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.
No 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.
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
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.
>> "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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
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.
No 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.
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
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.
Well, RayBan was junk brand in 90s, if it becomes junk it would be just fine.
>> "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.
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.
Everybody has been a walking surveilance camera for at least 26 years if not much longer
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
[0] https://banray.eu/en/
It's especially frustrating because the Ray-Ban logo no longer indicates quality or exclusivity: They were acquired by Luxottica Group in 1999.
> 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.
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.
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.
Luckily, the future isn't set in stone. I see a ton of skepticism towards this surveillance tech.
But some are everyone-er than others.
thats a nightmare for privacy enthusiasts :/
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 get allow your companies AI to see the vids/pics 100ms earlier than the wearer of the glasses.
3GC
>> 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-...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOnQ8CD3v4g
Person of Interest (2011)
That series was prescient.
FB in meat-space: see, for reference, page# 11 of the Meta's patent - https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...
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.
Like ring doorbell surveillance network
Every time Meta does something, it makes me yearn for the day they lose that $1.4 Trillion lawsuit and declare bankruptcy.
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.
When did you last see a security camera in the bathroom?
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.
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
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.
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.
[delayed]
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.