> Alex Himel, VP of AR at Facebook Reality Labs, informed me over a Zoom chat that taping over the LED light was a violation of the terms of service of the glasses, which prohibit tampering with the device.
This is a good summary of the kind of deal buying a pair of these would be. Even putting a piece of tape on something you bought and supposedly own is a violation of some contract and may in theory render your device inoperable. It's not hard to imagine that the companion app, which is the only way to use the device, requires Facebook login and then you just end up with a few hundred dollars worth of regular old glasses.
I still can't get over how it is still legal for a manufacturer to retain any kind of control over a device after sale. It's even more dystopian that you basically can't buy a phone that isn't backdoored.
It seems like we're moving out of the 1900s world where manufactured objects carried inherent value on their own and people paid high prices to retain control of the valuable object. People even passed furniture, dishes, books, and clothes down from generation to generation because they were so valuable but now you can't even give this stuff away most of the time. TVs don't get stolen much anymore because they're worth so little. Physical things are getting cheaper to a ridiculous extent and are being merged with services. That world of industrialized materialism might have been an aberration historically. I still encounter old people, myself included who have an aversion to destroying books, electronics, toys, etc. no matter how cheap and useless they are.
The problem is, the devices themselves do have inherent value. The manufacturers literally spend extra effort to nerf that value to make sure your continued use of the device is one way or another dependent on them. The iPhone is a very capable general-purpose pocket computer that was turned into an appliance that Apple controls remotely.
Exactly this. Business follows profit over end user benefit. When everyone is doing it, the choice to "own" gets smaller and our perception of ownership degrades. Look at Tesla nuking features in the 2nd hand market.
30 years ago you still could not get a phone line which can't be tapped.
At least now you can buy a second-hand phone with an unlocked bootloader, and flash it with GrapheneOS or PostmarketOS, which likely are not phoning home you location or actions, and switch off the mobile and wifi data connections just in case.
And they still can be tapped. Kind of different things tbh. This is more like buying a PC in 2000 and the manufacturer reserving the right to remove a RAM stick if you overclocked it or visited a porn site or something.
Depending on the phone, turning off mobile data might not disable the radio, which will continue to ping nearby towers. You might need a faraday cage, or a battery-removable phone like Pinephone.
> By September 2004, a new NSA technique enabled the agency to find cellphones even when they were turned off. JSOC troops called this “The Find,” and it gave them thousands of new targets, including members of a burgeoning al-Qaeda-sponsored insurgency in Iraq, according to members of the unit.
The NSA has had the capability to track switched-off phones since 2004, so it's fair to assume that a number of actors, nation-state and otherwise, can also do it now
This corroborates what I've heard here and there while working in the GSM industry: you could trust a phone that's turned off, if only you could trust it being actually turned off.
Are landlines, like the ones found in commercial buildings, backdoored. Can we purchase development boards that the suppliers do not control after sale.
Whats difficult to get over is when non-tech companies, e.g., Bausch & Lomb, go along with the nonsense.^1 All this supposed corporate responsibility and yet they still partner with unethical "tech" companies.
1 Probably should not be surprised considering B&L is owned by Valeant Pharmaceuticals. (Who has sinced changed its name to try to escape its well-earned bad reputation.)
With Australian Telstra phones, if you called someone and they didn't pick up after a number of rings, a carrier tone would happen. If you whistled a handshake, the reciever would PICK UP and yes you literally turned it into a hot mic.
Since I no longer have a landline, I can't confirm it works now.
No they are not, because there's a clear boundary between your own device and someone else's infrastructure. And you could as well build your own landline system — which is exactly what people do in commercial buildings. You could also build some sort of scrambler device that goes between the phone and the line.
It's the same as asking "is internet backdoored". It might be wiretapped, but you can use encryption to avoid that risk.
Not even this. The problem is that hardware manufacturers have what amounts to technological supremacy over the rest of the society. If you buy an iPhone, it's not illegal to jailbreak it in most countries. The problem is that you lack the technology to do so reliably (i.e. change the fuses in the SoC to flip it into a less restricted mode of operation) so you have to resort to vulnerabilities to untether it from Apple's servers which you never wanted in the first place. Android is marginally better because of the officially unlockable bootloader, but there still are various encryption keys within your device that you aren't allowed to see and/or overwrite.
I mean it's basically a Bluetooth camera, it's not rocket science.
It will be hacked and de-Facebooked in no time.
It would be nice to live in a world where the needs of nerds are more important than those of idiots on Instagram but that's not going to happen.
Luxottica/FB should be free to make a product/service they can charge for and you're free to buy something else (PineGlasses release in 2030?) or hack it.
Its related, but not identical. "Right to repair" in the sense that the FTC is talking about now is largely about manufacturers restricting usage of third-party repair services or parts - so think of it more in terms of Facebook/Ray-Ban allowing independent repair shops to swap your cracked camera lens, or an individual who can source the parts being allowed to perform the work themselves without buying a service contract: things which the manufacturer may currently choose to prevent via terms of use, or which they might have required you to buy a service contract to do.
You making a modification to your glasses to hide an LED isn't a repair... at least in the terms the FTC is using at present.
Should it be legal to use hidden cameras to record images of people without their knowledge? Or should it just be legal to deliberately modify small cameras for the sole purpose of doing so, and illegal for manufacturers of small cameras to implement tamper detection?
