporation has more legal reserves than a patent holder, it can be a long drawn out legal battle where the corporation eventually wins, or the patent holder can just not fight and it ends there. This is the patent system.
I'm not sure what part of meta delevoped that, I can't find those names in linkedin. I vaguely recognise one name but can't be sure about it.
In meta, there are a number of research teams, SOme are pure hardware, although they are less now, some are software and some are about specific modes of interaction. Ie agios is about touch, opals are about displays (assuming they exist anymore) surreal is about visual understanding and graphics is well, graphics.
Surreal built a "ego centric" platform, ie research perv glasses. They are quite capable https://www.projectaria.com/
Recording data is easy, processing and making that data usable, within the power budget is hard.
On the face of this, its trivially simple to do. Just record all that video and sound, do some STT facial recogntion and location extraction and jobs a goodun.
Doing it with a total power envelope of <500mwhrs is the hard part.
However, in terms or problems. These glasses have the ability to precisly locate the wearer. By inference it can locate anything it can see. If you have more than one wearer, you can locate lots of objects/people in real time.
This means that you can trivially map people's movments,s thoughts and actions in more or less real time.
Great for advertising, great for visually impaired, shit for everyone else.
That is a MUCH more interesting answer than I expected. I briefly worked for a company that made AI augmented cameras (OpenCV internally, usually) - some time back.
They spy on people. Their spyglasses are the next step.
I'd say Facebook is the most evil company, but we also have Google, so
competition is fierce here. Kind of sad to see what became of the big
US corporations - Evil prevailed there, continues and expands.
Meta = Dystopian Nightmare Disguised as Photo Sharing and Life Updates :-(
It’s taken 2 decades for most people to realise this but “Zuck” is a Bond Villain.
this is a type of false equivalency. the comments you read earlier were likely left by different people
the whiplash can be jarring, but it's important to remember that the commentariat are many individuals, not a single entity you can agree or disagree with
We should take a minute to understand that the current lawsuits are pushing, hard, for this. Whether or not Meta also want to do spying thing for their own purposes, we are forcing them to roll this shit out when we declare it's not enough for a user to tell a social media service their age, the social media site needs to be /certain/ and make a big database of their proof.
The world that results may be exactly what we want, IDK. It's just be nice if we could decide, collectively, one way or the other, then be deliberate about it.
Facebook already requires users to tell them their age, and already mandates minimum ages for users in their T&Cs. Recent and current lawsuits establish that /this is not enough/. Hence, mandatory age checks involving some combination of government ID and face recording, and a big database proving you've done that so you don't get fined when kids get on your platform.
We're literally about to require Meta to prohibit the creation of multiple accounts. Their T&Cs already prohibit that, so what we're saying is that just asking is not enough - we are demanding it is enforced. What we ask for, we get.
>A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities. In particular, the term denotes publications of this type distributed by university administrations at the start of the academic year, with the intention of helping students to get to know each other. A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities. In particular, the term denotes publications of this type distributed by university administrations at the start of the academic year, with the intention of helping students to get to know each other.
It's called Facebook, because it collected photographs to be used for facial recognition data, much like personal information was collected for sale to commercial interests. In fact, Facebook often used to ask you to identify people in photographs.
Skype and Zoom have been used to train AI to create human likenesses (which is why they are free to users), and probably for identification purposes too.
I was recently at a hotel where the front desk lady was wearing these glasses. I immediately saw the cameras and asked, "are those meta glasses", she said yeah but these are not on right now. I don't get how she thought it'd be a good idea to wear those glasses at a front desk job. This was a nice 4 star hotel in Atlanta.
After I came home I decided that I am going to put up a sign in my front yard - "I will shoot you if I see you with meta glasses in front of my house". I don't own a gun but I will definitely put up the sign just to tell people how shitty they are.
A lot of comments in here from privileged people complaining about some imagined oppression while ignoring the nature of actual ones.
I would love if meta glasses were freely distributed in poor, black and brown communities in the United States where police intimidation and rights violations are routine, and where there is almost no recourse because even when filmed via phone (if you manage it) enough context is missing to allow any litigation to err on the side of taking the word of the police. Not everyone is able to capture these on their phone in the moment, with enough context to make a case. In a world where police are predatory, a camera on your face becomes like a dashcam. Insurance against becoming a victim. Many police are still not required to wear body cams, courts and juries tend to take cops word as veracious evidence.
Citizens wearing glasses that record, if evenly distributed, would seem to reflect the surveillance state back at the authorities. If the problem is it's made by Meta, then fine. But it is irritating how much of this no cameras in public discourse seems authored by relatively privileged types who ignore the actual benefits of cameras in public given the power of witness testimony in the courts, and the biased nature in which such testimony is often favored.
Imo if you don't have answer for that problem, nor an ability to acknowledge more cameras in public has actually been an equalizer where oppression actually happens, then I have to doubt your sincerity.
You're suggesting total surveillance as an answer. That's going to happen then everyone will be oppressed in mo time at all.
Your examples and grievances are real and shared by me and many reading your comment, however, maybe let's start by making sure police are accountable? At the same time stop employing thugs and racists. Stop giving them weapons and a uniform. And make them unaccountable for (as the rest of the world see it) out and out cold bloodied murder.
I'm suggesting more nuance in the debate. I already acknowledged Meta being the company behind this is not ideal. Just like being glad someone can record police brutality or ICE executions on their iPhone is not some endorsement of Apple as a corporate entity.
I agree with your sentiments but we also have to be realistic about the solutions you suggest. It is frustrating to only hear pie in the sky solutions when so many people are suffering today. It often reads like the move against cameras is a move from an already privileged class to confine the surveillance state to poor communities, were it already exists in the form of hyperaggressive and predatory policing. If the state is going to do surveillance anyway, one might be tempted to suggest an equalization of this power is a good thing. I'm simply saying its not as straightforward as many people have been led to believe.
Your arguments sounds just like their internet.org pitch. Also advertised as great equalizer for the poor. Facebook used it for data extraction and political plays, with no regard for actual people using it. Meta should never be involved in any matters of public interest.
Nothing about my argument suggests engaging in the delusion that Meta has any "regard for actual people using it". So you either didn't understand it, or are attacking a straw man. Using iPhones or Androids to film the police can be a useful equalizer. It does not mean one endorses Apple or Google's corporate activities, or engages in the same delusion with regard to those companies.
I've dealt with this same sort of objection three times now in other comments. Instead of repeating the same objection, why don't you attempt to pick up any of my rejoinders, all of which are lacking a thoughtful reply. I am happy to be proven wrong here. Yet all I get are essentially 4 different versions of the same cheap attempt to mangle my point into some defense of Meta or surveillance or big tech. The inability to deal with the actual substance of my point suggests a concerning lack of candor.
