New privacy frontier: Europe eyes crackdown on smart glasses

rimbo789

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

doubtfuluser

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

Claudus

Smart glasses are for citizens, not subjects.

hootz

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.

thatmf

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

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

everdrive

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.

whiplash451

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

> 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-...

red_admiral

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.

dgellow

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.

Legend2440

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.

mncharity

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.

louwrentius

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

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

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.