I mean people have been putting cameras in their cars for more than 10 years. And at some point, with the advancement of neural interface tech, the line between eyes and cameras would start to become blurry.
>Should it be legal to use hidden cameras to record images of people without their knowledge?
Probably not but many of us live in the surveillance states. Businesses and governments already have lots of hidden and visible video cameras everywhere, I don't see why citizens shouldn't be granted the same liberties to invade others privacy instead of having double standards.
About 48% of the human population owns a smartphone (that doesn't include "feature phones"). 85% of American adults own a smartphone. 97% of Americans own a cellphone.
Lots of people can live without running water, sewer, power, cars, hygiene products, etc. but that doesn't make any of it practical in modern society in the US. There's of course a limit to this as to where the baseline is, but I'd say having a portable phone of some sort and internet access are pretty high up on that list.
Its not so much that it needs to be made "illegal", The problem is that terms of service itself is a legally enforcable idea. Facebook is the one using legal frameworks to overstep into our life.
Sure, Apple makes great hardware and software. But services? I don't want any. I trust myself more than I trust Apple, and I have a server I pay for anyway. It's about choice. Apple would have to compete with others and actually earn its reputation as an online services company instead of just abusing its existing market power.
Do you think it should be illegal for a manufacturer to implement features in their product that attempt to detect and prevent usage of the product that is dangerous or harmful to the user or others? Should products with batteries be allowed to detect when the battery is being damaged and deactivate in order to prevent excessive heat or fire? Or is there something specific about tampering with a camera indicator light that you feel is deserving of legal protection for the end user?
> Do you think it should be illegal for a manufacturer to implement features in their product that attempt to detect and prevent usage of the product that is dangerous or harmful to the user or others?
Yes. I use knives for cooking. I could use them for butchering my neighbors but that would be none of the knives' manufacturers business.
Not just knives. Anything can be used in a dangerous or harmful way. You can suffocate someone with a pillow. So this line of reasoning leads to any company having the right (or maybe the duty?) to monitor us.
Some knives intended for cooking have features deliberately intended to make them less suitable for stabbing people. Do you oppose this practice, or the legality of this practice?
Not really. I mostly oppose monitoring in the name of "security". But I also prefer to be considered an adult who's not a murderer and can handle their knives without help or active supervision.
So they can make "safe knives" if they wish but I would rather buy the other ones.
They’re not particularly popular as far as I can tell, but my point only relies on the concept itself as another example of manufacturers implementing features to attempt to influence how the product can be used.
At least in that case people can (and it seems they have) vote with their wallet, and avoid the more limited "nannying" product. Given the lack of competition in things like mobile phone OSes, that's not always an option.
It's subtle, but true. I would imagine that a "kitchen knife" with a full cross-guard that was regularly carried in your belt and implicated in a crime would probably not be considered "just a kitchen knife".
eg: all the rules around gun shapes, sizes, etc. etc. so they don't become "assault-style weapons" or give people impure thoughts when they're out on the shooting range.
I can’t speak for the person you’re responding to, but I personally do find a large difference between the risk of fire/explosion and the visibility of an LED.
Furthermore I do in fact think that the distinction is big enough to justify legal protection to the end user on the basis that one can burn your house down (and can happen by accident with no user intervention) and the other cannot.
Personally I think words like “harm” have concrete meaning outside of language specifically crafted by marketers in order to make awful products more palatable.
Do you think it’s controversial whether secretly recording images of someone can sometimes constitute harm? To me, it’s quite clearly the case, so I hadn’t considered the need to present an argument that undisclosed video recording can constitute harm.
Sometimes, yes. But always? No, certainly not. There are perfectly good reasons to want to record someone without their knowledge (e.g. recording law enforcement officers while they are in public).
I'm reminded of how phones sold in Japan have a fake shutter sound on their camera apps that you can't disable. Yes, there's a good reason for it (preventing creeps from quietly taking upskirt photos of women on subways), but it also removes the ability to take silent photos for legitimate reasons.
But in the general sense, I do find this new Facebook product to be gross and creepy, far worse than Google Glass. And frankly I think a recording light, which will easily become washed out and invisible in sunlight, is a pretty poor attempt at helping maintain the privacy of random people.
An exploding battery is not, to my knowledge, “controversial” in that we’ve all agreed that fire is unwanted behavior. This is why I’ve found issue with your battery analogy.
I do not believe there is a meaningful equivalence there.
I totally agree for standalone devices (knives, mentioned down the thread, seem like a perfect example).
It also seems like the only way to implement devices whose operation requires ongoing performance of services by the company. If I'm needed to ensure a device can fulfill its stated goal in an ongoing way, then of course I need to retain some kind of control - if to tell devices to update or send me photos or whatever. This doesn't mean that you need to cut off modified devices, but it also doesn't mean you need to put up with them either.
This take sounds like it's just opportunistically trying to find the negative in a positive, because it's Facebook.
In some countries, masking recording/photo-taking indicators is a bona-fide crime.
The TOS normalizing this to "don't hide the fact that your recording glasses are recoding" is not only not an onerous term of service, it is uncharacteristically pro-safety and pro-privacy.
Well, it's a policy that's uncharacteristically protecting user privacy, or rather the privacy of those subjected to the user's presence, so it's not the best example of onerous TOS.
>It's not hard to imagine that the companion app, which is the only way to use the device, requires Facebook login and then you just end up with a few hundred dollars worth of regular old glasses.
