Dunno why I remembered "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Basically, you had fine-grained control over what others perceived of you.
Your friends can see you completely, while strangers can only see a blur.
Makes me think of a Black Mirror episode where similar technology ends up with unlucky/unwanted people becoming inaudible blurs in perception of everyone.
As digital dystopias go, this is one of the worst I've seen; the episode ending with this happening to the protagonist shook me to the core.
I... don't know how I feel about this. I mean, the concept, sure, good idea. Is it reliable? Perhaps. But... I get a "buy merch" popup the moment I open the page, and there seems to be a pro option for what seems to be a very much LLM-aided app? ...IDK, rubs off a bit wrong IMO. Just my personal opinion.
Reading this inspired me that it would be nice if there were a do-not-film-me standard: your mobile phone sends out a do-not-film-me request with a (rotating) hash of your facial biometrics via Bluetooth. All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.
Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.
Police unions would love for cameras to standardize on that.
There was an article on HN that one city's police force, when there were protests going on, took to playing Disney songs from loudspeakers; so that any recording of their interactions would be impossible to publish on any significant internet platform (or at least, the audio would be muted, by IP protection filters).
I bet Disney's lawyers can squeeze a lot more money out of municipalities for playing the music publicly in the first place than they can out of random citizens who are uploading to Youtube.
There's no human to appeal to in social media platforms. It's automated, algorithmic enforcement; and when it's wrong (or someone exploits it to be wrong, like this), you're powerless to do anything. It means nothing if you're technically in the legal right: the platforms are risk-averse and don't care about your false positive.
You’re right. Tech companies will surprise us all and suddenly start obeying the DMCA to the letter instead of just taking the shortcut of “rights holders upload content, it’s fingerprinted, user content that matches fingerprint is taken down”. Then, we’ll link arms and sing kumbaya.
Theoretically, yes, absolutely. Practically, no, they would be taken down by automatic filters and you'd have to be willing to face Disney's lawyers to try to get them reinstated.
This has never once prevented a DMCA notice from being issued, and I'm sure you can guess how easy it is to get a person at YouTube to review your appeal
its basically equivalent of them punching you in the face and running away. Yeah you're right and they're wrong, but what would you do about that and your nose is bleeding. Nasty tactics.
> All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.
that requires too much goodwill and effort from the makers of such devices. They know their audience wouldn't want that. They don't give a shit about what people being filmed think.
Think about it some more. It's all fun and games, until same technology is used against you. There was literally a Black Mirror episode about this very thing.
Yes. And an app could render the same thing on your screen via the same tech currently used to robustly watermark generative AI image output, and now not only you won't be able to screenshot the app, you also won't be able to take a photo of it with another device, and on the off chance you found some pre-202X camera that still could, no other computer would display the resulting photo either.
Yes, let's keep coming with more of these great ideas.
To cut this short: the whole overall idea is just universal DRM writ large. A big, principled no fucking way, ever from me.
But what about the personal privacy / venue rights ...
That's a social problem, it should not be used as excuse to give unilateral control over other people's technology to groups or individuals with special interests.
Not too dissimilar to the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas" where you can block other people in real life. Except in this case it's glasses and in Black Mirror retinal implants. We're getting there.
Technical and legal norms are implementation of social norms. “obviously everybody knows that you are supposed to do it that way” doesnt hold up well at court, or during an argument about any decision that costs big bucks.
Wasn't there a "standard" that phones in south kora had to make a shutter noise when you took a picture because they had such a huge problem with men doing up the skirt photos of strangers?
Not sure why you think social norms are positive. Negative amoral behaviors can become norms. I'd argue the west has tons of amoral behavior that is normalized.
Not sure about the noise, but Japan did something likr it with a constant light when the device was recording. I believe it was combatting the same kind of issues though.
Sounds like a swift way to be included in "Need constant observation" list.
Or we can even build a special surveillance for such folks along with plausible Parallel construction scenario constantly refreshed.
The tricky part is that social peer pressure requires a lack of anonymity - not just in terms of detecting whether people are recording without consent at the time - but also the posting of content online.
The lines blur between actively taking photos and passively recording for augmented reality, AI assistance, etc. People might not be aware that they record. This standard would also be useful to extend to robots. For example if you visit friends who have a roomba [1].
If we have to come up with a technological solution to grant anonymity when people are filming, criminals can use it.
