That must have cost a lot. To get posters like that made.
Release a model without a camera and people might actually give it a chance.
I agree it would be nice to have a non-skeezy offering, but I think that would be an entirely different product line.
[Edit: oh, well, I didn't realize some but not all of the meta glasses do actually have a tiny display built in. That would be the other use case, for the looking at things, through your glasses.]
* Okay, the sound quality is just alright, but if Meta wanted to pivot to headphones, I'm all ears, as it were.
PS: two of my friends found no issues with these, bought a pair each and excitedly recorded with many other people present. Like, the issue didn't even register. I foresee that a lot of people will follow, if the price will be accessible, and one day it will be.
From what I can tell we aren't particularly close to putting this all together in a consumer usable package.
But that can only be a niche use-case - the sort of thing you'd expect to work better as a minor product from Logitech or GoPro, rather than as a celebrity-endorsed consumer flagship from a tech behemoth.
They also have to look radically different, because anyone who sees someone wearing the current design will always just assume the person using them is a creeper recording creepy videos whether or not the glasses are even capable of doing that. The association is already made from the current model.
The more nefarious motive is to inject a layer of AI between humans and nature.
A self-definition as an intrusive peeping Tom is not easily overcome.
The translation feature is also available on your phone which you'll need to pull out when using it anyway, because otherwise the other party won't understand what you're saying either...
I think a major use case for live translation is one where the other party is standing opposite to you.
Even the “conversation mode” built into Google translate or the iPhone app is useless. I can only imagine it working in the sterile environment it was probably designed in: a conference room with two people trying there hardest to make it work.
I live abroad and travel a lot for photography. Whenever I’m using a translator app, it’s typically a chaotic situation like haggling with a taxi driver, a meal with a group of strangers who invited me to eat with them, lots of background noise. The mode that everyone defaults to, without fail, is to use their own phone to speak or type a message and then hold it up in front of their interlocutor’s face. Sometimes they mix in some fragments of English or I know some fragments of their language. It’s lossy but it works.
I can’t imagine a wearable that would perform better. A notepad that can magically translate little messages is about as far as I would want it to go. Tech is pretty awful at intermediating human relations.
The camera feature is also really nice for a lot of non-creepy use cases. From translating signs and plaques in front of me w/o pulling out my phone, to taking 1st person videos on amusement park rides, to photos of my son without having to view the world through my phone waiting for just the right shot.
Heck video calls with Grandma where I can chase my son around the house and let Grandma see everything, or when we read books together over video chat.
Meta glasses are great for parents, kids do all sorts of wacky things and I don't want to be one of those parents always waiting with my phone out so I can capture the perfect picture.
Clearly there is a difference between someone waving a SLR camera around (digital or film) and the possibilities of today and where the content ends up.
However... the pub/bar/nightclub, gym, pool, etc etc etc isn't public. It is the private property of the owner. So if people don't like them - as is evident it seems - these glasses should hit social resistance.
What’s the story here other than a gruesome image?
I wish their storytelling matched their visual designs in terms of imagination.
So yeah, "educating people against some technology" is kind of the only way to help people see what is going on.
I mean, the government isn't run by aliens... probably.
A young, authoritarian-minded elitist aiming to force their views onto the rest of us 'stupid sheep'...with the implicit threat of a gun to the head via the state's monopoly on violence.
Have you ever examined the idea that, people doing things you don't agree with may not all be less enlightened than you? And that, in fact, it could be you who is a sheep, angrily shouting in unison with the mob in the midst of a trendy moral panic...scapegoating all the worlds problems and your own personal frustrations onto some dumb social media app?
On one end, we have a megacorporation that has been proven to engage in: willingly sharing private user data with random third parties; accepting and running ads for foreign state actors targeting another country; creating one of the most sophisticated tracking regimes in the world; collecting oceans of data to build profiles on everyone, user and not; enabling a genocide to be coordinated on their platform; using their money and power to influence legislation in their favor; knowingly designing their platforms to be incredibly addictive, including deliberately discussing how to get children hooked; and a practically endless list of other things.