That's me. I don't have an Oculus Quest 2 but have heard good things about it. But I can't get one because my Facebook account was shut down without explanation in 2019. Despite its age (15 years) I barely used it, let alone for anything "controversial", but did regularly log into it. I repeatedly tried to verify my identity by submitting an image of my driver's license, without any response.
If a Facebook employee is reading this ... I don't want to create a fake new Facebook account (which would be against the TOS, anyway). I want my own back.
My first thought was that I didn't want people to walk around filming me everywhere and I come to the comments and the top one is someone advocating for just that. What a crazy world.
I think this is not a very charitable interpretation of what I was trying to say, so based on your reaction I probably did not make myself very clear. My qualm is that Facebook alleges that something as innocuous as putting some tape on a piece hardware you bought is a breach of contract, and might thus essentially render your hardware unusable. For a comparison, you wouldn't expect your car to become immobilized because you put a sticker on it. Body cams of different shapes and sizes have existed for many years at this point, many of them built for the express purpose of covert filming, so this device isn't anything too new in that regard, if not for the new form factor.
So just put a dab of black paint over the light and claim that it must have happened when you were painting your door. Though it's not clear how they'd ever notice, surely they don't have a light sensor inside the camera light that would tip them off if it never seems ambient light.
LEDs work both ways. I wrote a tutorial on doing this with an Arduino sometime in the early 2000s. I've forgotten most of it, so this is going to be vague…
• Instead of driving your LED from one live pin to ground or power, put it between two pins (with its current limiting resistor unless your microcontroller can safely limit the current and you can tolerate the heat in package (RP2040!))
• Reverse bias briefly (pin 1 low, pin 2 high) to charge the stray capacitance of your pin 2 driver. Then turn pin 2 into an input and time how long it takes to change from a "1" to a "0".
Your LED is going to be matching up photons and electrons and passing electrons across. It isn't great at this compared to a photodiode, but it does do it. If the current flow through the LED is at least in the ball park of the input current on pin 2 you will be able to tell the difference in light levels.
It's crude, and may not be workable at all in low light levels because the input pin current will dwarf the LED current.
But for compliance checking in FB Glass, the camera knows when it is in bright light, and if the LED disagrees, then you have covered your LED. The cost to implement is one package pin and a little software.
Note: I am not necessarily known as nefarious. I used it to automatically modulate the brightness of indicator LEDs. Bright in the day, dimmer in the dark. The time to sense is short enough that you can do it with your indicator and no one notices the tiny dark interval.
That's not a good comparison. The user of these glasses isn't looking for privacy here (these glasses with the camera taped over are simply dramatically overpriced shades), they're looking to hide their intent.
The post originally linked to a different source [0, if I'm not mistaken in my google-fu], it seems that the link has been switched to a more neutral source which albeit omits some of these details.
Well.. my main objection would be that it seems impossible to detect such manipulation, and therefore these ToS are toothless.
As to your complaint: I don't see a problem? Assuming for a second that such a scheme would work, it allows transactions to happen and devices to be sold that otherwise would not or could not.
That's the basic mechanism of how contract law and court system help a society: a bank wouldn't have the capability to build its own mercenary force to collect debt (or, at least, it would be expensive and a nightmare for civil liberties). So, counterintuitively, by allowing you to bind yourself to an agreement to pay back a loan, your range of options is only expanded.
> Well.. my main objection would be that it seems impossible to detect such manipulation, and therefore these ToS are toothless.
I don't think that's true: LEDs can also be used as light sensors. If the camera sees a bright day and the LEDs see pitch black, you know something sketchy's going on.
I don't understand why companies keep making these glasses with cameras on them. That's the main issue and concern that people have with these devices.
Something like a HUD would be great but people don't want cameras pointing at them all the time.
Yup. I don't get the argument 'well every store already records you.' Well, that's different, I'm in their store. If I let people into my home, or go to the urinal, I have an expectation of privacy unless the guy next to me is pointing his phone down or camera down awkwardly. With glasses, I don't know who is recording what or when.
This isn't a 'i dont want people to watch me pee' argument, that was just an example. I don't want to be recorded when I have an expectation of privacy - full stop.
I can think of many professionals who would likely pay good money to have smart glasses.
- Mechanics who can see under the car and identify components and potential issues with those components.
- Logistics handlers who can look at a package and know where it goes next, or people who scan QR and barcode codes all day
- Construction workers who can measure distances, see wind speed, temperature, etc
In other words, there is good use for this tech while avoiding all together any privacy concerns, as you are looking and analysing objects, not people.
In practice can this tech even do that? according the article this is just a 5mp camera on a set of frames meant for taking pictures and stories. To do some of the stuff you mentioned (like measuring distance) you'd need lidar, since construction workers currently are starting to use lidar and this is the new standard. What something like the iphone can do today in terms of measuring is not that accurate in my experience, certainly no good for commercial construction where lasers have been a thing for decades. Smart helmet seems like a better bet since you can shove a ton of sensors in there and have the lidar spinning on top of your head.
The pitch of how useful AR can be in a professional setting is always about superficial things that are usually non-problems.
Car mechanics can recognize components. It's the easiest part of their trade. And doctors know how organs look like. That's not the kind of information they need. And no heart surgeon would look at getting started tutorial with a patient in front of them. Construction workers would use a proper measurement tool if they need a measurement and their decisions depend on this measurement.