You're dealing with the same objection, because, in the thread about Meta glasses, you're trying to argue about smart glasses in the vacuum.
Is easy access to private camera positive for people disadvantaged against the system? Likely yes.
Would the benefits be largely eclipsed by negative impact like perpetuating violence, depression and polarization if Meta is main vendor? Also yes, because they are careless enough to extract private data and offer it to people benefiting from vulnerable individuals.
Hardly surprising your comments are discussed in context of Meta if you comment in thread about Meta.
How do the same arguments not apply to iPhones and Androids?
How is pointing out the utility of cameras on consumer glasses (as cameras on consumer phones) to actually make an impact where oppression actually happens arguing in a vacuum?
You didn't answer the question. It seems to me you live in a speculative world, where in the real world it is well known people use these things to level the playing field. Do you deny that the ubiquity of cameras among the populace has lessened the ability of the state to act with impunity on American streets? Or do you only speak of oppression through the prisim of speculation?
Is it a perfect solution? Does oppression end at camera point? Obviously not, no more than at gunpoint or take your pick.
Perfect options do not exist. It is easy to insist on some sort of ideological litmus test when the consequences of what actually happens in reality are remote to you. Anyone who has actually seen how the criminal justice system operates would understand the value of cameras for those the state seeks to incarcerate or worse. What could be more oppressive? Seeing an ad you don't like?
Forgive me for not filming you getting bludgeoned in the streets, I don't agree with Google's data policy? What a useful civic actor that makes you. Accompanied by the obvious fact you don't even have a remotely plausible plan to usher in your supposed alternative.
In such a situation, it is hard to distinguish you from any other adversary to righting these ills, as your utility to anyone in actual risk is doubtlessly negative.
Google and Apple while far from saint weren't caught multiple times directly monetizing violence, political polarization or vulnerable minors and directly lying about what they do.
What I'm arguing is that if Meta ceased to exist some years ago, there would be less bludgeoning to film to begin with, as social media-driven hate is source for a lot of them.
And if men were angels no government would be necessary.
Obviously, Meta appears as more of a social ill. It's a social network. What has made society necessary and yet unpleasant has always been the same - other people. Rodney King and worse preceded Facebook. I simply don't think you actually have a very robust framework of how the world works. Sorry to put it bluntly. It's just deeply unsatisfying reasoning to anyone whose knowledge of history spans past the current millennium.
Even with respect to Apple and Google, Im not sure the claim Meta is uniquely evil actually is sustained on robust examination. Nevertheless, I take your point. At the very least, I appreciate your attempt to have a discussion. Have a good day.
Obviously Meta as social network has more opportunities to show "evilness". But also it has more opportunities to show good side.
And yes in the end it's always people. What makes a difference is that some of those people sit on the Meta's board and they consistently show, they aren't humanity's finest. To the point, where I don't think any technological stunt can make up for harm they're doing, therefore making their existence net negative for humans.
Of course one can argue on cynical/real-politik level something like Meta was unavoidable due to "how the world works", but that doesn't mean they should be immune from criticism, as honest public discourse is one of the ways to push Overton window.
Police can and should be reined in. There are so many better levers that can be pulled to do this, if only the political will were present. A technofeudalist surveillance state is a poor solution.
The political will does not exist. This is not a new problem. Americans have consistently chosen surveillance, for more than two decades now.
Unless you have a plan to codify privacy as a right, repeal patriot act era powers and actually have it pass the Senate, then you are by definition advocating a poor solution as it is not viable.
Meanwhile in the courts were being poor is criminalized and sends people to actual oppression in jails and prisons right now today as opposed to an imagined "technofeudalist" oppression sometime in the future having a camera recording is usually the best and only defense possible against the state. If no one recorded it's you vs the state, and you will lose.
I would also love for ubiquitous surveillance to be used for good, but what would happen in your scenario is ICE using the footage to hunt and kidnap people who "look" like undocumented immigrants.
Do you not see an irony in your claim? Why was ICE pulled back in Minneapolis? Because cameras caught the state in a lie. Without them those murders would have been swept under the rug, even celebrated.
If you think the problem with ICE is too many cameras once again I think you make my point. More people have died in ICE custody and at the state's hand since, yet don't have such clear incriminating footage of ICE available. ICE doesn't want to wear bodycams. They don't want cameras in their prison camps.
Don't you think under such circumstances, it is a little suspect that you won't acknowledge at all the way cameras are actually an equalizer? ICE is already doing the things you claim to fear. More meta glasses on the streets, especially on the heads of regular decent people, activists or vulnerable populations could only be a good thing.
Phones can also be used to spy on populations. Should citizens thus refrain from filming ICE with their phones? Or is preventing people from being murdered and letting the state brand them a terrorist right in front of you more important?
It's not a perfect world. You have to make a tradeoff. Imo you're making the wrong trade, and frankly one that is obviously coming from a place of speculation, and not immediate fear of actual oppression.
ICE doesn't like cameras. Apparently you don't either. Yet you claim to be against ICE? Why don't you square the circle for me instead of deflection by way of slippery slope. If you have a meaningful rationale I'm eager to hear it.
What is it with Meta and destroying society in general? Zuck buys all the buildings in the block to have his privacy, but now wants to patent everyone else’s privacy who happens to be in the vicinity of his product. Researchers already found a dormant facial recognition pipeline quietly sitting inside the Meta AI app earlier this year, built and shipped without anyone opting in. I hope people have the power to sue if there are any recordings without consent.
https://www.engadget.com/2187824/wired-found-code-for-an-unr...
In the EU they have.
Pictures of people, especially once they are identified, are person related data. And there are strict rules on how companies can collect / generate / process / transfer this kind of data.
Podcast Behind the Bastards has a great episode on Zuck, worth a listen.
The episode is "Mark Zuckerberg: The Worst Person of the 21st Century (So Far)", in three parts (eps. 43-45) [1] [2] [3]
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srIt1RFE-Zo
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2icLml1LJUE
3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxNYbfYiG2c
> Zuck buys all the buildings in the block to have his privacy
It's even worse than that, now he's buying up indigenous burial sites:
https://robbreport.com/shelter/celebrity-homes/mark-zuckerbe...
Billionaires buying tons of Hawaiian land is actually a huge problem. Marc Benioff has been doing it as well.
My friends in the cattle industry told me that one of Bill Gates’s companies is buying up pasture land and driving up prices across the midwest, too. I don’t know exactly how you’d legally prevent it, but it does seem like a problem.
In fairness to Bill Gates, buying a ton of pasture land seems like a reasonable step to diversify his fortune. It's hard to find enough non-tech places to stash that much money.
Making Bill Gates richer seems like an anti-problem for society. Centralizing land ownership under him however is a huge problem.