On the other end, we have HN commenters. They are really angry and that they want to undo some of the damage described above. They are pretty jaded about how elegantly Meta has been able to exploit addiction, network effects and the human mind to keep people complicit.
To me it's obvious that #2 is the true evil. They obviously won't succeed because wealth controls our reality, but just for daring to question the status quo, they are authoritatian elitist sheep with superiority complexes. True freedom is when the world's biggest companies get to do whatever they want, slavery is when people to use their democratically elected governments to oppose that. Can you smell all that freedom in the air?
Fixed it for you.
I absolutely wouldn't want them to incorporate a camera though. They should not have one at all.
And I would want them with open firmware from a respectable company or organisation. So these ones are a non starter obviously.
Do you really need this for that?
The dumb speaker that OpenAI is hoping you stick in your home to spy on you is not some preposterously worthless piece of crap from beginning to end without exception. It's just a creepy mess that's nowhere near worth it for anybody who cares about themselves or anyone who ever visits their domicile. That doesn't mean that it isn't pretty nice to have your hands full of grease and be able to get a small piece of information using your voice.
All about the details. You want to ethically produce something private at reasonable cost without excessive energy usage to serve useful functions, sign me up. Just no cloud, no privacy invasion, an entire impossible wishlist for companies not as cool as e.g. Framework.
Because the business owners figured out that they could get you to pay for things that turn you into an even more valuable product.
The cat is out of the bag and there is no reason to believe there will ever be a reversal of this. Not enough people care, and there isn't enough demand for "clean" products to displace the big companies. People aren't going to pay $1,000 for a privacy-respecting version of a product that's available for $200.
As I see it, the only solution (if you really want one) is to reject the idea that every aspect of your life has to be tech-ified. To say no to digital crack because you recognize it's rotting your brain, harming your relationships, etc.
You don't need to stare at a screen 15 hours a day for work, education, information and entertainment. You don't need your watch, television, speakers, glasses, fridge and toilet to be connected to the internet. You don't need a smart phone or watch or pair of glasses to be the "load-bearing" foundation of your relationships with friends, family and community.
And all my stuff is connected yes but not through big tech cloud. It is pretty easy to avoid all that. I use home assistant and I buy stuff specifically because it supports local connectivity. The biggest issue is whatsapp for now.
Anyone truly interested in their well-being should make sure they're not treating digital interactions as a 1:1 substitute for real-life connection.
Just saying it's not impossible to have your cake and eat it.
The only issue right now is that home control is relatively slow because home assistant plonks way too much context into the pipeline. It would work much better with an elective tool model like MCP but they don't have this yet.
PS: You could also choose the new Pine64 voice thing, It's looking pretty decent. It wasn't out yet when I bought mine.
Again there the problem was not the display, it was the camera. And Google glass didn't even use it for any tracking purpose.
I don't think the issue is that it can't be done without the camera. I think the issue is that the whole product exists to get those cameras out there. Data is the new gold, those vision AIs need to be trained. So they've never even tried without one.
Where is the exact line - i.e. can you use Lidar? Infrared depth-sensing? Or do these provide too much data such that the scene could be recreated?
(I'm exploring this as a thought experiment, in general I agree that people shouldn't be carrying hidden cameras on their faces, and if those cameras are at all connected to Meta then it's much worse!)
That would be ok I guess. That's not enough to capture much of anything even with a continuous feed.
You'd be Mark Zuckerberg's idea of an ideal person.
- Wear sunglasses or glasses now
- Take pics or videos with your phone
Smart glasses are very handy and when traveling especially solo asking about what your seeing in front of you is handy/informative.
I can see when AI becomes 100% reliable with smart glasses we all are almost know it alls. Everything and anything we need to know will be presented in front of us.