Another assumption about AR which is often wrong is that looking at things is the easiest solution to many problems.
Yes, a cash register worker scans codes all day. No, rotating each and every box to have the code facing you and then moving the head and the upper body to center at the code is not easier than reaching the same code with a hand scanner. Hands are good at reaching things. Neck gets tired. And even a better solution might be transition to RFID, or installing multiple cameras along the belt, or promoting a self service process, none of them require to look at every code.
Loooking at keyboard is not the fastest way to type. Many AR usage scenarios are like suggesting to project key labels on a keyboard through a magic HUD when there are already keyboards with labeled keys and many people using them professionally are blind typists.
Taqtile's Manifest [0] product does something like this. There are some videos of it here [1] [2]. It's not exactly what you describe w.r.t diagnostics, but instead it's used to speed up training of mechanics/mechanic-like tasks. It uses Microsoft's hololens, so a bit bulkier than these glasses, but it's a cool look into what kinds of tools some of these jobs might have 10-20 years from now.
If my mechanic doesn't know the components of my car, they aren't a very good mechanic, and certainly human sight and tactile access are better than some augmented reality.
How would these "see" wind speed? I just don't get how it's needed to have this in front of your eyes at all times...
I talked to an acquaintance a few years back, he was working for an AR company that was using Google Glasses in manufacturing plants. It makes it much, much more efficient to ensure that people don't make mistakes.
There's definitely a bunch of commercial use-cases.
Personally, all I want is for these glasses to tell me the names of people who are my Facebook friends. Given the privacy concerns though, this is very unlikely to happen.
> Something like a HUD would be great but people don't want cameras pointing at them all the time.
I really wanted this maybe 5-10 years ago, but personally I've reached a point in my life where I feel "less is more" regarding tech. Enough things want to send me notifications that I know it would be as worthless as my email feed, or my phone notifications feed, or my facebook feed, or any of the other feeds out there that have become sources of noise.
Notifications are not the important case for the HUD.
Other things are. Maps which track your location and show you the way overlaid on the streets and roads you see. Books and manuals which you don't need to hold in your hands. Video instructions that track your hands and correct their position. Finding stuff in a warehouse or in your closet by pointing at it right in your FOV. Heart rate monitor, etc right before your eyes when you are performing your hardest and can't lift your smartwatch to your eyes.
Many good uses with broad markets. Sadly, it's technically too difficult, so it's too expensive for non-professional use.
I'll try to argue that most of these don't benefit much from a wearable HUD.
Maps and navigation seem to be good enough when they are handheld or mounted on a vehicle. When you are on foot you're moving slowly so no need to have it always visible. Yes, there's a special case of you're on foot and carrying two heavy bags in both hands, in an unfamiliar place outdoors, and cannot stop, and do not speak local language. Voice navigation should still suffice.
Video instructions. Some of them have to be seen in advance to be able to plan your actions and logistics (e.g. cooking). Some of them teach skills which should be watched multiple times and/or tried multiple times to achieve mastery (e.g. sports and dancing techniques). What kind of instructional video benefits from being seen while doing, in real time? Even origami howtos are usually back and forth, until you _understand_ what you're doing.
Not holding books in your hands. I admit I wanted it on several occasions. My concern is usability. Is it easy to read four hours from a semitransparent surface, is it easy to focus on HUD projections continuously.
Finding stuff in the closet. This is so sci-fi. We'll see level 5 autonomous driving first.
Heart rate (blood sugar, any other vital) monitor. Basically, it's a solved problem and a feature available commercially. You don't need to see heart rate continuously to be warned about an anomaly. Sound alarm works just as well if not better.
I have young children and my wife frequently has her phone out to take photos & videos of them - trips to the zoo, ballet practice, "oh do that cute thing you just did again".
What I'd really want is to go back to a world where we just don't have the opportunity and expectation to record so much. But that's not going to happen. And a lot of it really does have immense value for us. Our parents live on the other side of the country and this (plus FaceTime) is the main way they get to see their grandchildren grow up.
With that in mind, I would love a set of glasses that record what we're seeing on a short buffer and let us tap to save whenever something interesting/significant happens. No more phone out worried that we'll miss a big moment.
Tap to save ... surely it monitors your heart and blink rates and takes photos video at 'important' moments. Filtered and edited by an AI when it's uploaded then a day review is presented to you and emotion-sampling again highlights the best images to keep in the monthly pick-reel.
We probably overwrite a lot of great memories with the slightly shittier version of what actually happened marred by the distraction of 'I must record this'.
> but people don't want cameras pointing at them all the time
That ship has sailed. People have their phones out all the time, often held at a 45° angle, but frequently vertical as well. Taking photos surreptitiously is already ridiculously easy and nearly anyone around you could do it all the time.
I'm not condoning it, just saying that building it into glasses isn't changing anything. We already live in a world where people might be recording you at any time. We have been for years.
I don't think everyone has their phone out all the time. I feel like I can usually tell if someone has a phone in a position where they can record me. Usually they are tucked in a purse/pocket.
I've seen it a many times it's dumb stuff they have the money and talent to waste and a fear of being left behind.
the leaders of these companies are also fairly uncreative leading them to blindly follow the current meme of "the future" which ironically leads to them faltering anyway
With Google Glass the HUD was not as useful as it seemed it would be. I think smart watches are a much better idea. More pixels and nothing on your face all day.