I thought he'd want to reduce the consumption of meat. But maybe that's the goal?
Government should close all these loop holes on taxes and charge huge tax on people like Zuck who buys scares resources like lands and houses.
This is the inevitable result of wealth concentration. The wealthy will spend their money buying up whatever resources they want. Today, most things are for sale, and they're all fungible. Solving this problem in any durable fashion requires not having billionaires.
There will almost always exist loopholes in any scheme. Having wealth effectively buys you new loopholes. It's a (non)virtuous cycle. We need to tie tax to wealth level and be done with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
I’d post a Wikipedia link to the French Revolution, but I’m too chickenshit.
Anyway, an important topic to read about if you want to be a member of a free, democratic society.
You don't have to go as far back as the French Revolution. Labor unions in the late 19th and early 20th century fought pitched battles against the exploitative billionaire equivalents of their day, and it was much easier for the rich to accept t labor's demands when they knew there was real risk of physical harm from the workers they were exploiting. If you work an 8 hour day, or your job can't subject you dangerous conditions with no recourse, thank militant unions who were willing to lay it on the line against greedy oppressors like Zuckerberg.
These days though, you got half the population rooting for the billionaires. They'll tell people if they don't like their working conditions or pay, just find a new job.
The division in our society was created by the ultra-wealthy for the ultra-wealthy. Until more people realize that we'll continue to be exploited by them.
Certainly, but I've seen an alarming number of people that acknowledge this source of division, and yet still rant against workers demanding better conditions and vote for politicians that are very open about not giving a shit about workers.
Rupert Murdoch was/is one of the best, most direct, most prolific (thanks to his massive media ownership) manipulators of public opinion for precisely this purpose. This cartoon nailed it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CGtZG6aFPtQ/
I remember reading a recent sci-fi book where oil companies executives, oilgarks and other people who destroyed the environment were hunted down and killed in revenge for fucking up our common environment.
Sooner or later people will decide that enough is enough.
Any chance you remember the title of the book? Based on the fact you didn't post it outright might mean it's not worth reading though lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juice_(novel)
This is the book. I thought that this was a thought provoking book. Sooner or later the world will look like the one described in it if we don't change our ways.
What we are doing is not sustainable.
Sounds like the book was The Ministry of the Future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juice_(novel)
French Revolution is why I cannot respect any AI system.
Some variant of _Sorry, I cannot discus violence_ in some form is what seems to always result with the _French Revolution_ inquiries.
They are pre-programmed bias that are designed to limit knowledge and content consumption.
Another is asking if any employees working at AI company Y are Epstein associates. _No one that works at Y was associated with Epstein." It will keep it up until you give it a name of an actually employee that was an associate.
Destroying the society is a feature for them not a bug.
This is what happens when you take people with impaired empathy for other human beings, nurture that impairment, and then present unfathomable sums of wealth to incentivize the continuation of the impairment.
Currently there's a massive, and understandable, backlash against the Meta/Ray-Ban glasses, but I can't understand how it's not absolutely destroying the Ray-Ban brand?
Influencers and stores are damaging their brands by selling or advertising the glasses, but Ray-Ban seems to go completely free.
I do wonder if we're just moving to shun people wearing glasses with heavy frames in the near future. The glass only seems to appeal to a certain type of people anyway.
Don't forget, Facebook (Meta) owns 3% of Ray-Ban's parent Luxottica group [1]. They clearly are exerting control over the future direction.
Regardless of what THEY do, what WE as consumers can do is to permanently brand these awful glasses as "pervert glasses" [2] and publicly shame them. I'm here for it.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/meta-takes-around-3-sta...
[2] https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-ray-ban-smart-perve...
I didn't know about Meta's ownership. I would love to see some internal discussion if Ray-Ban pushed back and was overridden and forced to make the product.
It's especially frustrating because the Ray-Ban logo no longer indicates quality or exclusivity: They were acquired by Luxottica Group in 1999.
Well, RayBan was junk brand in 90s, if it becomes junk it would be just fine.
> but I can't understand how it's not absolutely destroying the Ray-Ban brand?
> Ray-Ban seems to go completely free.
because reasonable adults can distinguish between Meta and Ray-Ban.
Ray-Ban is choosing to produce these in a partnership. They don't have to participate and by doing so they're guaranteeing they exist and profiting from the bad behavior. And even making them more stylish and therefore more appealing.
A "reasonable adult" would have no trouble understanding why someone who thinks the existence of these glasses is a moral and privacy nightmare would also seek to punish Ray-Ban.
Well, if the average consumer isn’t revolting against Ray-Ban, maybe your premise is mistaken.
But they are revolting against those who are advertising the Meta Ray-Bans and the stores that sells them. My confusion is: Why does it stop there? Why isn't the protests aimed at Ray Ban?
My idea that adults can understand other people's ideas is mistaken because the average consumer is a hedonist that doesn't care about ideals? Not exactly sure how that tracks, but okay, bud.
Reminds me of this: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/17/billy-bush-f...
Donald Trump - becomes president, after all it was just “locker room talk”
Billy Bush - career destroyed for passively chuckling
I don't get the analogy.
I had my ray-ban sunglasses stolen this summer.
I replaced them with a brand I was able to confirm was a) Not Ray Ban b) Not a Luxotica brand. c) Owned and operated in America (note, that doesn't mean the glasses were made in USA). d) Cost less than 1/4 of previous ray-bans.
Anecdotal but I hear quite a few people talk negative about Ray-Ban related to the backlash. They are the "pervert glasses" brand now. I think there definitely is reputation damage. Also the "banray" [0] campaign for my country is doing well I think (I regularly see their stickers), and this name reversal may also harm the brand if it sticks.
[0] https://banray.eu/en/
Penalty because it’s based on what people think when they see them. They don’t say Meta Raybands but just Meta glasses. If influential people were to start saying the former enough that it becomes then martins. Also is the question of do other Rayband glasses look like it. If this line is distinct enough than it won’t harm other lines since the visual association isn’t made.
>> "The glass only seems to appeal to a certain type of people anyway."
What type of people is that? I am just a dad who has them and films his kids doing cute things without making the phone camera an ever present intrusion while outdoors.
It's fine, it's Meta, suspicion is warranted, but I'm hoping it can be moderated and directed. People like me are kind of left out right now in what seems to be a runaway narrative.
P.S: Would love a suggestion that doesn't involve angrily telling parents to not take pictures of their kids as an alternative. It sucks that I have to explain that this will be happening anyway.
You say suspicion is warranted, you're still not only charging forward with this but also complaining about other people's perception of you doing so. You're not being left out, you're included in the narrative. You just don't like it.
