nah. no way to know what strangers are doing with them
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
21 points (76.9% liked)
Privacy
50695 readers
659 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
Lets not normalize [smart] glasses.
Why not? AR glasses which don't film the environment but just give a HUD would be rad.
Either we normalize smart glasses or we dont. There's nothing in between. We should not play into Metas surveillance strategy.
I'd say, b/c it's impossible to know that by looking at the glasses.
You see a rando walking around with smart glasses. You can't tell at a glance what it can / cannot do. So you must assume the worst.
I'm with Vegafjord oakframer. Normalization will be problematic. Maybe in a perfect world it coudl be OK. But in our world, abuse at scale is 100% inevitable. That's why I think social pressure against smart glasses is for the best.
load more comments
(4 replies)
There are no "privacy-focused" smart glasses. In fact, all of them are the exact opposite.
"I want a way to record the young ladies at the gym without Meta knowing about it"
I'd like a hud, don't really care about cameras.
If smart glasses become mainstream you'll have many people wearing them in public. And you can choose privacy respecting glasses but most people will not. So maybe let's not make them mainstream.
I mostly just don't see the point in them. If the technology could run a live adblocker that would be a different story.
Literally Black Mirror
The special episode "White Christmas"
There's a bunch of good uses for them (but none that outweigh the privacy problems). For example when you look at someone you met before it can pop up info about them like their name, business relationship to you, topic interests you've talked about before, etc.
That sounds very dystopian to me. Have we humans reached such a low that we need to be reminded of the person's name we are talking to even though we've met them before or business relationships, or what we talked with them?
The glasses I wear everyday which do not contain any kind of electronics already does its job perfectly. Smart Glasses are an unnecessary extra, created merely due to the rise of trend of 'en-smartify every product and implement it with unnecessary electronics and spyware.'
It is dystopian, for sure. That's why I don't want them to catch on. But I also can see valid uses in the spirit of what bright@piefed.social said.
Think about ppl with face blindness. Or those who are getting older with senility, and need a reminder of t heir relationship to the person they are talking to. Or technicians to reference up schematics or w/e while having both hands free for work. Maybe even surgeons, to get superhuman / synthetic senses.
Those feel like good uses. But... I can't imagine ANY way to have the good, without the much bigger privacy clusterfuck. So I don't want them to catch on as consumer devices. And I want social pressure against glassholes to continue. The good of the tech is real. But the dystopia will be too much, for too little gain.
I agree, it has uses but they're pretty niche. When I talked about how it's unnecessary for people, I meant normal people who don't have such niche needs or objective.
It is a brilliant tool only if it's used correctly.
Finally, we've invented a machine that saves mankind from the drudgery of getting to know other people!
Smart glasses with HUD and speakers, and bluetooth, no cloud dependency - yes, please.
With camera - absolutely not. This would be just a hidden recording device, absolutely capable of intruding other's privacy, regardless if it's cloud connected or not. I realize that camera provides a lot of functionality, but I just don't see the way how it can preserve privacy of other people and fit in glasses form factor.
Oh, and all that applies not just to camera, but also to microphone. Damn, such a good topic to talk about.
Actually, there is a way to use a camera, but I'm not sure if it's possible from technical or usability perspectives.
Imagine a device that has a camera, but no data connectivity. No WiFi. Only USB for charging and firmware updates. Maybe BT for firmware or control from app. No memory card slot either. Internal storage reserved for system only, camera software cannot store videos or images persistently.
This will probably have to be not open source, especially if bluetooth is present - otherwise someone will figure out how to capture camera feed with a custom firmware.
But if possible, such device can use camera for smart navigation, object recognition, some basic tasks on-device, depending on how much compute (and battery) can be placed into such a small package.
The problem there is nobody else will know if yours are the privacy friendly glasses with a camera or not. They'll just see smart glasses w/ camera. I certainly wouldn't associate with someone wearing those fucking things, and I'm not going to bother to research which models are which.
What if the glasses come with a little flag stuck in the frame that says "I'm born blind, this thing helps me be less disabled. It's not filming you."? I mean, there are genuinely helpful use cases for such things out there.