Ok all the above sounds crazy to most, but ive enjoyed using my Metas since Oct 2023 (had to buy another paid April 2025) though Meta glasses are sh!t in terms of durability. So i can recommend smart glasses but not really Metas especially if you like to buy technology that lasts!
Positioning smartphone camera seems way easier then positioning your head for a good photo. What do you do when you want low perspective? Or an overhead view?
Keep going with that line of imagination and it's easy to understand how even someone burned on the Metaverse could be excited about the kinds of pitches Zuckerberg must give for his future visions. (Legitimately exciting thoughts, w/optimist hat on)
Have you ever unintentionally recorded a stranger?
Pardon but I don't understand your question cause if you think of it all humans have done the above since the day cameras or video cameras existed.
Further, im pretty sure smart glasses to AI devices are the next big thing. Meta probably will not win the smart glass race as many hate them due to privacy reasons. Apple a privacy focused company could add tech to blur out and or anonymize faces of those in the background to calm peoples fears.
How are these things not publicly shamed out of existence?
It feels like each year lately has been a new Black Mirror episode.
I need a device that tells me who I’m talking to if I’ve been introduced to them before and tell me how I know them (This is Bob Dobbs, you first met him in Texas in 1985 and he saved you at that party when you needed some Slack)”. Especially great when I meet someone out of context.
But bad actors mean I’ll probably never get this prosthesis.
These things are peak ick
Honestly, just take notes and reread them sometimes, maybe?
Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely anti a lot of things, including people wearing cameras all the time, but I see no logical way to stop it without stomping on freedoms. In this case, defense will be your ally, whatever form that may take,eg wearing a mask.
If I had to choose between flock cameras and meta glasses existing, I'd choose the glasses.
And in practice many of the undesirable things that will happen with these glasses are 100% legal. For instance people are going to bars, finding drunk girls, and recording everything for clicks and humiliation. Ban the filming and you ban the glasses. Banning the publication would do nothing since there's endless ways to share "content" that would sidestep this.
And that's just one trend. There's endless ways for this stuff to be abused, yet very few ways it'll achieve anything good. And those are much more hypothetical than the endless abuses which are already rife in spite of these things being extremely fringe.
I happen to were in exact scenario that you have mentioned, and I think I understand what you mean. Just as an anecdote - no, it doesn’t always work that way. At least it didn’t worked that way with me, because I held a different belief. It irked me for a moment - when I recognized a camera the association of topic-adjacent controversies sprung to mind. However, I dismissed it, and in retrospect I can assure that my behavior returned to natural. And if not for Meta specifically, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me at all.
(The person with glasses had an - IMHO - very legit use case for having a device like that, if this matters.)
But that’s just me with my weird beliefs. In my head a camera is a sensor. It’s no fundamentally different from wearer’s own eyes to me.
When I emphasized “actually” I was (very poorly) trying to say that it ideally shouldn’t be a problem, because its not what causes harm, only provides a way to cause it. But you’re right, when the abuse is de-facto the only prevalent spoken about use case, and legal side doesn’t match social expectations, it creates all those ill effects, so even if it possibly shouldn’t be problematic - it becomes such, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy’s way.
People nearly always go for the lowest hanging fruits, I shouldn’t hate us for this. But it’s really depressing, to be honest.
And in exchange we get... what? Somebody can record things slightly faster than the approximately 3 seconds it'd take you to do so on your phone?
Whatever happened to give me liberty or give me death
Despite the f. up American idea that people have no expectation of any privacy in public, recording others on behalf of Meta is stomping on freedoms
One day perhaps Meta Glasses will be the same. I really like them. They're a spectacular (haha) addition to a sightseeing trip. At the aquarium you can ask them what you're looking at and it'll tell you about the fish, at the playground you can record your kids running around, and you've got music where you go and so on. The problem, of course, is that they have short battery life and I don't want to switch from my smart glasses to my other glasses since the entire point is availability.