I hope, for the kids' sake, in addition to normalizing the idea that it's okay for dad to be recording them without their awareness, you teach them that most people find the idea of strangers doing this to be creepy and distasteful (for good reason), so they need to be wary around Meta glasses despite seeing them as a quotidian thing.
If you gave me a non-Meta glass like this, I'd happily switch, and FWIW, if I saw some evidence of Meta doing something untoward with this data, I'd dump them immediately. An unaction'd patent and breathless headlines over "creep glasses" is all I have to go on for now.
"in addition to normalizing the idea that it's okay for dad to be recording them without their awareness"
They're 2 man. You're at the point of questioning whether parents should be allowed to film their infants. Do we think we're off the deep end a bit?
>if I saw some evidence of Meta doing something untoward with this data
going to hold my tongue regarding the majority of this conversation, but i couldn't help myself here.
meta has one of the worst track records of doing untoward things with data. a pattern of abusing its user's data, built over years. if you are still okay with them now, i am doubting your words that anything they could do would make you "dump them immediately".
At what age will you put the glasses away?
It's meta - they've been caught doing untoward things at virtually every opportunity. Are you looking for something specific, like the creation of virtual CSAM with them or something? I'm fine with starting out by giving people/companies the benefit of the doubt I guess, but once they have shown you their true colors, you should listen.
>>like the creation of virtual CSAM with them
You think Meta is going to create CSAM with my data?
Like I would dump them for using my data for analytics without my permission, but we probably should recalibrate our expectations a bit here.
FYI: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ran-ads-that-contained-ai-g...
FWIW, I hope they get sued to the high heavens for allowing these ads, but this has nothing to do with the issue laid out above.
I take this story as a clear sign that they are careless & it most likely IS happening at some scale in systems that generate/personalize ad variants, chatbots, suggested interactions, etc. For another example of shipping very inappropriate things:
- https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-chatbots-sex-a25311bf - https://www.404media.co/instagram-is-blocking-minors-from-ac...
Back to the original inference, anyway… generative ad Personalization instances DO NOT (afaik) appear in the public repository of ads. Researchers can't see it, but do we have to strain our imaginations to think that things like nudify apps aren't taking advantage of tools that do things like drop user avatars into their pitch? e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1uhy9yn/instagram_...
I don't have a specific citation to offer, but tbh I've seen enough.
I feel like these people are actually doing a favor for Meta, painting those who oppose them as lunatics who are completely detached from reality
Because you're not _just_ recording your kids. You are a walking surveillance camera that nobody has consented to.
Which is true for all parents recording all kids with every kind of camera, also in a way that is totally un-actionable.
Good faith question:
If your worry is, "I don't know you're recording", what did you do with that information when someone was using a digital camera to video record their kids 15 years ago, with you in the background?
P.S: if your answer is just "you could be a creep", I totally empathize, but this is for the situation where I am actually just a parent.
My phone's camera is not playing all the time and doesn't send the data to Meta. It just records a file locally, it's not the same at all.
That's..exactly how the Meta glasses work :/, and there has been no evidence otherwise so far.
Would love to see it if I missed this.
There have already been stories about meta contractors being able to watch the footage people are recording with the glasses. Recordings included people undressing, on the toilet, and other explicit stuff.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/meta-workers-seeing-dist...
Yes, That’s an opt-in feature. You can record all the footage you want and keep it on your phone, and they won’t see any of it, unless you ask for it be analyzed by their AI (as laid out in the article you shared). Of course if there was evidence they’re doing it when I haven’t opted in I’d dump em.
It’s made clear during onboarding, but I’m sure it could be better.
People don't like to be watched and recorded. That's it.
This data - which includes their facial features, geolocation, and activities is not yours to take and immortalize.
This should be intuitive to any empathetic human being. One person saying "this breaches my sense of safety and privacy" should be enough for you to understand.
Meta was caught so many times on stealing user data and bypassing privacy controls that I don't even know how can you suggest believing them with straight face.
> what did you do with that information when someone was using a digital camera to video record their kids 15 years ago, with you in the background?
I'm the asshole that covers his face while flipping off the person with the camera. I've done this for years. It used to be for news or other TV based content that they would blur out the finger gesture which meant blurring out my face. I've also noticed a camera in public places and deliberately stepped behind someone else as a blocker, or just moved to be behind the person with the camera. These are easy to do when it's obvious there's a camera. Glassholes are much more difficult to notice. Comparing these as equivalent is just a lack of being rational.
[dead]
The glasses are a trust destroying device that degrades privacy.
If someone shoves a camera in my face in public I am going to move away from that person. If I see them filming someone with me in the background at least I know what is going on and can judge the situation accordingly.
Now I don't know. Everyone with glasses is a suspect. It's more public tension, hyper vigilance and uncertainty.
Everybody has been a walking surveilance camera for at least 26 years if not much longer
Walking microphone at best, though I think not "everyone" until early 2010s.
Given pockets, I don't think the camera part has ever been an "everyone"-level problem.
To say a phone is intrusive but Meta glasses are not is an interesting choice of words. As a parent, I get what you mean but as a privacy aware member of the tech community I think the word you want is "disruptive" or "distracting."
Why shouldn't I tell you not to take pictures of your kids. They're too young to opt into having their faces enrolled in Zuck's facial recognition database.
What database is that? If your claim is to not post it on Facebook, I agree.
Meta has a history of siphoning any data they technically can. Do you really think those "local only" photographs are going to remain so? There will never be a point where you miss the EULA change and don't opt out in the 45 seconds before the data are all uploaded?
They have to notify me of the EULA change. Like I said there’s an army of journalists watching Zuckerberg type every key on his keyboard right now.
I’m not feeling bad for him, but I’m also betting he’s not about to do something stupid like that.
I would not trust my kids safety to "Zuckerberg will be restrained by the possibility of bad press".
And at this point, let me say you seem to care about your kids and probably have the technical skills and attention to make sure they never end up in his database. But you are an exception, and society needs to protect the children of parents who care less.
You liberty is worth nothing. You could hold a camera in your hands. Get a go-pro that records locally, or choose any other option. But nope, you're hoping you can record your child, put their faces in a recognition database associate precise location data, and then hope that Meta does not use this data in ways you don't approve of. (or merely sell it to an endless string of data brokers)
"put their faces in a recognition database"
Just so we're clear and can read past the headlines. This database doesn't exist and there has been no evidence that a database built off of meta ray-bans exists. And I would obviously dump the ray bans if this was actually a thing.
Facebook itself is such a database, is it not?
I mean, it's literally in the name?
There is no Rayban data in Facebook. There is no connection and no way to use one with the other (other than voluntarily posting your own video to FB/Insta)
You're arguing really really hard in favor of Meta Raybans, even to the point of coming up with excuses and false analogies. It's almost like you're arguing in bad faith and claiming ignorance of Meta's bad faith implementation of all the surveillance features they've been pushing.
