It does seem harder to tape the phone camera since the in/out motion into your pocket I imagine would remove the tape.

The manufacturer might access it, Apple states they don't, Google and Samsung I'm not sure. A bad actor with 0days might too.

If you post a video online of someone's worst day which you decided to film for entertainment, they can legally go after you.

Have you been alive for the past decade?

As another poster mentioned, it can in fact be more difficult. Almost all of my social clubs/groups over the years migrated away from websites/forums to FaceBook. I could give up an account, at the cost of losing effectively my entire social calendar.

I have a generic account with no real user data, but they still get all my content from the social groups so they still win I suppose.

My point ultimately I guess is that I have chosen the ability to continue to have a strong social life over my zuck hating principles.

https://japandaily.jp/why-you-cant-turn-off-the-camera-shutt...

That's just nonsense. Your feeds seem to be polluted by what you are seeking out, as I've never seen a video on any service that shows humiliation of anyone.

I watch a lot of 1st ammendment audit videos, and that is never about humiliation, though many people end up looking very ignorant of the laws concerning recording in public which is in the 1st ammendment.

This is why paparazzi exist and how they operate. It's the dirty, dingy cost of having a free press, freedom of travel, freedom to hold public officials accountable, subject to the same laws you are; you can't waffle or restrict or grant exceptions, because those inevitably, invariably get abused by those in power.

Like we could have navigational AR-glasses. The wearer sees arrows on the floor where to walk. And we could choose to not let anyone wear them in public even though what they do is useful, and there aren't any real privacy issues. But people around the wearer don't know that. That's the privacy concern.

Shouldn't there be a discussion about what that means? What _is_ privacy? Is it completely black or white, all or nothing? Are some kinds of privacy breaches more acceptable than others?

I feel that the "you can have no expectation of privacy in public" discussion is some times used as if it's some sort of fundamental truth that must not be challenged. If people _want_ to have more privacy in public, whatever that means, then let's make it happen.

Not perfect, but better than nothing I guess. I don't think I've noticed the glasses IRL anywhere, but if I start seeing them, I'm definitely installing the app and avoiding any interactions with those people.

https://xkcd.com/1807/

I propose we just assume people with meta glasses are recording others in public and we call them creeps. Shaming works, we should use it more.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9sVqKFkjiY

Cops also announce their presence in uniforms and are operating as government agents. People already moderate their behavior around cops so being recorded isn’t as big a deal.

Doorbell cameras are also typically pointed toward public streets, where again, there is no expectation of privacy. Even then, many people have been removing Ring cameras after they were shown to automatically upload video without user's knowledge.

A face camera has no light or warnings (you just put tape over the small light), and is operated by a pervert.

Not sure how it is where you live, but doorbell cameras are commonly criticized where I live. With many people claiming they don't feel comfortable walking around anymore knowing that the entire neighborhood is filming them.

People are more okay with cameras in public areas and less okay if it's in intimate, social, private situations, inside apartments, individual offices etc.

Body cam - used to protect the police and people being policed in a potentially hot conflict. Recording is scoped to these specific interactions that rarely occur for most people.

Doorbell cam - highly controversial. See response to dog-finding superbowl ad.

Body cam wore on face - Mass surveillance in potentially every conceivable social context. Data owned by Meta, a company known for building a profile on people that don't even use their products.

I think the difference is that these cameras are relatively concealed, and can be used to record every interaction, even in pretty intimate/private settings. Yes you could do this with a cell phone but it would be pretty obvious your recording if you're trying to get more than just the audio of an interaction.

There's very little sense to me in searching for meaning in any of this. It just is, people are that way. There are no lines and boundaries based on anything but just whims.

It's difficult to draw a bright line between these activities:

- I told someone else something I saw the other day

- I painted a picture of the public square or wrote a book about specific activities that I witnessed

- I specifically remembered an individual based on their face, visible tattoos, location, license plate, or some other unique factor and voluntarily testified to that fact in a court of law

- I spent every day at the same corner making note of the various people/vehicles that I saw

- I stuck a camera at that same point (perhaps on my private properly directly abutting a public space) and recorded everything, posted it publicly on the internet, and used automated technology to identify people, text, vehicles, etc

- I paid a different person every day to follow someone around and record what they did

- I developed a drone system that could follow specific individuals/vehicles from airspace I'm allowed to occupy

Pretty much everything I described above is legal in most of the United States. Obviously it gets creepier and more uncomfortable going down the list (I don't really like it when I'm the subject of any of these activities) but how do you stop this?

