New privacy frontier: Europe eyes crackdown on smart glasses

https://www.politico.com/www.politico.eu/article/new-privacy-frontier-europe-eyes-crackdown-smart-glasses/

by 1vuio0pswjnm7 • 1 month ago

98 78 1 month ago

rimbo789• 1 month ago

Good. Finally. These never should have even been prototyped. Fool of an idea.

lightedman2• 1 month ago

To you, sure. Meanwhile I have about 7 legitimate uses, almost all of them involving recording things down in mines while I need both hands free to keep myself from dying.

You stay in your bubble if it makes you uncomfortable. Real people have real uses for this tech, whether you like it nor not.

reaperducer• 1 month ago

almost all of them involving recording things down in mines

How are the glasses more beneficial than the far, far more durable helmet-mounted cameras that construction workers use, or the industrial-grade chest-mounted cameras used in many other industries?

Also, how well do the glasses function underground? Are there pico cells down there to provide connectivity?

adithyareddy• 1 month ago

You can't use a GoPro or one of the many body cameras where it is clearly obvious to everyone who sees you that you:

(a) Have a camera (b) Are recording?

Legend24403• 1 month ago

I agree, I think people are being far too cynical.

It's just like AI, people discount the positives and magnify the negatives.

netsharc2• 1 month ago

What a silver lining... "oh this date rape drug works great as an animal tranquilizer and I need it at my farm! Don't ban it!"

doubtfuluser• 1 month ago

I hope Europe does this for real. I’m wondering how this privacy nightmare is eroding our standards so easily.

I certainly see the potential use of such - but the risks coming with such glasses at least in my opinion outweigh these uses..

Pleas, EU, ban this! Iirc there are already spy cams banned anyway in Germany, this should fall into the same category

dgellow6• 1 month ago

The EU (i.e some EU politicians) is considering regulating them, not a full ban

Claudus• 1 month ago

Smart glasses are for citizens, not subjects.

vkou3• 1 month ago

Citizens have responsibilities to their society, not just the right to be assholes.

hootz7• 1 month ago

I do photography as a hobby, especially street photography and related styles, and I constantly question myself on the ethics of photographing people in public without permission, even with my huge ass camera. Meanwhile, we have people running spy cameras in their glasses, and they view that as just a normal thing to do. What.

Jblx2• 1 month ago

I wonder how many surveillance cameras are currently in operation.

hootz7• 1 month ago

While they are a problem, they are a different problem from spy cameras capturing you up close for the benefit of a single person. Surveillance cameras are for shady governments and maybe "security", camera glasses are for straight up creeps.

drdaeman7• 1 month ago

Glasses’ camera [usually] sits right next to couple more cameras embedded in wearer’s skull. [Almost] nobody has any problem with those.

That strongly suggests me it’s not the cameras that are problematic, but something about what happens to the images.

vkou3• 1 month ago

Most people understand that the difference between your camera and your eyes is that one records an image, while the other records a very rough description of an image.

hootz7• 1 month ago

I guess people wearing spy camera glasses won't do anything at all with the images! /s

vkou3• 1 month ago

Hell, I (like anyone else) grab photos with my phone on vacation, and when I take a picture of a busy market, I do my best to avoid including people in my photographs.

People in places I visit are just trying to live their lives, they aren't some kind of human zoo for me.

hootz7• 1 month ago

Yeah, someone giving me even the slightest hint of being uncomfortable already makes me instantly delete their photo. Like, I want to photograph the public without ruining spontaneous moments, but I don't want to make others uncomfortable or mad at me because of my photographs.

jameson2• 1 month ago

Exactly.

The problem with photo since the birth of social media is that it's permanently stored in the internet, literally.

Photos used to be personal and (mostly) temporary. I may take a photo in public, develop, then share with the close ones and store in the photo book. Photo may be somehow passed onto others but likely thrown away eventually when I become less of importance to them, and it'll worn out.