If we as a society don't go around filming everyone all the time, we don't need that technical solution available, so we can film the criminals when they are doing something criminal.
Humans adapt and will always break the rules, but that’s not something that can be solved with tech. Think: prohibition vs public anti smoking campaigns/healthcare support/and then increasing prices
As much as I despise Meta and concerned about privacy, I’ve not found anything better for recording snippets of my glider flights than the Meta glasses.
I don’t post them anywhere (except occasionally to friends or family in direct messages).
I fly club gliders and can’t really attach a camera easily. And in any case the PoV is a useful learning tool. I can check I was doing lookout properly, I can see the instruments clearly and so forth.
I have a second pair of normal glasses that I always swap to when I’m back on the ground.
First they filmed the celebrities, then the politicians, then the cops, then came the ring cameras. It was a slow erosion over decades, the justification drifting from "they are a public figure" to "they are standing near me"
I never knew why the paparazzi could harass celebrities and a few decades later we are all being secretly filmed for a Meta perv database.
A major factor is that the companies pushing for this technology are spending significant resources into making sure your consent isn't relevant. From this article [1] about Meta and smart glasses:
> Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns. Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.
> (…) The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. (…) Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
> We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns
And if there's no dynamic political environment or fitting concerns to steal focus at hand, we'll sure as hell fund their creation.
So google can already figure out if you're being followed by an air tag, why can't they natively scan Bluetooth for smart glasses and do what zuckoff does without a third party app?
the demo video really looks ai generated — several weird artifacts, but what bugs me the most is that at the end the alleged glasses-wearer goes through two men between whom clearly there is no space for a third person.
The live music image in their collage is hilarious: it's blurring the backs of people's heads, and presumably blurs the faces of the band, as how would it know the difference
Eta: and in their demo video there's a person walking by who's face doesn't get blurred lmao. Bang up job, Claude
Seems this is a well branded slop app and there's other options, but I support anything to shame these out of the public. Genuinely if it made my phone blare a max volume alarm that called it out I would use it
I would bet my money that there's a dozen lawyers at work, right now, in Meta's HQ, to get a sense of what options they have to harass, shut down, or do something else to the creator of this app. And I would also bet that Zuck is furious about it.
I can't claim to know more than you; but I think I know enough about corporate america and Meta and Zuck that the idea of multiple lawyers, instead of just one, is at least plausible.
You'd be surprised. They banned Christopher Wylie from Facebook. People routinely report their entire team (building some product for Facebook) getting their accounts banned
Zuckerberg takes things personally. It's his entire history
Somewhere deep in the central European woods, a lonely dev fights for his life, against a dead man switch. Accidentally, a NATO drone flattened his house into glass a week ago. Now, he evades drones, rabid lawyers, train accidents, Starlink honey traps, sudden internet blackouts of unknown origin, regular honey traps, poisoned whiskey, social media bans and dowvotes ...
... if you can find him, you can hire him, and restore privacy and sanity to your apps. he is ... the ZuckOff dev.-
Anyone can get a $5 bluetooth-capable ESP32 and set its bluetooth mac to one in the range used by smart glasses. Not sure why you'd do that though.
The other direction is trickier. You'd have to modify the firmware of the smart glasses to set a different mac, or at least gain arbitrary code execution with hardware access. That's well beyond what the average smart glass user will do
And at that point, it'd be mostly about the heads-up display anyways. Somebody who is determined to record you without your knowledge has far easier paths available to them. Just get one of those lighters or ear-rings or car key fobs with built-in camera
I think this will go like this:
- Resistance. People don't like being "secretly" filmed.
- Most people will realise it does not affect their lives.
- People will ignore it
- New generation will accept as something normal to do. Everyone recording everyone.
Not sure why you'd use this sketchy vibecoded proprietary app over the same thing that's open source and existed for a while
https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses
Unless you're selling to grandparents over 50-70, nobody says yj_nearbyclasses or "Nearby Glasses".
"ZuckOff" is a better quality marketing name for an app like this, vibecoded or not.
The media have talked more about "ZuckOff" than "Nearby Glasses" so a winner has already been chosen.
Dunno why I remembered "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi. Basically, you had fine-grained control over what others perceived of you. Your friends can see you completely, while strangers can only see a blur.
It was an amazing book.
Thanks for the book recom.