I'll at least throw out some options

- Implement some form of right to forget

- Forbid individuals or organizations from doing any of these

- Enact actual "civil rights" level privacy protections (extend HIPAA? automatic copyright for human faces? new amendment?) that include protection of individual's DNA, unique facial features, and other "uniquely human" attributes

To record a video on your phone you need to hold your phone up pointed at the other person, usually not in the same way you would normally use a phone. If you see someone holding his phone steady at face level and pointing at something without making finger movements, you know he is filming. If someone is pointing his phone down towards the ground and scrolling around with his thumb, you know he is probably not.

To record from a pair of smart glasses you just need to look at someone, as you would normally look at any other thing. Yes there will be an LED on, but the person being recorded probably couldn't see it if it is in a bright, busy environment and you are more than a few steps away, plus there will be aftermarket modifications to disable the LED. In short, there is no way you can reliably tell if someone's smart glasses are filming you. You have to assume that worst.

Then again, there may be some selection bias at play…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/nyregion/nyc-nightlife-no...

The world is not deterministic, and we can shape norms of how we interact with each other. We don't have to accept being constantly recorded just because the technology makes it possible.

No, we need to make this as socially radioactive as possible. We don't need to establish a permission structure to allow Facebook to continue doing this without repercussion.

I’ve seen stories of people banned from gyms for taking selfies in the locker room as people were walking by.

And we probably ought to regulate how all such footage is handled.

> banning all non-consensual recordings in all spaces

It's a false dichotomy. Even if recording is permitted that doesn't mean the systemic invasion of personal privacy needs to be.

Just FYI, they do heavily market this towards RX glasses wearers. So, you wouldn't quite be able to just as simply ask someone to take off their glasses and no longer be able to see.

Really it should just be in the UI. Click Upload this and get 10c/minute or whatever for the video. Choose what you upload. That'd be closer in effect to using social media.

It isn't really "rhetoric", they're talking like they believe this actually happens, this is strategy.

And I tend to agree with them that things like attention and political capital are ultimately finite resources.

I've found that the "we can do two things" and "we can walk and chew bubblegum" line of argument to be simplistic and just wrong (and pretty incredibly patronizing). I think the world works exactly the way Meta thinks that it does here.

It might blow up and turn into a Streisand effect, but more often than not this kind of strategy works.

Much like how people think they can multitask and talk on the phone and drive at the same time and every scientific measure of it shows that they really can't.

Is that a good enough explanation to reduce your feelings of being personally targeted?

On September 11th 2001 a UK government department's press chief told their subordinates it was a "good day to bury bad news".

The idea is pretty simple - you might be obligated to announce something that you know will be poorly received, like poor train performance figures, but you can decide the exact day you announce it, like on a day when thousands have died in a terror attack. What would otherwise be front-page news is relegated to a few paragraphs on page 14.

Facebook proposes a similar strategy: Get the feature ready to go, wait until there's some much bigger news story, and deploy it that day.

> “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.

Every day I understand more and more that I have something really priceless and rare, complete luxury of choice, and 99% of people don't. (as with all things, it has its downside: nothing matters!)

I refused to get "stuck" in my hometown, which motivated me from college dropout to FAANG. Once I got there, it was novel to me that even rich people get "stuck" due to inability to imagine losing status, and also responsiblities that come with obvious, healthy, lifestyle choices (i.e. marriage and kids)

I mean, they don’t. There isn’t a single decent person who has ever worked at Meta, and that started long before this nonsense. The entire company is about the social destruction of its users. Everything anyone there works on drives towards that goal.

But still nefarious. Thats kinda messed up, to be honest.

Do you believe these companies and individuals will ever see consequences for putting this in writing? I don't think they will, and I assume they believe the same based on their actions. Why waste time being "moral" when you don't lose anything for being immoral and stand to gain something if your gamble wins?

I mean, there's a whole philosophical outlook about being a good person and some people just want to do without needing enforcement, but those people also dont tend to become one of the largest corporations on the planet.

Now, one wonders what constitutes "nefarious" or a grey zone worth hiding in their minds.

Most people are just trying to get through their day and not worry about ethical questions.

I'd say that's terrible, but I'm not confident I'd be a better person if my livelihood depended on doing that sort of work, though I hope I'd be better.