Though, with that said, some people I know tried it on and the HUD was easier to use. A lot depended, I think, on the shape of your face. The way my nose and eye sockets and ears are I had to look up with my eyes at an uncomfortable angle to see the full HUD.
I think if it's "actual" glasses, unlike the Google Glass, an HUD could be incredibly useful since you have the entire vision field to play with. Bonus points for that since many people wear normal glasses anyways (me included).
Have you seen the average teenage girl lately? They point cameras at themselves and others all the time, this would free their hands.
I don't know whether it will be a success, but I don't think the crowd that doesn't want a camera pointed at them is a majority. For the record, I don't want a camera pointed at me.
Is this a generational thing? I've started using Instagram lately and I just can't understand how people who are doctors, lawyers, or dentists are posting content providing professional advice or tips and tricks one day and the next day it's videos of them doing yoga in thongs to sell underwear. There is the odd account where developers are posting similar content. Even elementary school teachers are twerking in videos in their classroom for likes.
If the upcoming generation of developers and tech professionals no longer believe in a separation of personal and professional boundaries, will we see a complete elimination of boundaries and privacy? Is the end goal to have the ability to directly tap into what others are seeing on demand in their most intimate interactions. Something similar to the TV adaption of Brave New World? (I haven't read the book, so I don't know if this is true to the original.) As far as I know, Facebook photos and accounts are private, or that's what it appears people tend to send the accounts to, but Instagram is all about leaving an account open, so they can get influencer collaboration bucks.
If I'm in a store and the store has a camera that I know will probably never be looked at, it's different from me being in a store with a camera that will be fed into some facial recognition system sold to advertisers that decides to charge me more for airline tickets a year later, which is also different from sitting across the bar from twenty people with cameraphones pointed at me. It's not a binary 'cares about cameras or doesn't.'
You don't think all the cameras in big box stores are networked and monitored by AI? I would be shocked if they're not doing customer tracking. Notice the number of face-level cameras popping up in Wal-Mart, they even have them built in to the front doors at chest height so they can scan every face and then track what you're looking at as you peruse the shelves.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that they aren't doing it. But I also don't like it, which was my intended statement. Especially so if they're sharing data about me specifically outside of their store, or if they're using it to charge me special prices.
An underrated point. All those security cameras represent an inexhaustible source of monetizable data that is currently going to waste.
Right now there are too many retail security cameras for humans to monitor constantly, and too many shoppers to tag and track even if the data could be retained and processed. But both of these problems are well on their way to being solved.
Surveillance cameras are entirely different, in the same way as people don't care about giving their data to a company but do care about giving someone else their phone, a persons camera pointing at them is much different to a surveillance camera.
Reminds me of "Surveillance Camera Man" [1] from several years ago. His YouTube channel seems to have been scrubbed of videos, but basically the guy just stood out in public recording people, just like thousands of surveillance cameras currently do, with lots of subjects objecting, berating him, becoming scared, upset, even violent. Point being, it's no different than all the surveillance that is already done, except people freak out when there's an actual human visibly holding the camera.
“Surveillance Camera Man” should continue to exist and raise awareness. It’s much, much worse when a camera is not held by a human and is instead fixed in a known location, plugged into mains and is constantly feeding footage into a large network of face/stride recognition software; yet most people are entirely oblivious to the latter happening all around them.
People look at me like a madman when I try to explain that you can buy good-quality glasses for $7 online + $6 shipping (or ~$40 with all the coatings and fancy upgrades you could ever want)
I just buy a sack of glasses every couple of years and then treat them with absolutely no respect whatsoever. My toddler loves to rip the glasses off my face and chew on them or use them as a club to beat on random objects around the house.. This is not a problem for me. I popped the lenses out of a $7 pair of glasses and strapped them into my VR headset. When I find an old scuffed-up pair of glasses, I just throw them in the trash.
I wonder how many other parts of our society are a blatant scam without me knowing about it.. I know that the way people study English in Japan and Korea is a giant scam where they basically learn nothing, but I could only recognize that thanks to my outside perspective
I find that the more I pay for sunglasses, the more I look after them. For me, longevity seems purely a function of cost, and not of the build quality - by knowing they're expensive, I'll look after them better and they'll last longer. I seem to have settled on a middle ground at around $40 - more than throw-away price, but not over the top.
So, you pay more money so that you'll pay more time so that you consume less. How does that benefit you? Or are you saying, we should add a tax to glasses so people don't treat them like garbage?
Warby Parker is a bit more, around $100, but last I checked they donated a pair when you bought one. I was happy with what I got. They do their own stuff.
When Clearly Contacts was bought out by Luxottica it was described to me as the Mafia coming in. Clearly Contacts had gotten too big to ignore and it was starting to impact their bottom line. Yes was the only answer, how much was negotiable.
Rayban integrating with Facebook looks like the Mafia and Triads joining forces.
I take this as work towards the next platform/UX of AR enabled glasses. These look a lot better than previous attempts and embed the hardware pretty well so that's cool to see.
Absent the actual AR part though I don't think there's much here that's an improvement on previous failed attempts (with a big exception for improved hardware integration/design which does matter a lot). I don't personally find the camera/video recording stuff compelling (but I'm also not the target audience) and there's still the negative privacy/social element of it. That's been talked to death so nothing interesting to discuss there imo.