BTW, I will also recommend 'a hero of our time' by Lermontov. In it, you will get an updated view of what the meaning of 'friends' will be. :)
Makes me think of a Black Mirror episode where similar technology ends up with unlucky/unwanted people becoming inaudible blurs in perception of everyone.
As digital dystopias go, this is one of the worst I've seen; the episode ending with this happening to the protagonist shook me to the core.
There was a Black Mirror episode called White Christmas with similar concept.
I... don't know how I feel about this. I mean, the concept, sure, good idea. Is it reliable? Perhaps. But... I get a "buy merch" popup the moment I open the page, and there seems to be a pro option for what seems to be a very much LLM-aided app? ...IDK, rubs off a bit wrong IMO. Just my personal opinion.
The nearby glasses app linked in this thread seems to be a lovingly hand coded tool to detect Meta glasses.
Reading this inspired me that it would be nice if there were a do-not-film-me standard: your mobile phone sends out a do-not-film-me request with a (rotating) hash of your facial biometrics via Bluetooth. All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.
Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.
Police unions would love for cameras to standardize on that.
There was an article on HN that one city's police force, when there were protests going on, took to playing Disney songs from loudspeakers; so that any recording of their interactions would be impossible to publish on any significant internet platform (or at least, the audio would be muted, by IP protection filters).
Did the police have the appropriate license to play those disney songs in a public space?
I bet Disney's lawyers can squeeze a lot more money out of municipalities for playing the music publicly in the first place than they can out of random citizens who are uploading to Youtube.
Im guessing the intention wasn’t that Disney would actually sue them in court but just getting it blocked automatically in YouTube, etc
Wouldn't that be covered by fair use?
Nobody who loves Disney songs would listen to them while also hearing police officers shouting, etc.
> "Wouldn't that be covered by fair use?"
There's no human to appeal to in social media platforms. It's automated, algorithmic enforcement; and when it's wrong (or someone exploits it to be wrong, like this), you're powerless to do anything. It means nothing if you're technically in the legal right: the platforms are risk-averse and don't care about your false positive.
You’re right. Tech companies will surprise us all and suddenly start obeying the DMCA to the letter instead of just taking the shortcut of “rights holders upload content, it’s fingerprinted, user content that matches fingerprint is taken down”. Then, we’ll link arms and sing kumbaya.
Just to note, you can keep the data on French servers as they are a Offshore/DMCA Ignore country.
Theoretically, yes, absolutely. Practically, no, they would be taken down by automatic filters and you'd have to be willing to face Disney's lawyers to try to get them reinstated.
> Wouldn't that be covered by fair use?
This has never once prevented a DMCA notice from being issued, and I'm sure you can guess how easy it is to get a person at YouTube to review your appeal
That’s an admission of guilt by the police, right there. If you have nothing to hide… etc.
“We’ve got ‘em now!”. This’ll be police brutality’s great undoing.
Wouldn't that constitute a public performance of copyrighted material? The police themselves could be DMCAed. Haha
its basically equivalent of them punching you in the face and running away. Yeah you're right and they're wrong, but what would you do about that and your nose is bleeding. Nasty tactics.
Not DMCA, but yes, that would definitely open them to a lawsuit for unlicensed performance.
> All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.
that requires too much goodwill and effort from the makers of such devices. They know their audience wouldn't want that. They don't give a shit about what people being filmed think.
Nor should they.
Think about it some more. It's all fun and games, until same technology is used against you. There was literally a Black Mirror episode about this very thing.
Culture/social pressures work better than purely technical solutions
Yes. And an app could render the same thing on your screen via the same tech currently used to robustly watermark generative AI image output, and now not only you won't be able to screenshot the app, you also won't be able to take a photo of it with another device, and on the off chance you found some pre-202X camera that still could, no other computer would display the resulting photo either.
Yes, let's keep coming with more of these great ideas.
To cut this short: the whole overall idea is just universal DRM writ large. A big, principled no fucking way, ever from me.
But what about the personal privacy / venue rights ...
That's a social problem, it should not be used as excuse to give unilateral control over other people's technology to groups or individuals with special interests.
Not too dissimilar to the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas" where you can block other people in real life. Except in this case it's glasses and in Black Mirror retinal implants. We're getting there.
Why do we need a standard for something that should socially be the norm?
Because some people would still smoke in restaurants and airplanes if left to their own devices.