> Hey Meta, is it safe to cross the street

> You are absolutely correct to check whether it's safe to cross before crossing! (emoji). Let me check for you(emoji)

> ...10% ...40% ...80% ...100% DONE. (made up progress bar)

> It is perfectly safe to cross right now! (emoji)

> Thanks Meta! (user dies)

Or do you think that those cameras are less secure because the leadership is not good with their people?

I'm not sure I follow the criticism here.

One that bothers me a lot are all the apps that want people to share your contacts to find your friends. This is a quick way for them to get all the contact information, which may also include birthdays and other more sensitive details.

Even if I were to never make a Facebook account, I could almost guarantee they still have my name, address, phone number, DOB, and maybe more.

The distinction here occurs wherever the data is processed, and it sounds as if the difference between using your video for labeling versus privately processing it through an AI is deliberately confusing and obscured to the user by the way the terms of service are written. Once the video is uploaded, which is necessary for the basic function, it's unclear how or whether it can be separated from other streams that do go through labeling. This confusion also seems to be an intentional dark pattern.

"But for the AI assistant to function, voice, text, image and sometimes video must be processed and may be shared onwards. This data processing is done automatically and cannot be turned off."

I’m sure you’ve never said anything callous or snarky, and were a bastion of morality as a teenager.

I mean, not as if I were to visit such sites, right ... but video recordings can be done in numerous ways. Also on small devices. I mean the smartphones are fairly small.

OTOH, Meta could just be desperate for training content and they're just slurping up all recordings by people who've opted into the AI function. It would be great for them to clarify how this works.

It's certainly possible that it's something much more surprising / sinister, but there is a fairly logical combination of settings that I could see a company could argue lets them use the data for training.

I'm also very certain that few users with these settings would expect the images to be shown to actual people, so I'm not defending Meta.

Is it because younger people don't care about privacy anymore?

The terminology you chose is tasteless, loaded, and detracts from your point.

Meta have been desperately searching for “the next big walled garden” for like a decade.

The prize is clear: whatever the next big mass-consumer hardware device is with an app store attached will leech hundreds of billions in fees and enjoy absolute control over everyone building on it.

How about if their glasses either...

1. Can not take pics or videos but its camera is just for AI vision?

or

2. All pics and videos taken through Apple's smart glasses the pics/vids of anyone not in your network (Apple already automatically list faces & sometimes names in your network under "People & Pets," and has done so for years & they are the privacy company) show as anonymous/randomized faces.

I own two pairs of Meta Glasses since 10/2023 and find them very useful to capture or record my own life experiences only. Tho I share hate for them because Meta makes trashy non-durable smart glasses that quickly become dumb glasses. A software update killed my 1st pair in March 2025 and then my next pair couldn't handle water splashes in June 2025.

Sadly the disabled have no choice but to accept the status quo, and facbook gets to virtue signal while holding humanity back another cycle by not selling us an open platform that would actually help people at scale not just now but forever.

dang, could you check what went wrong here? The new title doesn’t represent the article at all. (edit: sent an email, too)

sandbach, if you still have access to editing, maybe you could change it back?

The one containing "hidden" is the one you apparently changed it to originally - I don't think GP can, nor has any reason to - so you initially changed it to.. clickbait?

It seems a serious reach to call "see everything" clickbait.

> First-ever in-utero stem cell therapy for fetal spina bifida repair is safe, study finds

Currently 9th on the front page, is "is safe" also clickbait, since surely it's not 100.0% safe, just like with "see everything" it's surely not every single frame?

The large number of replies this renaming got in a short timeframe is because it's not in line with what we're used to when it comes to title changes on HN.

https://www.imy.se/en/individuals/camera-surveillance/

I sometime ask this person to hide the camera and they generally understand my feeling.

So if you take a video of specific people looking at flowers at the Keukenhof you would have to ask them for permission if you are recording them primarily and publish it but recording for yourself is fine as it is a clearly public space. If you take a picture of all the flower and catch some people in it in the background you are fine. If you do it in a place where people do not expect it they can ask you to remove the video and they have to (e.g. in a restaurant when you are eating as it is not expected to be recorded there).

There are some exceptions for journalism, law enforcement and public good. I doubt strongly any Meta (AI) post would classify for that.

There is also the small caveat that if you can avoid recording innocent bystanders you must. E.g. putting up a doorbell camera and pointing it to the street instead of your door is bad as it's easily avoidable by putting it top down.

Besides that there is the issue of publishing said footage, as others point out.

Even having a fake camera pointing at a public space can be forbidden as it creates surveilance pressure on people using the space.

In fact why on earth would they choose the Ray Ban glasses which are getting highly suspicious?