I think Apple's focus on airpods/lidar and waiting on glasses with cameras until they have the actual UX/AR working in hardware probably makes sense, but FB always has a bias to shipping and testing new stuff early.
When you do, say, extreme sports, you can attach your GoPro to your helmet, and produce an almost your-point-of-view reporting. But this is unpractical in less extreme situations.
I can imagine that various video lessons can benefit from a camera positioned right at your eyes; there are several other offers for that on the market. OTOH reporting in a social situations, like a birthday party, can benefit even more, because you don't have to carry the camera around, keep it pointed, etc, you can participate and sometimes make shots, or shoot video.
As an aside: an ideal reporting camera would have a button like "save the shots from 10 seconds ago to now", and "start video recording 10 seconds ago". This hardware likely lacks the battery capacity for such a mode, though.
Maybe I’m old or have the mentality of an older person, I don’t know… but this seems very deeply unappealing to me, even though I have looked at bluetooth-enabled sunglasses before with potential interest. My subjective take-away is that Facebook’s hardware release attempts are always tainted by the company’s previous behavior (rightfully so) and they just come off as pretty uncool regardless of the marketing angle even when they partner with insert brand name here.
Oculus stands alone in that they offer a product that’s good enough to get some people to ignore that and all the potential future Facebook-initiated awfulness that will inevitably come down the pipeline. Even then I’d happily buy a Facebook-less Oculus device, though I understand that the financial realities of VR R&D kinda necessitate having them there.
I hate this. If people are recording me, I want the cameras to be obvious. I don't want them to just look like Ray-Bans. If they have to exist, I want them to look ridiculous, like Google Glass did.
And I absolutely don't want Facebook to have more portals into more of society. Also, based on every choice Facebook has ever made, any claim that FB makes implying or asserting they can't access video/image/general camera data is not credible.
I really hope FB doesn't make a dominant product. I'm excited about the possibilities afforded by a mature AR platform, but the idea of giving FB the ability to see through my eyes is so viscerally repulsive that no product could be amazing enough to offset that.
Over the years I have become very mindful of what tech I choose to adopt. Which means I first encounter a problem and then try to find a solution for it using tech. I can't think of any worthwhile problem that this smart glass will solve. So I am going to pass on it.
Google glass had this air of inevitability about it. The glasses were hyped to be the the next iphone. Not only that, but tech was going to create iphone-level product categories every 3-6 years.
Then it completely fell flat. It just didn't cross the divide from enthusiasts to the wider culture at all. The term glasshole was invented. We all saw scoble in the shower.
It might be that the culture's moved enough over the last decade that smart glasses will be a thing, as more people see social media success as aspirational. AR and VR give a value prop that wasn't there. Still, it seems like there's a big gap between the enthusiast market and the mainstream, and this release doesn't do much for that.
I really appreciate that FB keeps trying to make hardware and products that don't need to be a data collection funnel. It's like they want to free themselves from the cursed golden goose that is data driven ads.
I really don't appreciate that every attempt by FB to free themselves of ads they end up with a product perfect for scooping up data so it either flops out of consumer fear and/or turns into a data collection funnel.
I want FB to be more than a heinous data trap. I don't think it's going to happen though.
You need a Facebook account to use the "View" app that connects to the glasses. Not convinced that Facebook will refrain from data collection, especially after some time passes and the reviews have already been published.
I don't know if you should paint the entire company's employees with the same brush. There are probably people at Facebook working on user privacy, trying to fight the good fight. Are they still tainted because they are fighting that fight at a "terrible data collection funnel advertising company"? These companies are huge and have lots of departments within that are not feeding the beast at all. (Disclaimer: Not a Facebook employee :) )
Fortunately for your viewpoint, the person who made this aberrant suggestion is now dead, and you’ve nothing to worry about. (All I did was agree with him.)
A white LED light on the front indicates that a picture or recording is in progress.
I am generally weary of government regulation, but, depending on the implementation, I might be onboard with a law that requires cameras and microphones to have a power indicator. Specifically, the LED should be hard-wired into the main power wire going into the camera/mic, so that it will activate any time those sensors are receiving electricity.
I shouldn't be hands free, especially for video recording. There should be a button that needs to be pressed all the time and as for taking picture it should have a shutter sound effect without ability to silent it.
Ok, but what about blind people? Should they not be allowed to know they are being recorded? There clearly needs to be a "recording" sound that plays while recordings are happening.
> I might be onboard with a law that requires cameras and microphones to have a power indicator. Specifically, the LED should be hard-wired into the main power wire going into the camera/mic, so that it will activate any time those sensors are receiving electricity.
Such a law should be equally applied to police body cameras.
Cops frequently have to chase suspects into dark areas. Being lit up will both help suspects get away easier and massively increase the risk that the suspects will be able to easily shoot their pursuers.
Police don't skulk around in the shadows at night, waiting to observe crimes. Crimes occur far too infrequently for that strategy to make any sense at all.
They're either in cars or if they're patrolling on foot (which is basically only something that happens in very dense commercial areas), they're dressed to be obvious and noticable. That's the mechanism by which police can prevent/displace crime: would-be perpetrators see police and choose to wait, commit their crime elsewhere, or (potentially) cool off and not commit the crime.
A bit childish, but this seems like it was built with PoV porn as the primary use case. Saves a hand. Likely good for creeps too.
I can't figure out who else would be using it. Good way to lose friends and make enemies. I wouldn't be hanging out with anyone with them on. Would stay away from any strangers with them on.