Here's a video of my daughter running around the playground from the perspective of my wife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcLAByw6ZYc
Do you expect your opinion to change as your daughter grows up and makes her own experiences with being filmed all the time?
I feel reminded of those always on AI cameras from a few years ago (google?) that were advertised to young parents because that’s like the one singular moment where it’s pretty uncontroversial to do this.
Kids are cute and full of energy, hands full, don’t want to miss a moment.
But smart glasses have real implications for our society around bullying, harassment, stalking etc.
All things that older children and young adults are affected by the most
If I were in high school again I would not want smart glasses to be normal
I doubt I'd even notice if someone was leaning back and video recording me from their seat as I walk down the street. It would just look like a lounging person reading social media.
But yeah, I probably would prefer to have her have access to at least some private spaces without any recording so she can rest easy, but in public that's a societal shift and the smart goggles add very little. It's just inherent in computers that their processes to see also store high-fidelity. Presumably with sufficiently advanced video generation all acts will be deniable or some other such thing will occur.
It's been over 20 years since then and it's still just as awkward to take a call in public. People will instinctively prefer a quiet place away from the crowd. Otherwise others may eavesdrop, think you're talking to them, or are crazy.
You'll find that most of those people with airpods are listening to something, not talking on a call. The most popular "smart glasses" that I see everywhere don't have cameras. They're "AR" HUDs for watching movies or playing games.
It's not about social acceptance. These hardware designs still suck big time.
Yeah that's still weird. Last time it happened to me was in the City of London near Liverpool St (ironic as we're talking about banking phonecalls). Out of nowhere a guy walking towards me starts speaking, for all the world like he's trying to talk to me, so I stopped and said "Hey, can I help you?"
Nope, strides on past, then I noticed the airpods.
Thanks to binge-watching CGP Grey's channel this week, I know exactly what you're referring to, and why you wrote it fully-specified like that!
Two very different use cases. The vast majority of folks wearing AirPods are listening, not talking. The former is not disruptive to others while the latter is.
How does the ad know from what angle I'm watching? "We're always watching" must be literally true!
Anyway, gotta love British humor.
Monitoring everything around you, all the time.
And what you've heard about the UK police is likely to have been comically exaggerated by people with an agenda. There are problems, yes, they do not arrest thousands of people a year for being mean on twitter, no.
(I'm rate limited and can't reply below - when people look into these figures what they tend to find is the majority are people getting arrested for using services like whatsapp or facebook messenger to stalk, harass and threaten others, often in a domestic-violence situation. These are categorised as social media-related but it's not what is often described or assumed by american commentators, that they said something politically sensitive in public, and OH MY GOSH just look at the state of free speech in Britain. It's often much more along the lines of abusers threatening to kill an ex that finally managed to leave them.)
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
It's everything from sending death threats in an email or SMS to your ex who finally got up the courage to leave your abusive ass, to sending unsolicited dick-pics on whatsapp, to bomb threats old-school paper-mailed to a school, to direct, public incitements to mass murder on twitter during a riot, hoax calls to emergency services and a ton of other stuff. But it gets thrown around as if it's all about people making 'edgy' social media posts. I believe at least some of these would be grounds for arrest in the bastion of free speech that is the USA too?
Is there a problem with police in the UK overreaching on speech on social media? Yes I believe there is, and there are specific examples to show that. Is that figure you've got there in any way meaningful? On its own, no. Is it a delicious tidbit for people with scant regard for the truth and a specific agenda to push? You betcha.
It doesn't need to be thousands for it to be worrying.
From [1]:
> The Metropolitan Police has awarded Father Ted creator and Irish comedian Graham Linehan £25,000 and an unreserved apology after they arrested him last year as his plane touched down at Heathrow airport.
> Last year, Graham Linehan — who now lives in Arizona, United States of America — was arrested by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow airport in one of the most shocking incidents we have seen in years.