With photos now uploaded to social media or the "cloud", they exist permanently as a means of backups, sold to 3rd party (knowingly or unknowingly) analyzed to "improve the experience of the platform".

drdaeman7• 1 month ago

That permanence is a bit of a myth. Bit rot is as real as physical one. At least four cloud storages (Bitcasa, hubiC, Ubuntu One, Cyphertite) I’ve used in the past are gone.

basisword• 1 month ago

And we're already seeing a tonne of creepy bastards harassing women using the glasses and they have no recourse because "public place". They should be outright banned imo. I see no benefit to them and I genuinely cannot see the day everyone is running around wearing the same few brands of glasses because they provide that much value. I had to wear regular glasses for a few years and they were a pain in the ass. I'm not doing that voluntarily so I can see live ads and reviews as I walk past restaurants.

Legend24403• 1 month ago

You have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public. It is completely legal to film someone on the street.

This is important for other reasons, as it is the same law that allows you to film cops.

fusslo• 1 month ago

law != ethics

dgellow6• 1 month ago

It's actually country specific, you don't have a universal rule that you can legally record people in public

whilenot-dev2• 1 month ago

This seems like a US-centric view, because "it is NOT completely legal to film someone on the street" in the european country I live.

drawfloat2• 1 month ago

In America. That is not true for all other countries.

And in even more countries it is legal to film, but it's not legal to send that footage back to Meta's servers for use in LLM training.

hootz7• 1 month ago

As someone already said, I am not talking about legality, but about ethics.

WesolyKubeczek2• 1 month ago

In some jurisdictions, it depends. You may film “a street”, and people go into and out of the frame all the time, and it’s okay. But if you take a random passerby and make them the focus of your recording, you may run into problems.

Gigachad• 1 month ago

What you have a reasonable expectation of is decided by society, not some unmoving law of physics.

A country could very easily decide you do have the right to go outside without creeps recording you with spy glasses.

thatmf• 1 month ago

The one thing I appreciate about smart glasses is that it broadcasts the wearer's terrible personality loud and clear and I can thus avoid them.

ChrisArchitect• 1 month ago

Banray.eu

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47650022

everdrive• 1 month ago

There's a mad dash right now. Everyone is sprinting as fast as possible to invent and propagate the worst technology possible. Oh, you thought smart phones ruined society? Well good news, smart glasses are finally viable. You just won't believe what they'll come up with next, and everyone will buy it, and everyone will be worse off.

NBJack• 1 month ago

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

Meta: We created the portable Occular Torment Nexus. We believe you should always be present in the Nexus, even with others around you. And thanks to our partnership with Popular Glasses Company, you can be tormented in style!

whiplash451• 1 month ago

Why are we even allowing this in Europe? These smart glasses are just plain data collection and surveillance in plain sight. When does the nightmare stop?

haxiomic• 1 month ago

The internal memo from Meta’s Reality Labs notes that the current situation in the U.S 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,” says the document.

https://www.biometricupdate.com/202602/meta-plans-launch-of-...

dgellow6• 1 month ago

That's so fucking cynical. I cannot imagine how bad the internal culture has to be for such a thing to be said so openly

WesolyKubeczek2• 1 month ago

I’m actually glad they say the quiet part out loud. Leaves no room for doubt about their nature.

nicce• 1 month ago

It is so sad. Money always wins.

bigfatkitten• 1 month ago

I want to see the original memo just so I can put a name and a face to the utter ghoul responsible.

netsharc2• 1 month ago

A video I saw on social media concludes that this is a product of a misogynistic company.

Couldn't agree more.

tencentshill• 1 month ago

So they have maybe 3 years of fun before regulations return. Never miss an opportunity to be evil, I guess. Hopefully in 2029 they can be fined for all of the money they end up making from this.

DANmode2• 1 month ago

By who?

It will be explained very concisely to the next President how much soft power and security comes from having access to that Meta…data…and the train will be allowed to continue as-is for 15+ years.

Then they’ll make a big multi-year show of going after them on paper, the way that’s happening with Google.

red_admiral• 1 month ago

The EU's tech laws have some good parts and some bad parts. If this goes through, I personally will consider it a very good part.

dgellow6• 1 month ago

Assuming they are recording strangers speaking in public, that's illegal in Germany without explicit consent: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...

Even without sharing the recording.

Legend24403• 1 month ago

This is the laziest possible implementation of smart glasses.

What I want is an overlay that gives you useful information about the world. Like you're looking at a store shelf and it tells you if the price is low or high compared to other stores in the area. Or you're fixing your car and it shows the steps you need to execute.