If its a camera it's filming. I've never heard of any smart glasses that help blind people, I'd need to know what it was doing with the video. If it's being sent to a cloud service I'm still going to avoid them. Sorry but I'm trying to minimize the amount of my image that's going to these fucking data companies.
This will probably have to be not open source, especially if bluetooth is present - otherwise someone will figure out how to capture camera feed with a custom firmware.
Encrypt the traffic and follow proper key management procedures? It wouldn't exactly be the first open source thing that transmits sensitive data over a network. See you talk about privacy and in one comment find a justification to not disclose the source code. Ahem.
No, you got me wrong. My position is that I don't want anything that is capable of recording and that looks like an object that normally can't do that. So I tried to imagine how something may have camera to capture what user sees, but not be able to store the recordings - only process it in like real-time, or close to it.
I may not understand the hardware design good enough, but I think if you make an open source device, it should allow custom firmware. If you allow custom firmware, someone will write a version of it that will work around the restriction on recording somehow. To be clear, I'm not concerned about communication protocol interception, but about someone changing how such device handles the data it captures.
Keep the creep glasses where they belong, in the bottom of a garbage can
That there is an oxymoron.
It would be at best, privacy for the viewer/owner but not for the viewed. Why would you buy always seeing glasses to protect the privacy of those you see?
There is no such thing as a privacy respecting camera you are pointing at others.
I would never trust them, no matter the claim.
normalize punching glassholes if you want privacy in a "smart glasses" world
There are some already, e.g. https://docs.brilliant.xyz/ with firmware you can replace or https://mentraglass.com/ and I even made one by sticking a RPi with its tiny camera on 3D printed frames https://twitter-archive.benetou.fr/utopiah/status/1449023602079240194/
I'm not saying it's a good idea or that it's private enough, just that it's not a theoretical questions, alternatives to Meta or Google Glass do exist already and some of them are not cloud dependent.
IMHO what's important is to be explicit about usage, understand how it's used and have informed consent. If you use them to be sneaky and hurt others, even if they are "privacy focused", fuck off.
No. Absolutely no interest in 24/7 being plugged in.
I'd love a useful heads up display with things like navigation, search (as in, "where the fuck did I leave my keys, they should be in my field of view", not "what's the capital of italy"), and something like a dashcam, where you can retroactively playback the last X minutes if something happened, but otherwise it gets deleted automatically.
And nothing gets off the device without my consent of course.
I would like no smart glasses at all.
'Privacy focused focused smart glasses' sounds as credible as 'your friendly stalker neighbor'.
My thought is that y'all will someday see on the news "old fucker on lemmy arrested for curb stomping some asshole with smart glasses that refused to respect his wish to not be filmed"
This is something I've been wanting, but with a camera. I take lots of videos on my phone everywhere I go, but I often miss moments and record too late. I think having glasses with a camera can make my life documenting easier.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I have some smart glasses with no camera and the option to use on device or cloud AI. They've been gathering dust though; they didn't add much to my life once the novelty wore off.
Dumb question, but what are smart glasses with no camera?
HUD, head up display, being able to have information displayed on the move without using your hands.
if it has camera and does show time, calendar, txt files and image files through sd card, without internet connectivity, that would be enough for me
Even if I think there could be nice advantages using AR for specific use cases, for example in construction jobs, we should not invest in those technologies in any way as they would become more popular and reduce privacy overall
I guess if only find it remotely fine if the glasses were very obviously equipped with a camera, bulky and what not.
If not, then its just a pedo cam a guy can use at a childrens playground
Truly "privacy-focused" smart glasses wouldn't have gesture- or voice controls: because it wouldn't come with cameras nor microphones. It wouldn't allow ambiguity surrounding the ability, for these devices to collect personal data without consent: "trust me bro" toggle switches (controlled by the wearer) don't provide reasonable reassurance, to those in the vicinity of such sensors. Which would pretty much leave a heads-up display, which isn't something for me: I like clear separations between the digital and physical world, and this seeks to further blur that line; together with the obvious surveillance implications of course...
if you only use them at your home alone, that's fine
I don't need another source of distraction. My phone is distracting enough I don't need to have a HUD like that constantly.
If they are screens for viewing something with no camera, that already exists. "Smart glasses" as they were are tools for creeps to video everyone against their will
No such thing.
view more: next ›