Technical and legal norms are implementation of social norms. “obviously everybody knows that you are supposed to do it that way” doesnt hold up well at court, or during an argument about any decision that costs big bucks.
Wasn't there a "standard" that phones in south kora had to make a shutter noise when you took a picture because they had such a huge problem with men doing up the skirt photos of strangers?
Not sure why you think social norms are positive. Negative amoral behaviors can become norms. I'd argue the west has tons of amoral behavior that is normalized.
Not sure about the noise, but Japan did something likr it with a constant light when the device was recording. I believe it was combatting the same kind of issues though.
This. Absolutely this.
Explains a lot about why people vote for racist and right wing parties.
Why do we need laws against stealing bikes?
(Yes, example chosen for its reputation for indifferent enforcement.)
> hash of your facial biometrics via Bluetooth
Sounds like a swift way to be included in "Need constant observation" list. Or we can even build a special surveillance for such folks along with plausible Parallel construction scenario constantly refreshed.
Why not make filming opt-in rather than opt-out?
How do you opt out when someone rocks up to the restaurant you are in or the publoc restroom wearing these?
there was a black mirror episode on something similar IIRC
These are social problems not technology problems.
We want a society that does not need these workarounds.
Indeed.
The tricky part is that social peer pressure requires a lack of anonymity - not just in terms of detecting whether people are recording without consent at the time - but also the posting of content online.
Naming and shaming requires names.
The lines blur between actively taking photos and passively recording for augmented reality, AI assistance, etc. People might not be aware that they record. This standard would also be useful to extend to robots. For example if you visit friends who have a roomba [1].
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
Which won't happen as criminals will never want themselves filmed and they are the ones you want to film to make society better and protect yourself.
Haven't you got that the wrong way around?
If we have to come up with a technological solution to grant anonymity when people are filming, criminals can use it.
If we as a society don't go around filming everyone all the time, we don't need that technical solution available, so we can film the criminals when they are doing something criminal.
You can't trust humans to follow the rules. They break rules all the time. Look at the HN community.
Humans adapt and will always break the rules, but that’s not something that can be solved with tech. Think: prohibition vs public anti smoking campaigns/healthcare support/and then increasing prices
We also want a society that is less greedy but that will never happen.
Been around for ages for Android as "Nearby Glasses" app
I hope the Microsoft marketing dept is paying attention, because ZuckOff is amazing branding.
Instead of Copilot for Counter Spying, or Anti-Creeper.NET.
As much as I despise Meta and concerned about privacy, I’ve not found anything better for recording snippets of my glider flights than the Meta glasses.
I don’t post them anywhere (except occasionally to friends or family in direct messages).
I fly club gliders and can’t really attach a camera easily. And in any case the PoV is a useful learning tool. I can check I was doing lookout properly, I can see the instruments clearly and so forth.
I have a second pair of normal glasses that I always swap to when I’m back on the ground.
cool solution to a problem that shouldnt even exist I'd say. how did it become ok to be recorded at all times without prior consent??
First they filmed the celebrities, then the politicians, then the cops, then came the ring cameras. It was a slow erosion over decades, the justification drifting from "they are a public figure" to "they are standing near me"
I never knew why the paparazzi could harass celebrities and a few decades later we are all being secretly filmed for a Meta perv database.
> how did it become ok to be recorded at all times without prior consent??
Incrementally, apathetically and often to gleeful offerings of tinfoil hats to those who pointed out previous steps and extrapolated them forth.
A major factor is that the companies pushing for this technology are spending significant resources into making sure your consent isn't relevant. From this article [1] about Meta and smart glasses:
> Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns. Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.
> (…) The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. (…) Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.
> “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re... or https://archive.is/65Fze
> We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns
And if there's no dynamic political environment or fitting concerns to steal focus at hand, we'll sure as hell fund their creation.
Good to know, now I need to find my flipper zero and build a small app to use the information gained.
> Own a pair? Add them to known devices
Oh, the hypocrisy
So google can already figure out if you're being followed by an air tag, why can't they natively scan Bluetooth for smart glasses and do what zuckoff does without a third party app?
An airtag is one device that by its nature desperately wants to be seen.
...because they also are going to be selling smart glasses and don't want to trash a market they are about to join?