I doubt people would use it for actual porn, but I fully expect it will herald an explosion of creepshot porn where guys take (and distribute) sexualized, male-gaze footage of women and girls in public. These glasses will absolutely be used to harass and objectify women and girls. Some people may just want to produce fairly low quality (5MP) POB videos for Instagram, but that doesn't negate or offset the harm these will do to many women and girls.
I watched a WSJ video on these glasses and from 5+ feet away, they are indistinguishable from the ubiquitous Ray-Ban Wayfarers sunglasses. The "camera's on" LED is about the size of a poppy seed and in daylight conditions, it was nearly impossible to notice. Also, they put the button that starts recording in a place I touch while adjusting my glasses, so starting a recording will also be completely inconspicuous. These seem to be designed to violate people's privacy, which would make sense considering how incredibly good FB is at monitizing their (often non-consensual) access to the intimate details of people's lives.
"I wouldn't be hanging out with anyone with them on. Would stay away from any strangers with them on."
I imagine a lot of people will choose to only cavort with people who have hidden audio recording devices, as opposed to visible video recording devices. At least until we all get used to this in 2-4 years.
If you think addiction to social-media via round-the-clock mobile-phone use is a serious problem today, wait until you see what addiction will be like via always-on glasses. A new kind of always-on addictive-social-porn-on-steroids industry is likely to emerge on this technology.
I'm not sure these glasses are a Good Thing™ for humanity.
My retirement plan is to kill myself, failing that, a piece of land far from everything and everyone where I would do substinence living and a lot of cannabis consumption.
I'd only need around $50k-100k, so it looks doable.
I had a pair of Google Glasses when they first came out in beta. Looking at the HUD was a bit of a strain but these look like they don't even have a HUD.
Plus the privacy concerns and the "glasshole" nickname.
I see that there is an activity indicator LED (just like there was with Google Glass) but even the article admits there will likely be nonconsensual candid photo taking.
Which raises the question: Did things really change that much about how people perceive privacy since 2013 that now no one cares?
I'm happy with with smart watches at this point. I'm not convinced smart devises were meant to be attached to our head.
> Did things really change that much about how people perceive privacy since 2013 that now no one cares?
My guess is that is a mixture of glassholes from back then are willing to try again and younger people who would have been glassholes back then never got a chance and so are trying again. The societal expectations probably haven't changed, although the loudness of the different voices in society may have. I almost expect more pushback now, given the increased awareness of privacy invasion and the greater trust Google enjoie(s/d) vs Facebook
More broadly that the worry about the device being locked IMO is the issue of consent. I, personally, don't consent to being filmed by what amounts to facebook in a public space and then especially not to having that data being input to a ML system and analyzed. I understand that the way the law works now, if I am in a public space, I can be filmed. But that law was not written when this particular problem - ie persistently capture everything which is going on in the real world, and store it forever, with analysis, was in view. Panopticon.
At least this is up-front from the beginning, unlike what they did with the Oculus Quest. Though, I daresay many people won't realise this is the case until they get a pair and set them up.
Honestly, it sounds a lot like Google Glass but with none of the actually useful stuff like heads up navigation, AR translation, heads up documentation, etc.
But given how everyone seems to have forgotten about privacy and invited always on microphones into their homes, maybe this won't hit the same brick wall Google did in 2012?
I’ll never forget the time I wore google glass to a bar in Palo Alto and a very annoyed bartender told me to take them off. I wasn’t even using them for video or picture taking, which I wanted to explain but he had no patience for.
Maybe attitudes have changed but I can’t imagine it going much better.
The world just wasn't ready for glassholes. I remember those and thinking how alien someone's socialization would need to be to consider recording in strange peoples faces to be appropriate, but now that we are just getting comfortable with totalitarianism, they can do their part and keep society safe from people with personal boundaries.
Nobody is ever recorded in public to exonerate them. The idea someone could have an objection to carrying firearms as public aggression but not see how recording people is effectively brandishing with an implied threat is going to be one of those things we will look back and laugh at.
I personally separate things into different categories. Weapons that can be used to kill me are in a different category from dogs that can bite me, from phones that can take pictures of me and from glasses that can film me.
People will attempt to blur the lines between adjacent categories to argue their point, but you're going from the first straight to the last, skipping over everything in the middle. That's what I call 'a stretch'.
I'd argue that's a false dichotomy. They are both expressions of unprovoked aggression. The difference is one has clear conseqeunces, the other is a vague threat of blackmail without an expiry.
Low level violence and physicality used to snap people who exploited this latter nerd version back into moderation, but now terrible people have become sacred cows, and here we are.
> I wasn’t even using them for video or picture taking, which I wanted to explain but he had no patience for.
I would have also asked you to take them off. For one, normalizing wearing them even if not recording is a step towards normalizing them at all. For another, I don't really trust you when you say they're not recording. I remember having to alter my paths through crowds to avoid glassholes back then, and I don't want to go back.
Why would you even want to wear it in a bar?
> Maybe attitudes have changed but I can’t imagine it going much better.
I hope attitudes haven't changed. I hope people still ostracize beaming pictures of everyone around them into the cloud without consent.
I didn't really understand the bathroom objection when it was Google Glass, and I don't really follow it now. I've got plenty of problems with the general idea of camera glasses, but in terms of bathrooms...