> What was Graham's supposed crime? Three gender-critical posts on X. This is despite the fact that gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act 2010 and were reaffirmed by last year's landmark Supreme Court ruling, which settled that "sex" is defined by biology, not gender identity.
Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word. It also seems that it is far more than one, too:
> General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young, said: "I'm beginning to lose count of the number of cases we've fought in which the police have arrested someone for a tweet, decided to take no further action and then had to pay them substantial compensation for wrongful arrest.
[1] https://freespeechunion.org/news/met-police-apologises-and-p...
I very much agree, which is another reason I think facts are important. There are real issues and discussing them using real data is great, productive etc.
But instead of rational debate what I see time and again is spurious figures like these thrown around by talking heads, repeated by posters like those above, trying to ... well I don't know, I don't fully understand why the US right wing thinks it's a smart move to demonise its allies at the moment, but here we are.
> Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word.
Yeah, it's a gross abuse of police power. Linehan seems like he's a bit of a nob, but being a bit of a nob in public shouldn't attract anything like this sort of attention. The police need to be reined in seriously, and to have pointed questions put to them about what they think is their damn job and where the money is going. At least it looks like he won the day in court, and the policy has changed - https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/jul/09/graham-lineh... - but IMHO heads should be rolling over this.
- people are being arrested, charged, and prosecuted, for opinions
- that number is greater than 1
- the number of people being arrested under speech laws, per year, is reportedly[0] over 12,000
- some substantial number of those are for opinions, some are not but we don't know how many either way [0] (and considering the government were attempting to delete the Courtdesk archive[1], I'd say that's by design)
- "convictions and sentencings for the relevant offences had decreased dramatically" [0]
This points to overzealous policing and vague laws.
The criticisms by Americans, who are surely aghast at this state of affairs given their founding principles, cannot be dismissed until better numbers are available, but while the number we do know is > 1, the criticisms are valid if not entirely sound (but may be entirely sound).
[0] https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...
[1] https://www.legalcheek.com/2026/02/ministry-of-justice-order...
I disagree that the American commentary on it is well informed, motivated by anything approaching principle, or really anything other than a desire to paint the UK in the worst possible light. Such figures being bandied around form part of a larger narrative along with false claims about "no-go" areas and hysteria about London having a Muslim mayor.
It's effectively rage-porn for the US right wing. We can see this in the continued framing as "12000 people arrested for inappropriate speech", when that number includes death threats as part of (for example) domestic violence cases.
Meanwhile, of course, let's ignore that the US President is weaponising the civil justice system in the US to silence critics and journalism he finds unfavourable.
> (but may be entirely sound)
We know they're not entirely sound, because the category of offences is wide enough that the number of these offences which are not, in fact, related to expressing one's opinion on social media is substantial. The arrests cover stalking and harassment, making death threats and threats of violence, racial abuse, intimidation, and inciting hatred via any form of communication down to and including snail mail.
So if there's one thing we do know, it's that the actual number arrested for "posts they make online" that should really be considered free speech is unlikely to be anywhere near that, and as such the statistic itself is useless. It's like looking at the overall death rate for the US (approximately 3 million) and proclaiming to be shocked at the results of gun ownership. But it will continue to be thrown around because it fits a specific narrative.
They arrest thousands of people for posts they make online. The public data does not break down what site it the arrests were from.
It's clear they arrest some people for posts online, and that is bad. But the numbers aren't clear at all, and the one bandied around most in public at the moments is so not informative that its use is basically propaganda.
Additionally there are laws and expectations around cameras in places like bathrooms. Those laws still exist for smartglasses-wearers, but it can be hard to police if it is not obvious that the glasses have cameras and are recording.
How? This is just going to give a bunch of creepy men an easier way to film me. I'm dreading these getting mainstream adoption.
Damn, just how good is that coffee?
(if that's real, and pulling phone out really is dangerous, can't you just ask the employee to film next time it happens for 10 bucks?)