What is the difference betwen this and https://www.noglasshole.com/ ?
wtf is this
the demo video really looks ai generated — several weird artifacts, but what bugs me the most is that at the end the alleged glasses-wearer goes through two men between whom clearly there is no space for a third person.
The live music image in their collage is hilarious: it's blurring the backs of people's heads, and presumably blurs the faces of the band, as how would it know the difference
Eta: and in their demo video there's a person walking by who's face doesn't get blurred lmao. Bang up job, Claude
Unlike other commenters, I do not mind the ai-ness of this app. This is a quick solution to a problem that we should not have had in the first place.
Does it beep louder as the BT signal strength changes and the camera comes closer?
Bring along a small Bluetooth speaker and call out pervs in public!
Wait, doesn't it beep for smartphone cameras too?
Seems this is a well branded slop app and there's other options, but I support anything to shame these out of the public. Genuinely if it made my phone blare a max volume alarm that called it out I would use it
Cool idea, but why not spend 5 minutes to tell Claude to generate something besides the default AI UI style for your app?
love this. We need more anti-privacy gizmos like this!
Great name
Yes, the name is absolutely a genius move.
I would bet my money that there's a dozen lawyers at work, right now, in Meta's HQ, to get a sense of what options they have to harass, shut down, or do something else to the creator of this app. And I would also bet that Zuck is furious about it.
At least one lawyer looking at it? Sure, maybe. But this is probably not even registering on Zuck's radar
I can't claim to know more than you; but I think I know enough about corporate america and Meta and Zuck that the idea of multiple lawyers, instead of just one, is at least plausible.
He's extremely petty and fhin skinned. Remember the seat booster?
You'd be surprised. They banned Christopher Wylie from Facebook. People routinely report their entire team (building some product for Facebook) getting their accounts banned
Zuckerberg takes things personally. It's his entire history
I'm guessing it's not even aware of it. The billionaires all live in their own reality.
Somewhere deep in the central European woods, a lonely dev fights for his life, against a dead man switch. Accidentally, a NATO drone flattened his house into glass a week ago. Now, he evades drones, rabid lawyers, train accidents, Starlink honey traps, sudden internet blackouts of unknown origin, regular honey traps, poisoned whiskey, social media bans and dowvotes ...
... if you can find him, you can hire him, and restore privacy and sanity to your apps. he is ... the ZuckOff dev.-
A better solution would be a miniaturized quadrf style device that could see radio sources and overlay them.
*knows when a pair of camera glasses are in the room
I was going to say: can't wait for EU to regulate this, but they already did!
Good. Now what about fscking smartphones? There's 1000 times more of those, most with dual cameras and microphones.
I have "Hey Siri!" enthousiasts visiting soon. They can leave their iPhones in a nice Faraday cage at the entrance.
It says:
> Flags camera glasses by their manufacturer signature <
How is this guaranteed to be not spoofed?
Anyone can get a $5 bluetooth-capable ESP32 and set its bluetooth mac to one in the range used by smart glasses. Not sure why you'd do that though.
The other direction is trickier. You'd have to modify the firmware of the smart glasses to set a different mac, or at least gain arbitrary code execution with hardware access. That's well beyond what the average smart glass user will do
And at that point, it'd be mostly about the heads-up display anyways. Somebody who is determined to record you without your knowledge has far easier paths available to them. Just get one of those lighters or ear-rings or car key fobs with built-in camera
Where does it say that is guaranteed? Nobody can guarantee that.
I think this will go like this: - Resistance. People don't like being "secretly" filmed. - Most people will realise it does not affect their lives. - People will ignore it - New generation will accept as something normal to do. Everyone recording everyone.
This is fantastic.
Sorry to be that guy but:
>Quiet is not proof that nobody is recording, and a detection is not proof that anyone is
Is such claudespeak it’s not even annoying it’s just funny at this point
Amazing. But it won't work for long, they'll patch the BT beacons with some "privacy" mode :(
And even if not - could always make another device with the same company ID and flood everyone with false positives.
You can only fight the future for so long.
pl_PL ( ｡ ♡ ‿ ♡ ｡ )
Czas dorosnąć.
we really need to regulate fast on those pervert glasses
v2.0 ... auto-project two middle fingers at the recording camera, in place of the recorded subjects face.
Upvoted for the best lulz of the day.
Need permanent paint spray at protests for just hoodlums. Blast them red commie paints.