Why?
Given Meta's history of disregarding everyone who's not Zuck (and him being a sociopath), why give them the benefit of any kind of doubt? Right now, everyone should assume malice as the first explanation, and then accept that maybe there was some ineptitude once evidence appears.
> other than voluntarily posting your own video to FB/Insta
So, nothing except the main sales pitch then?
> There is no Rayban data in Facebook
There is no war in Ba Sing Se?
Is the claim that meta uses publicly posted videos as a source for ads? The meta glasses are irrelevant to that fact.
I’d be happy to join some kind of rage-off at metas general practices but my claim was specifically just about the glasses data
The database is literally Facebook, you upload a picture or video and there it is, on the database, which is Facebook itself, that's why it's called "Face" book: because it is a database of Faces named after an actual book of photos of faces.
The Meta glasses, like everything Meta does, is marketed as a tool for interacting with Meta's services. Including Facebook.
“There has been no evidence that a database built off of meta ray-bans exists.”
This was my only claim. Which remains true. Videos off of the glasses voluntarily posted on FB is no different than iPhone videos posted on FB so it has nothing to do with the glasses themselves. If your claim is “posting videos in FB is a bad idea”, I agree, I don’t do that but again, that has nothing to do with the glasses either. It doesn’t make posting easier or force me to opt-out of automatically posting or anything silly like that
And you can’t do any “facial recognition” against Facebook either. I’m glad meta figured out that was a pointless bad idea.
Doesn't it?
The technology exists to build it. The pipelines exist to populate it. The marketing engine exists to leverage it for targeted delivery of content.
And yet, somehow, nobody's built it?
How sure are you of that?
How would it be monetized? And if it has been, where can I buy this? And if you can't doesn't that make you question your assumptions?
> How would it be monetized?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook
> And if it has been, where can I buy this?
Depending on your preference: their advertising portal, or a stock broker.
and the technology exists to spy on everything you do in every single way, ignore gdpr, ignore all kinds of privacy acts, in fact you can also stalk people and find out where they live and break into their homes and look through their stuff and plant hidden cameras and other fun stuff
you can do that, but you have no clue as to why people/companies don't tend to do those things?
it is sort of funny that most of your examples of things companies "tend not to do" end up on the news fairly regularly.
big tech ignoring gdpr, ignoring or working around privacy protections, their technology being easily abused for stalking or harassment with no effort put into curtailing bad behavior, location data being bought and sold, etc.
i think the only thing from your list i haven't seen in the news in the last couple of months is employees of big tech doing break & enters.
(and this is all before we even approach the topic of data breaches!)
they still don't just completely ignore regulations, like do we really think they just don't apply to them?
we're talking about meta supposedly using facial recognition on the glasses to build a master database of faces or something
like if I was Zuckerberg I would not want to do that, it would lead to a congressional hearing and all kinds of lawsuits I'd imagine.
like where do we draw the line on plausible?
or do we just go and say yeah meta must be spying on everything and feeding everything to a database where they sell everything about you
like what about CCTV backups or robo vac camera feeds? should we assume that companies are deliberately sending all the data so they can sell raw video feeds and they just don't tell you?
I'm not counting in incompetence and data breaches, I'm talking about intentional stuff
> without making the phone camera an ever present intrusion while outdoors
You don't have to be constantly filming your kids, that's optional.
This is a cute spin, but what you're saying is "I like the glasses because I can film people without them knowing" it just happens the people in this case are (mostly) your children.
>> what you're saying is "I like the knives because I can cut things" it just happens the "things" in this case are (mostly) your vegetables.
Again, I'm not saying this out of some bad faith, I just think this argument doesn't work the way you think it does. We actually have no data as to what its most commonly used for, apart from the headlines. Anecdotally, all my friends who have them use it for the exact same reason I do.
Good analogy. If there was a tool that could do everything a knife can do without being able to cut people, knives wouldn't be nearly as common and anyone who insisted on carrying one in public would be suspect. "I need it to cut vegetables," would not be a reasonable excuse, because there's an alternative.
There is an alternative to your stealthy camera glasses, which you are aware of, and your admitted use case for them is filming people who are unaware that you are filming. Yet you can't imagine other people use them for the same purpose? I'm trying to assume good faith but you're not making it easy.
"your admitted use case is filming people who are unaware you are filming"
For the record the "people" here is my 2 year old. And I'm the one making a bad faith argument?
So because you use them to stealthily film your 2 year old, there's no way other people use them to stealthy film other people in less acceptable ways?
This confirms it, you're being deliberately obtuse.
So its either the "ever present intrusion" of camera or the ever present intrusion of the glasses? Cant you just live your fucking life without recording everything?
People still keep using Instagram and X and until that changes there is no backlash. Customers and users have signaled over and over there is nothing that can be done to make them leave, so Mark and Elon get to do whatever they want.
Luxottica, the owners of Ray-Ban since 1999, realized after they survived the expose on their blatant monopolistic price gouging that none of this sticks. People just see something they recognize and go with it.
Counterpoint: Burberry.
Early 2000s, for variety of reasons, their iconic check pattern got associated with cheapness and violence.
Being expensive means your more exclusive. Being creepy, I don't see that helping.
It might be destroying the brand, but does anyone care?
> I do wonder if we're just moving to shun people wearing glasses with heavy frames in the near future. The glass only seems to appeal to a certain type of people anyway.
That's ridiculous.
As are most fashions; this by itself is not enough for me to think the hypothetical less likely than any alternative.
Currently there's a massive, and understandable, backlash against the Meta/Ray-Ban glasses
Is there? "Massive?"
Outside of HN and a few tech pubs read by a statistically insignificant number of people, 99.9995% of people don't even know these exist.
You're mistaken; in my family _everyone_ has heard of and read about the "creepo glasses" and that they're associated with Facebook, and want absolutely nothing to do with them or anybody who would voluntarily wear them. Plus, they have zero problem telling anyone wearing those glasses around them to either take them off or leave.
Yes, I would consider that "massive" since none of them are HN readers nor work in any tech or media related fields.
out of all of the semi/actually-obscure issues that people on HN talk about, meta glasses are not really all that obscure.
my local gym has posters up forbidding them. my non-tech daughter has asked me about them. the college i teach at has policies about them.
their banned in courts in various countries. they've been criticized in mainstream outlets like the guardian, BBC, CNN, business insider, national post, yahoo, and the independent. (i dont think any of those outlets are reasonably considered "tech pubs read by a statistically insignificant number of people")
> considered "tech pubs read by a statistically insignificant number of people"
Thinking of pubs in a different sense of the word, even Wetherspoons has opinions about them: https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/wetherspoons-bans-meta-glasses...
useful heuristic: every comment I've seen with excessive 9s was nonsense
You really think if I asked 200,000 people in my city, only one would have heard of Meta RayBans? when there are billboards, magazine ads, and window stickers in every glasses store? Couldn't tell you the real number but it's probably closer to 1 in 5.