(1) a single or handful of security-angled cameras controlled by a local business for security purposes
(2) any individual possibly recording you at eye level at any second without you knowing, and having the ability to use and manipulate that footage and upload it to the internet
From my vantage, this appears to be a "rules for thee but not for me" situation. If you support filming in public spaces, but believe restricting that to only those you trust, then this is hypocrisy.
Anyone have data on this? Feelin’ doubtful
How?
What do you think all these glasshole-women are going to do with bunch of (poor quality, grainy night) videos of some drunk bro on the street telling them "nice rack you have there, sweetheart"? Call FBI so they would give chase on a helicopter immediately?
Please stop using ad hominem attacks, this is not the appropriate forum for such remarks.
> "nice rack you have there, sweetheart"
I assume that would be considered sexual harassment in most jurisdictions, which local police should concern themselves with, especially if it's happening to minors.
I'm at a loss for why you brought up the FBI.
I feel quite strongly about people nonconsensually filming other people in public spaces. The proliferation of guides about disabling the indicators of active camera on smart glasses make me even more hesitant to normalize or condone such behavior.
> I assume that would be considered sexual harassment in most jurisdictions, which local police should concern themselves with, especially if it's happening to minors.
Stealing an Amazon package from your porch is also illegal in most jurisdictions yet police won't do anything with a video from your Ring doorbell showing some generic young-dude-in-a-baseball-cap-and-a-hoodie taking it away. They are only interested in such videos when investigating (what they consider) serious crimes.
> especially if it's happening to minors
You want minors to wear Meta glasses and film all the time? I shudder imagining growing up in such dystopia.
> I'm at a loss for why you brought up the FBI.
Sorry, that was a snark about how people who support installing smart doorbells and Flock cameras everywhere imagine police would react to a video showing someone stealing a bag from their car or a package from their porch.
yes, please.
i think that is exactly the direction we should be pushing. this creepy compulsion to record random people is weird af.
Before, when it was he said, she said, it was always tenuous for the person with less power to pursue the issue. Now, they can finally access consequences for people violating their freedoms.
1. Women do it. 2. The government does it. 3. Private businesses do it.
What?!
I'm not sure this is helping your argument. Why are some entities given the benefit of the doubt, while most individuals are not?
This ridiculous idea that "it's in public so you have no expectation of privacy" is a semantic retcon, the pervasiveness of cameras is new and fundamentally changes your level of exposure in the public sphere. Overtly recording people in public is not really OK. Face-mounted, covert recording is another step too far and offensive to most people.
If you genuinely wish to understand the attitude, may I recommend doing a deep dive into the many fine articles written about this back in 2013-15, when Google failed to launch the original glasshole-wear.
This rules out the use of dash cams then.. but I'm sure you realize the public benefit those offer, so I'm reluctant to accept this argument.
I agree that dash cams are for the most part OK, because for the most part they're recording for safety reasons and evidence in case of accidents. But sitting in a coffee shop as a private citizen, recording everyone that comes in without any particular justification would not really be OK, covertly or overtly. Even though the owner might be doing the same thing for security.
So perhaps "covert recording of other people in public without an accepted, socially justifiable reason, is not OK"
Then you are going to have a hard time in a society filled with other humans, or living with a legal system that takes human complexity and grey areas into account in so many different ways.
Outside of a parser or a maths class, rules are rarely that concrete.
(Reading your other comments, I am sorry that your experiences have lead you to be so scared going about your day to day life that you think recording every interaction is a necessary thing to do. I'm afraid you're not going to find a lot of people who agree with that, and many who will find the idea very intrusive, though I suspect you're far from the only one in your position.
FYI if you go down this route, in some countries it is a legal, not just social, requirement that people be notified that you're recording them, particularly when it comes to audio, see one-party or two-party consent jurisdictions etc, while recording of direct threats may be legit, blanket recording of all interactions or of other people's conversations, as a precautionary measure, may not be)