The wearer can't really record anything he/she can't directly see already. Is the concern that the guy at the next urinal might crane his neck over the divider and film your junk? Would you consider that acceptable behavior if he didn't have camera glasses on?
Is the worry that someone might capture you entering or leaving a bathroom stall, or record your back as you stand at a urinal? It seems like a regular old cell phone would be a more effective way to take sneaky pictures or videos, since it doesn't involve popping your whole head under the stall...
It just feels like doing anything truly unpleasant with camera glasses would require a serious breach of standard bathroom etiquette, and even considering how shitty the general public can be, I've never experienced that level of bad behavior in a public bathroom in all my years.
>The wearer can't really record anything he/she can't directly see already. Is the concern that the guy at the next urinal might crane his neck over the divider and film your junk? Would you consider that acceptable behavior if he didn't have camera glasses on?
My concern is the difference between something being able to be seen and something being able to be recorded and shared later.
I've been in a hand full of k-12 schools where there are no stall doors. You can walk in the bathroom and make eye contact with someone who has their pants around their ankles.
I trust that people with a cell phone in their ear are probably using them to talk. On the other hand, if someone has their phone up in the usual taking-a-photo-with-their-phone pose, then I'll also assume they're taking a photo, and if they are holding their phone out like that in the locker room, I'd ask them not to.
I don’t understand why these aren’t programmed with rolling buffers like dashcams. Often I want to capture something that already happened, not something that is about to happen.
Dash cams are wired to a car battery and often only record when the engine is running. If these glasses were constantly recording, the battery would last less than 60 minutes
Interesting to note that Facebook advertises on Axios (see any recent copy of Axios AM) and that fact isn't disclosed despite an editorial policy stating "If a story involves an investor, board member or business partner, we disclose the relationship in the story or on the bottom of the story."
> "Weighing just a teaspoon of salt more" why not just say the glasses are 5 grams more?
I like that there is a light signaling the glasses are capturing photo/video, although it might not be noticeable in some cases, just like other devices
Cool to see the pictures/videos don't go directly to FB.
I was just thinking that if these are going to be used by perverts, its going to be trivia to paint over the light with something like nail polish. At least a proper audio cue like the camera snap noise which has been forced on at least in Japan, would be a bit better.
I'm sure the FB's plan is to see everything you see, analyse faces and places and build a better personal profile of its users. These glasses will be connected to network and linked to your real identity, or there's nothing in it for FB.
For a moment: Let's step aside from the glaring immorality of Ray-Ban (aka Luxottica SpA) and Facebook.
And instead ask: Is there a reason to not immediately "defend yourself" against any person who is looking at you with a pair of these? (Physically or not)
I"m curious as to how these will be received at U.S. ports of entry considering U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s policy and practice of prohibiting the use of cameras and video recorders. Will they take people's prescription glasses away?
This feels like Holy Motors. Wearing these will inevitably change the way the bearer or the person pointed at will behave. They'll start being actors in their actual lives. Weird blending of life and film...
Standups have a strong incentive to keep their routines off youtube, so comedy venues use products like Yonder to secure phones at the door. Imagine needing to relinquish your prescription lenses because they have cameras built into them.
I'm probably in the minority, but I would like a record of everything I see and hear for my entire life. If every other private company gets to monitor me, why don't I? That said, Facebook is probably the very last company I would want to buy that kind of a device from.
For sure this is a socially unusual thing to do now, but the same was thought about having Gmail "read" your email, or having an always-on Amazon microphone inside your home. I expect attitudes will be different about personal recording in 10 years.
I was thinking about this recently when I took an Asus laptop apart. You can get a 720p camera and microphone for $5.00 [1]
It weighs nothing, cost nothing. I just have to figure out how to plug it into a raspberry pi for an augmented car experience. (right not using my bulky laptop)
I've trained a small model with my voice to respond to basic commands. No need to go through a Facebook server or any cloud server for that matter. Tech can be a lot of fun when you get your hands dirty and ignore FAANGs.
There is a 3d feature, inside the app. I am guessing it exports as 3d post on fb (already a feature that uses iPhone's portrait photo to get depth data)
If you don't like them get your local government to pass a law. These are a great opportunity for creeps and perverts and we should ban the devices from the community .
The reveal trailer is so dishonest, it shows environment-mapping AR features, while the glasses don't even have a display. Please calm down the creative department.
That doesn't really seem to fly, as smartphones existed before the IPhone, but they were not done with the "no stylus" idea, thus not done correctly. When Apple does their best, they make the market by just doing it better, and everyone follows.
Putting aside the whole "Facebook has something to do with this so I will dismiss it out of hand because blah blah blah evil company" I don't really see the point in smart glasses, though yeah I'm sure it has some uses
With 2 cameras they should at least record VR 180, otherwise they don't provide much value compared to cheap Chinese "spy glasses" for $30 from eBay and they look basically the same.
We really need laws banning devices like this before they become common place, Illinois at least has some laws regarding facial recognition it's probably a good starting point
I presume what the parent poster is referring to isn’t ads but spam images posted by people whose accounts have been compromised. They promise huge discounts on ray ban sun glasses. I still haven’t gotten my pair of $20 wayfarers!
Widespread adoption of these kind of products are a precursor to a big-brother dystopia. Given FB's reputation (and raison d'être), it's plausible that these devices will become tools for purposes such as crowd-sourced sousveillance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28471302