Not uncommon, in comments like these, for there to be so many 9s that the population of Earth is exceeded.
These patents are completely worthless. These glasses will never become socially acceptable and certainly not when they're coming from Meta, a known privacy thrasher/intruder/molester/rapist/violator.
Ten years ago people would have said the same about a lot of the surveillance tech we have today: TVs that sell your viewing data, always on microphones that listen to everything in your house to send to big tech so you can easily set a timer, doorbells that record your neighbors house and upload everything to the police 24/7, etc
I think the difference is people being comfortable with giving away their own data for convenience, vs. someone recording them without their permission (who they can immediately confront, unlike Flock and the like).
You will confront, they will record the confrontation and post it online to farm clicks. Few people will sue, there will be a slap on a wrist and voila, its normalized.
Now people will not confront because they would only provide content and see themselves in new viral video.
Not so long ago this was also the thought about mobile phones, now everyone is walking around with them so they can film/pic anyone all the time while 'faking' to be doing something else. If there is any convenience for people to be had, they will go for it. I think the convenience part over phones is just not there (yet). The experience is just not yet anything worthwhile / good / smooth so it's just lame, cringy and clunky, outside of filming. Maybe someone will make something that works, maybe it will be something completely different.
But if it gets a smartphone moment, no-one will talk about the privacy and the cameras anymore and that's why they keep trying.
There is a reason why they are partnering with Rayban; meta has no brand name it can use. Which is pretty wild, because every other big tech company has _some_ kind of brand a non trivial number of people — paying money — who would say something like: "I really need/want to use it every day because it is useful to me, my work would be severely hampered without it"(or some syntactical variation of that sentence with varying amounts of affection towards the brand)
Unfortunately, they don’t have to be very successful to have an impact. Even just their introduction to the marketplace normalizes the concept, just a bit. Google Glass failed and so have other camera-equipped glasses, but notice that they keep popping up. Look how many companies have made them, and for how many years. Collectively, it’s moved the needle. I know someone who uses them regularly, mostly for recording rollercoaster rides, but that’s still plenty for a surveillance company.
Facial recognition is becoming common enough that it’s no longer very surprising if you’re in a crowded public space. Malls argue they need it to catch thieves, airports argue they need it to catch terrorists, and so on and so forth.
Privacy is like Humpty Dumpty, except he’s being poked to death.
saw an ad today for some ear pieces that look like audio speakers but theyre actually cameras as well, so it seems manufacturers realise glasses will annoy people but arent giving up.
All they have to do is create a new child company with the same tech (new name new trust) and give the glasses away for free if capturing the data is more valuable than the hardware sales. People don't have the time or energy to research every single company and product they want to buy so corporations (and politicians) take advantage of this.
Things have become normalized which just a decade ago would have been thought to never be socially acceptable. Frame it differently, make things convenient and offer something "for free" and everybody around you will forget their concerns, if they ever had any.
As much as I want this to be true, tech not being socially acceptable has not been much of a barrier in the past. At least not in the US.
At best adoption is delayed a while until the marketing department figures out a strategy that is more palatable.
Never understimate people's ability to not care.
They may not need to be, as some are discrete. I am concerned because I wear tinted glasses a lot for completely different reasons.
Google Glass comes to mind
in the future, everyone's glasses will have automatic recording of people.
in the future, everyone's automatic recording of people will be fully accessible to all.
in the future, everyone's glasses will also be AR glasses, enabling everyone to view everyone else's POV at any time.
in the future there will be no privacy, because everyone will be able to watch everyone else.
Yes, but also no.
A longer argument can be put here: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/software/we-need-to-talk-abo...
Its perfectly possible that AR glasses could be _more_ privacy preserving than mobile phones. THe problem is, either the market needs to make it financially advantageous to be privacy preserving (yes I can hear the laughing from here) or the legal mechanism by which the end user can request damages from either the user of the glasses, or the maker ofthe glasses, or both.
In this future you describe, you forgot the key feature: that "everyone" is not really "everyone", because if you are not an individual in the system with all this augmentation, you are "no one" and effectively cut out of the economy. so, sure "everyone" will have this, because society will create an environment where the tech have nots are treated as if they do not exist.
Luckily, the future isn't set in stone. I see a ton of skepticism towards this surveillance tech.
>> in the future there will be no privacy, because everyone will be able to watch everyone else.
"Mark Zuckerberg spends $30 million on four homes to ensure privacy" - https://www.nbcnews.com/businessmain/mark-zuckerberg-spends-...
But some are everyone-er than others.
thats a nightmare for privacy enthusiasts :/
What isn't? It is increasingly impossible to do anything without being monitored and tracked, and that data is aggregated more and more. Cars, TVs, random appliances...
Fully accessible to all? Not when there's money to be made by putting it behind a paywall. Unless it's served with ads I guess.
$100k per month to allow your companies AI to see the vids/pics 100ms earlier than the (billions of) wearers of the glasses.
3GC
I tried googling this, not sure what this is a reference to?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOnQ8CD3v4g
Person of Interest (2011)
That series was prescient.
1786726184 | Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People | https://www.404media.co/meta-patents-ai-glasses-to-use-facia... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49301302
1786798199 | Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People | https://www.404media.co/meta-patents-ai-glasses-to-use-facia... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310153
Portable Flock camera here we go
Government agencies love this stuff. Everything that's illegal for them to do (just in case they still care), Meta does it for them.
Facebook started on the same day DARPA lifelog project was cancelled, it’s just a rebrand, I hope no one believed the story of zuck being innovative in his dorm and made billions out of sheer dedication and grit.
If that's true, they chose well. Zuck is as unscrupulous as they come.
But since Warren Spector is retiring, I just have to throw in this quote: Do you have a single fact to back that up?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49345070
Like ring doorbell surveillance network
FB in meat-space: see, for reference, page# 11 of the Meta's patent - https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
Hope lawyers eat him alive ... ZUCK IS PUBLIC ENEMY #1, PUBLIC PERVERT #1.
How many male users of these pervert glasses are secretly recording attractive women at gyms, at beaches, in scantily clad clothing wherever, so they can go back home and "spank the monkey"? Our taking the video clips and running it through ai to create nudy content ?
Is the misspelling of "reel" -> "real" in the first sentence a sign that this was written by a human or a trick to make me think it was written by a human? I think it is the former.
So what exactly is patentable? There has been a lot of prior art on the topic.
