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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>> "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 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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
https://www.engadget.com/2187824/wired-found-code-for-an-unr...
Anyway, an important topic to read about if you want to be a member of a free, democratic society.
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.
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.
> Ray-Ban seems to go completely free.
because reasonable adults can distinguish between Meta and Ray-Ban.
Donald Trump - becomes president, after all it was just “locker room talk”
Billy Bush - career destroyed for passively chuckling
[0] https://banray.eu/en/
That's ridiculous.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Would love to see it if I missed this.
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.
"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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
"Mark Zuckerberg spends $30 million on four homes to ensure privacy" - https://www.nbcnews.com/businessmain/mark-zuckerberg-spends-...
Person of Interest (2011)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.