This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I honestly don't understand why these glasses have become so mainstream
Have they? I’ve never seen anyone wearing them.
If only they had a "legitimate public-interest justification", then they could feed it straight into Brussels' Regional Informatics Center (BRIC), together with the thousands of public cameras from: police stations, the subway system, the port of Brussels, the fire and emergency medical assistance department, and the public service department responsible for traffic management, signals and tunnels; to be analyzed by video analytics tools (alerting operators upon "illegal parking or a large group of people, for example", bookmarking video clips with movement, and where the "next step will be to integrate facial and number plate recognition"), as reported in their Genetec customer story...
as intended.
A small LED light is designed to indicate when recording is taking place, but RTBF's investigators found that tutorials explaining how to conceal the indicator are abundant and easily accessible online.
You need a tutorial to use a piece of electrical tape?
Supposedly there is a sensor that detects if the recording light is covered and disables the camera, so it's about bypassing that.
The users are peak idiots…
... and water is wet?
“Experts in Europe warn that these devices are used to record strangers without their consent, possibly breaching EU law.”
Isn't this all public cameras?
And private smart phones.
Yes, in a way.
Privacy laws are a little complicated but not that bad.
In this case Europe sees filming in public, while concealing the fact, not legal.
Conversely, if you are filming and it is very clear that you are(ie a camera, film crew etc) and you are not singling out anyone who doesnt want to be recorded then it is perfectly legal to film in public.
Do you see how it works now and how these Ray-Ban glasses go against this?
Its legal to record in public as long as you respect the privacy of others. Of course they can always be a background figure if they are not focused on but making them the star of your production without consent makes it very illegal and immoral in my opinion.
Have a great day!
I work in the field, in Europe, and can confirm this is about right. There are also situations where you start needing permits to film, either because it's private property or even public property if you start having to put down a lot of equipment and crew.
Except that these cameras easily go anywhere, they aren't just outside on the street.
Spas? Pools? Gyms Locker rooms? Find a nice spot sitting on a bench near a women's dressing room at the mall that peeks in a bit? Set your glasses at your side and record while you look ahead at your phone, not freaking anyone out. They're pervert enablers just as much as Grok is a CSAM machine if you pay for it.
as much as Grok is a CSAM machine if you pay for it.
CSAM is Child Sexual Assault Media, and Grok is not providing that, it's providing Child Pornography.
You are comparing making non-consensual material with real people to generating material with no real people (based off real media, though, but that's an implication with everything AI-generated).
If you spend some time understanding how AI image generation works, it's essentially iterating on known images to make images that are probably also close to what it was rained on.
So if someone took some CSAM pictures printed up, and cut them up and made a collage, is that no longer CSAM? Of course not. It's still CSAM. If someone took digital CSAM images and photoshoped the victims into different settings, it's still CSAM. Real people were victims in the base material.
If you trained a Stable Diffusion model on only pictures of Rwandan people, and asked for an image of "a man sitting on a chair" the man will look vaguely Rwandan.
When you train an AI on CSAM, it produces images that are based on CSAM. Real people were victims in the base material, too. Close e-fuckin'-nough. Real people's victimization is literally the core of how those images are made.
Also true for spy cameras. And they don't have the disadvantage of needing to be attached to a person to work.
Recording camera in public sources are subject to the EU law. You can't install then without authorization and their use is reglemented.
I don't know if it's there case in all the EU but for example in France people need to be informed by a sign of a camera is recording the area, they can't record the entrance of private houses ...
In the US installation of cameras is actually pretty similar, but it's a property thing more than a privacy thing.
For instance, Flock made a deal with a local HOA to install cameras, but the fence lines for the houses are at the property line, so where they're wanting to place the cameras is in the public right-of-way. So they need to request a license to encroach into public property with private improvements.
However, cameras on private property facing public property are perfectly legal. And any private space visible from public property also has no "reasonable expectation of privacy."
Private property in public view not having an expectation of privacy sounds insane, but prohibiting recording of publicly-visible property essentially bans almost all outdoor recording of any kind because some private property is probably going to be somewhere in the frame.
If I take a selfie in the break room of my office (2nd floor), the background will include bits of dozens of private properties through the window.