A camera recording is neither smart nor useful IMO.

stymaar• 1 month ago

A camera recording is neither smart nor useful IMO.

It's very useful for big brother Zuckerberg though.

mncharity2• 1 month ago

I've long since given up on seeing thoughtful policy space discussion, here or anywhere, but I see drdaeman's 'I need assistance in recognizing faces' being downvoted here today, so briefly...

Europe and the US have had different legal perspectives on public photography, and each has had both costs and benefits. Perhaps those contrasts could help inform discussion.

As with any tech in its infancy, thought experiments might illuminate options. I suspect few here would object to a camera feeding only a chip which outputs only hand pose for gestural UI. What if that chip output a facial UID, for help with 'hey, that's someone I know', and that UID was transient and never left the glasses? What if that UID was sent to Meta for arbitrary monitization? If the last two drew different answers, then perhaps the downvoted suggestion to regulate the use, not the camera, might deserve discussion.

Notable elephants in the room include: Trust - with societal lying normalized, and misrepresentation pervasive in policy discourse, it's not unreasonable to suggest that we're societally incapable of regulating use, so broad prohibitions are the only policy tool available. Imperial conservative stagnation - as with drone's "yes it could be an economically transformative technology, and a militarily critical industry, but at every stage of its exploration, it must be perfectly safe(tm)!" (the emph bit heard here on HN) - turning your back on modernization and reform has consequences when you have rival states. Privilege - having done dementia caregiving, there are lots of people whose lives would be profoundly improved by having ride-along see-what-they-see AI companions - "Did I have dinner? Yes, 10 minutes ago. You had X. Maybe you'd like a snack of Y to get more protein?" - even a valid claim of "this tech would hurt me" deserves a pause for "but how might it help others?".

I wish we had some social tech to facilitate doing better at this kind of discussion.

em-bee• 1 month ago

What if that chip output a facial UID, for help with 'hey, that's someone I know'

what if i don't want to be recognized by you? or by anyone else? the problem is not that it allows some people to recognize me. the problem is that it allows everyone to identify everyone else at scale.

if this tool can help someone because they have a medical condition then we can make these devices specifically available for them. that's just like allowing support animals in places where animals are not usually allowed to be.

mncharity2• 1 month ago

I like the "service animal" analogy. But it's not that easy to escape the ethical fork/tradeoff, as the breeding of universal companions would be far better resourced than that of service animals. Then it's not "only some people are allowed to have cell phones", it's more "we'll ban cell phones and if someone really really has needs, we'll let them have a milk-carton brick of a radio telephone", with an implicit "and that will be good enough for them".

louwrentius• 1 month ago

Smart Glasses are for creepy men who want to make pictures of women without their consent in secret. I hope these glasses will be banned.

  Lawmaker Cifrová Ostrihoňová said that, from a gender-based violence perspective, it is "simply unacceptable for any woman to worry about being filmed in public secretly and then worry about those images being shared online.”

100% this

FpUser• 1 month ago

On the other hand if I am interacting with the government persons I very much like it to be automatically recorded just in case. fuck never mind government, when I deal with the companies / services I may want to record the whole thing as well

petethepig• 1 month ago

I got sent to immigration secondary while crossing the border in Amsterdam earlier this week because they were worried I was taking videos of their “military object” with my meta glasses. They told me to take them off while i’m at the airport.

This is so silly — they only record when you press a button, not continuously, and they can only record for like 3 mins max and there’s a light that indicates to everyone around you when they are recording.

Meanwhile there’s a bunch of people in line with their phones out, which do not indicate when the camera is on. But somehow that’s different.

It’s a bummer because they’re great for taking family photos/videos. Also great as an Airpods replacement. A little flimsy but the tech is 90% there.

I wish Apple made them instead of Meta — I think they’d do a better job of bringing them to the market while maintaining public trust.

spwa4• 1 month ago

Is anyone else curious why the authors of ChatControl have so much interest in "protecting your privacy" ? Supposedly it's to "protect the children" but ANY EU country is implementing harsh savings on children. On medical care for children, on child-care, on education, on child services, you name it. None of them are being funded adequately.

New privacy frontier: Europe eyes crackdown on smart glasses

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