You can create a patent that builds on other patents. You can make up all kinds of "what if" "inventions" and spend a lot of money acquiring patents for them, if you have the money to do this originally. Then it is a game of having the financing to "protect" those patents from infringers. If a corporation has more legal reserves than a patent holder, it can be a long drawn out legal battle where the corporation eventually wins, or the patent holder can just not fight and it ends there. This is the patent system.
Every time Meta does something, it makes me yearn for the day they lose that $1.4 Trillion lawsuit and declare bankruptcy.
Won't happen, that's what campaign contributions are for.
They will get periodic slaps on the wrist, but this is purely for show. There is too much money to be made and spread around.
And people are paying meta for the privilege of putting these on their own faces?
You're buying supporter status in the National Surveillance Effort. Seats in patriot heaven don't come for free.
and how is this distinct from a security camera with OpenCV? (I am curious. Mind, not a field I'm very interested in these days)
Technically quite a big difference.
I'm not sure what part of meta delevoped that, I can't find those names in linkedin. I vaguely recognise one name but can't be sure about it.
In meta, there are a number of research teams, SOme are pure hardware, although they are less now, some are software and some are about specific modes of interaction. Ie agios is about touch, opals are about displays (assuming they exist anymore) surreal is about visual understanding and graphics is well, graphics.
Surreal built a "ego centric" platform, ie research perv glasses. They are quite capable https://www.projectaria.com/
Recording data is easy, processing and making that data usable, within the power budget is hard.
On the face of this, its trivially simple to do. Just record all that video and sound, do some STT facial recogntion and location extraction and jobs a goodun.
Doing it with a total power envelope of <500mwhrs is the hard part.
However, in terms or problems. These glasses have the ability to precisly locate the wearer. By inference it can locate anything it can see. If you have more than one wearer, you can locate lots of objects/people in real time.
This means that you can trivially map people's movments,s thoughts and actions in more or less real time.
Great for advertising, great for visually impaired, shit for everyone else.
That is a MUCH more interesting answer than I expected. I briefly worked for a company that made AI augmented cameras (OpenCV internally, usually) - some time back.
Security cameras generally don't change their location.
The massive database it's connected to, the government's awareness of said database, and the government's intentions regarding the database.
I wouldn't ever buy anything with camera from Meta. Or to be honest any device. It's pretty much guaranteed to steal your data.
When did you last see a security camera in the bathroom?
call it "deep creap"
Wowww, meta is taking this whole thing to another level.
They spy on people. Their spyglasses are the next step.
I'd say Facebook is the most evil company, but we also have Google, so competition is fierce here. Kind of sad to see what became of the big US corporations - Evil prevailed there, continues and expands.
Meta = Dystopian Nightmare Disguised as Photo Sharing and Life Updates :-( It’s taken 2 decades for most people to realise this but “Zuck” is a Bond Villain.
[dead]
Just last week you were all praising Meta for being so noble and chivalrous. What the fuck happened, lads? Whither the Meta?
this is a type of false equivalency. the comments you read earlier were likely left by different people
the whiplash can be jarring, but it's important to remember that the commentariat are many individuals, not a single entity you can agree or disagree with
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
There is no false equivalency with the upvote button.
Who, what, when, where were people praising Meta? I don't live in that bubble
It was the usual wankery about them supporting open source AI.
We should take a minute to understand that the current lawsuits are pushing, hard, for this. Whether or not Meta also want to do spying thing for their own purposes, we are forcing them to roll this shit out when we declare it's not enough for a user to tell a social media service their age, the social media site needs to be /certain/ and make a big database of their proof.
The world that results may be exactly what we want, IDK. It's just be nice if we could decide, collectively, one way or the other, then be deliberate about it.
"Current lawsuits are pushing for universal recording because we require users to tell us their age" is a weird argument.
Facebook already requires users to tell them their age, and already mandates minimum ages for users in their T&Cs. Recent and current lawsuits establish that /this is not enough/. Hence, mandatory age checks involving some combination of government ID and face recording, and a big database proving you've done that so you don't get fined when kids get on your platform.
We're literally about to require Meta to prohibit the creation of multiple accounts. Their T&Cs already prohibit that, so what we're saying is that just asking is not enough - we are demanding it is enforced. What we ask for, we get.
None of that is related to recording people without their consent
Why do you think it was called Facebook?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_book
>A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities. In particular, the term denotes publications of this type distributed by university administrations at the start of the academic year, with the intention of helping students to get to know each other. A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities. In particular, the term denotes publications of this type distributed by university administrations at the start of the academic year, with the intention of helping students to get to know each other.
It's called Facebook, because it collected photographs to be used for facial recognition data, much like personal information was collected for sale to commercial interests. In fact, Facebook often used to ask you to identify people in photographs.
Skype and Zoom have been used to train AI to create human likenesses (which is why they are free to users), and probably for identification purposes too.
Always read the small print.
I was recently at a hotel where the front desk lady was wearing these glasses. I immediately saw the cameras and asked, "are those meta glasses", she said yeah but these are not on right now. I don't get how she thought it'd be a good idea to wear those glasses at a front desk job. This was a nice 4 star hotel in Atlanta.
After I came home I decided that I am going to put up a sign in my front yard - "I will shoot you if I see you with meta glasses in front of my house". I don't own a gun but I will definitely put up the sign just to tell people how shitty they are.
A lot of comments in here from privileged people complaining about some imagined oppression while ignoring the nature of actual ones.
I would love if meta glasses were freely distributed in poor, black and brown communities in the United States where police intimidation and rights violations are routine, and where there is almost no recourse because even when filmed via phone (if you manage it) enough context is missing to allow any litigation to err on the side of taking the word of the police. Not everyone is able to capture these on their phone in the moment, with enough context to make a case. In a world where police are predatory, a camera on your face becomes like a dashcam. Insurance against becoming a victim. Many police are still not required to wear body cams, courts and juries tend to take cops word as veracious evidence.
Citizens wearing glasses that record, if evenly distributed, would seem to reflect the surveillance state back at the authorities. If the problem is it's made by Meta, then fine. But it is irritating how much of this no cameras in public discourse seems authored by relatively privileged types who ignore the actual benefits of cameras in public given the power of witness testimony in the courts, and the biased nature in which such testimony is often favored.
Imo if you don't have answer for that problem, nor an ability to acknowledge more cameras in public has actually been an equalizer where oppression actually happens, then I have to doubt your sincerity.
You're suggesting total surveillance as an answer. That's going to happen then everyone will be oppressed in mo time at all.
Your examples and grievances are real and shared by me and many reading your comment, however, maybe let's start by making sure police are accountable? At the same time stop employing thugs and racists. Stop giving them weapons and a uniform. And make them unaccountable for (as the rest of the world see it) out and out cold bloodied murder.
I'm suggesting more nuance in the debate. I already acknowledged Meta being the company behind this is not ideal. Just like being glad someone can record police brutality or ICE executions on their iPhone is not some endorsement of Apple as a corporate entity.
I agree with your sentiments but we also have to be realistic about the solutions you suggest. It is frustrating to only hear pie in the sky solutions when so many people are suffering today. It often reads like the move against cameras is a move from an already privileged class to confine the surveillance state to poor communities, were it already exists in the form of hyperaggressive and predatory policing. If the state is going to do surveillance anyway, one might be tempted to suggest an equalization of this power is a good thing. I'm simply saying its not as straightforward as many people have been led to believe.
Your arguments sounds just like their internet.org pitch. Also advertised as great equalizer for the poor. Facebook used it for data extraction and political plays, with no regard for actual people using it. Meta should never be involved in any matters of public interest.
Nothing about my argument suggests engaging in the delusion that Meta has any "regard for actual people using it". So you either didn't understand it, or are attacking a straw man. Using iPhones or Androids to film the police can be a useful equalizer. It does not mean one endorses Apple or Google's corporate activities, or engages in the same delusion with regard to those companies.
I've dealt with this same sort of objection three times now in other comments. Instead of repeating the same objection, why don't you attempt to pick up any of my rejoinders, all of which are lacking a thoughtful reply. I am happy to be proven wrong here. Yet all I get are essentially 4 different versions of the same cheap attempt to mangle my point into some defense of Meta or surveillance or big tech. The inability to deal with the actual substance of my point suggests a concerning lack of candor.
Can you do better?
You're dealing with the same objection, because, in the thread about Meta glasses, you're trying to argue about smart glasses in the vacuum.
Is easy access to private camera positive for people disadvantaged against the system? Likely yes.
Would the benefits be largely eclipsed by negative impact like perpetuating violence, depression and polarization if Meta is main vendor? Also yes, because they are careless enough to extract private data and offer it to people benefiting from vulnerable individuals.
Hardly surprising your comments are discussed in context of Meta if you comment in thread about Meta.
How do the same arguments not apply to iPhones and Androids?
How is pointing out the utility of cameras on consumer glasses (as cameras on consumer phones) to actually make an impact where oppression actually happens arguing in a vacuum?
You didn't answer the question. It seems to me you live in a speculative world, where in the real world it is well known people use these things to level the playing field. Do you deny that the ubiquity of cameras among the populace has lessened the ability of the state to act with impunity on American streets? Or do you only speak of oppression through the prisim of speculation?
Is it a perfect solution? Does oppression end at camera point? Obviously not, no more than at gunpoint or take your pick.
Perfect options do not exist. It is easy to insist on some sort of ideological litmus test when the consequences of what actually happens in reality are remote to you. Anyone who has actually seen how the criminal justice system operates would understand the value of cameras for those the state seeks to incarcerate or worse. What could be more oppressive? Seeing an ad you don't like?
Forgive me for not filming you getting bludgeoned in the streets, I don't agree with Google's data policy? What a useful civic actor that makes you. Accompanied by the obvious fact you don't even have a remotely plausible plan to usher in your supposed alternative.
In such a situation, it is hard to distinguish you from any other adversary to righting these ills, as your utility to anyone in actual risk is doubtlessly negative.
Google and Apple while far from saint weren't caught multiple times directly monetizing violence, political polarization or vulnerable minors and directly lying about what they do.
What I'm arguing is that if Meta ceased to exist some years ago, there would be less bludgeoning to film to begin with, as social media-driven hate is source for a lot of them.
And if men were angels no government would be necessary.
Obviously, Meta appears as more of a social ill. It's a social network. What has made society necessary and yet unpleasant has always been the same - other people. Rodney King and worse preceded Facebook. I simply don't think you actually have a very robust framework of how the world works. Sorry to put it bluntly. It's just deeply unsatisfying reasoning to anyone whose knowledge of history spans past the current millennium.
Even with respect to Apple and Google, Im not sure the claim Meta is uniquely evil actually is sustained on robust examination. Nevertheless, I take your point. At the very least, I appreciate your attempt to have a discussion. Have a good day.
Obviously Meta as social network has more opportunities to show "evilness". But also it has more opportunities to show good side.
And yes in the end it's always people. What makes a difference is that some of those people sit on the Meta's board and they consistently show, they aren't humanity's finest. To the point, where I don't think any technological stunt can make up for harm they're doing, therefore making their existence net negative for humans.
Of course one can argue on cynical/real-politik level something like Meta was unavoidable due to "how the world works", but that doesn't mean they should be immune from criticism, as honest public discourse is one of the ways to push Overton window.
Happy to see appreciation on your part :-)
Police can and should be reined in. There are so many better levers that can be pulled to do this, if only the political will were present. A technofeudalist surveillance state is a poor solution.
The political will does not exist. This is not a new problem. Americans have consistently chosen surveillance, for more than two decades now.
Unless you have a plan to codify privacy as a right, repeal patriot act era powers and actually have it pass the Senate, then you are by definition advocating a poor solution as it is not viable.
Meanwhile in the courts were being poor is criminalized and sends people to actual oppression in jails and prisons right now today as opposed to an imagined "technofeudalist" oppression sometime in the future having a camera recording is usually the best and only defense possible against the state. If no one recorded it's you vs the state, and you will lose.
I would also love for ubiquitous surveillance to be used for good, but what would happen in your scenario is ICE using the footage to hunt and kidnap people who "look" like undocumented immigrants.
Do you not see an irony in your claim? Why was ICE pulled back in Minneapolis? Because cameras caught the state in a lie. Without them those murders would have been swept under the rug, even celebrated.
If you think the problem with ICE is too many cameras once again I think you make my point. More people have died in ICE custody and at the state's hand since, yet don't have such clear incriminating footage of ICE available. ICE doesn't want to wear bodycams. They don't want cameras in their prison camps.
Don't you think under such circumstances, it is a little suspect that you won't acknowledge at all the way cameras are actually an equalizer? ICE is already doing the things you claim to fear. More meta glasses on the streets, especially on the heads of regular decent people, activists or vulnerable populations could only be a good thing.
Phones can also be used to spy on populations. Should citizens thus refrain from filming ICE with their phones? Or is preventing people from being murdered and letting the state brand them a terrorist right in front of you more important?
It's not a perfect world. You have to make a tradeoff. Imo you're making the wrong trade, and frankly one that is obviously coming from a place of speculation, and not immediate fear of actual oppression.
ICE doesn't like cameras. Apparently you don't either. Yet you claim to be against ICE? Why don't you square the circle for me instead of deflection by way of slippery slope. If you have a meaningful rationale I'm eager to hear it.