Nearby Glasses
github.comTried this on a Pixel 9, after allowing permissions the Start Scanning button does nothing, and there's nothing in the debug log. I do like the idea and might try again in the future if it gets updated. Seems like a good candidate for F-Droid instead of Google Play.
I had to tap the sprocket in the top right and enable Foreground Service to get the button to work
On my Pixel 9 this overlaps the status bar, and can't be clicked. I worked around that by split-screening it with another app.
I'm having the same problem on a Pixel 7
Currently detects via Meta, Essilor or Snap company ID.
So it won't detect my XReal's. I purposefully bought my XReal now because it feels like they might be one of the last models released without cameras.
But theoretically I could have the XReal Eye attachment on my glasses, and could be taking video through that. I don't, but the XReal user next to me might.
Of course the USB wire hanging from my ear probably makes me look suspicious enough already that the warning probably isn't necessary either way...
Looking at this almost unanimously negative comment section, on a tech website, it appears you should be concerned about your safety while wearing anything that could be seen as being "smart". I imagine a non-tech crowd would be even more negative.
> for identifying creeps nearby
> I recently had to interact with an idiot wearing meta glasses.
> Would renaming to ”Nearby Glassholes” be acceptable as a PR?
> If you're wearing these glasses and recording people in public, you're asking for a sweet punch in the face.
> I imagine a non-tech crowd would be even more negative.
Weird, I'd assume the opposite. The meme is "tech enthusiasts vs tech workers" implying there are people who like tech and people who understand it enough to distrust it. This tech-crowd is more aligned with the latter.
That used to be the case (see the joke about printers) but AI completely reversed it.
AI turned a lot of tech workers into tech enthusiasts (and frankly, most cool new technologies take their toll), but there are still plenty of people here who distrust AI.
I find myself in the awkward place of being both. I use LLMs to offload busywork and to allow me to get work done that I otherwise wouldn't have time for, but I also see that we're walking a pretty tenuous tightrope when it comes to pretty much every concern we've ever had with technology bundled in one place and amplified 1000x.
It's the old rag of "tech is the tool, ethics are the user" in an era where people who are unethical have become loud and proud about it and the tech is recursive reinforcement power tools on steroids.
Given that I'm not interacting with people when I'm using these things I'm not at all worried about that. I probably meet maybe a dozen people per mile on my walks, for a few seconds apiece as we pass each other. It probably causes people to avoid me, but when I have them on I'm working or reading during my walk and am not interested in interaction either.
But if I was still commuting by public transit I would have liked to use them there.
It would be really annoying to avoid using my display glasses in a place highly suited for them just because of worries about creeping out people creeped out about a thing my glasses are incapable of doing.
> it appears you should be concerned about your safety while wearing anything that could be seen as being "smart".
People don't have issues with smartphones, smartwatches, or any other "smart" stuff that isn't spyware.
The issue isn't smarts, it's supporting stasi-as-a-service.
People are sensitive to video. Looks at the reaction from the Ring Super Bowl commercial and Nest Camera video retrieval news from a few weeks ago.
Your phone and watch are spyware mostly just spying on you. Sure they could be used to spy on others but the directness of an always on smart glass camera lens in one’s face is a little more jarring.
That's why ICE wears masks and cops don't like being filmed.
Not advocating for unprovoked violence, but I do hope wearing things like this remains socially unacceptable. Not all technology is good.
I'll be sad if this kills the whole concept of HUD/display replacements. I want my 32 inch screen while I work in the coffee shop/plane! Maybe the "workaround" will be giant bulky VR setups, to cushion the punches a bit better.
Good.
amen
Tried this on my moto g 128GB - 2025 (XT2513V) running Android 16. Here is some rapid fire feedback.
I opened this in a pretty heavily populated area in Baltimore. There wasn't anyone likely near using glasses and no detections were made, but the debug log flew by absurdly quickly likely because there are a ton of Bluetooth devices nearby.
The start scanning button doesn't change to stop scanning, but it does seem to toggle scanning.
The top bar is overlapping with the notification bar area.
The bottom is truncated slight by my 3 button gesture bar thing. I am old and use the very ancient back, home and multi task buttons that are always visible because I am old.
When I first granted permission the app seemed to just lock up and wouldn't do anything until I restarted it. I gave it both the permissions it wanted and tried fiddling with stuff, but it didn't seem to redraw and I couldn't get the settings to open until after I restarted.
When I first started I think I was connected to my headset, which then disconnected after the permission request?
I second this ... using a Google Pixel 8 I have exactly the same issues.
Maybe the app doesn't work, but at least no humans wrote it (:
I don't get it. It seems to be a great start to an interesting idea. I don't care if he wrote it using punch cards or a fever dream he induced by huffing paint, the source code is there
Seems like GP spent more time testing this than the author did
These are fairly common problems for newer apps in Android which has been changing quite a bit in the recent years. There are multiple ways to do "safe area" viewport stuff. It's reasonable to make these kinds of mistakes.
This is really neat, I gotta find an android device to try it. Reminds me of the good old days of wardriving with kismet and netstumbler.
I am surprised there isn't an existing BT/BTLE fingerprint table that takes more into account than just what is provided. I would assume each device, or atleast each chipset has subtle quirks that could be used to weed out some of the false positives.
the link in the readme for the identifiers doesn't work because it's relative to the repo, so it is below. I like that they did this, it's so much better than the OUI table for mac addresses, because some companies (cough cisco) keep getting new ones.
https://bitbucket.org/bluetooth-SIG/public/src/main/assigned...
Add satellite imagery, nearby self-driving vehicles / Google maps cars, line-of-sight ring doorbells, peripheral street surveillance cameras, police equipment, people in your proximity with a smartphone camera, and various-purpose drones and then you'll have the perfect paranoia alerter.
A big red screen that always says "yes"?
The fact that people dislike so strongly only a subset of these recording devices also means something. Part of it is people being unaware. But also: wearers of smart glasses have a reputation. I guess the question is, is the glasshole reputation deserved.
I think it's mostly that smart glasses are at the intersection of "will push stuff to public internet" and "does it stealthily".
CCTV, self driving cars etc.. are (mostly) out of the first bucket, and phones are (mostly) out of the other bucket. Ring is a good contender and is also quite disliked.
Could even have their locations show up in your smart glasses.
...people with neuralink or similar, in a year or three.
Projects like this are useful not only for identifying creeps nearby, but also for highlighting a broader issue: once AI glasses become common, everyone nearby becomes part of the experiment.
I recently switched away from my usual brand when they started shipping AI-enabled glasses. That was my small way of opting out.
Would renaming to ”Nearby Glassholes” be acceptable as a PR?
2014, that name, similar thing https://julianoliver.com/projects/glasshole/
Give it a try ^^
Bought my first pair of Meta glasses in Oct 2023 and overall I really enjoying using smart glasses! They are great for quickly/easily capturing life experiences. Also, while traveling or wherever asking and getting information on things your looking at - it's cool & useful. Tho Meta makes trash as my 1st pair died after 14 months of use after a software update and then my 2nd pair only lasted 4 months after some water splashes. I called Ray Ban for tech support and the lady on the phone agreed they are trash per how many calls she gets.
I don't care to take pics of strangers tho lots of people who havent adopted them are concerned about such.
Overall no more Meta glasses for me Im waiting for Apple's. They have tons of stores to get your glasses fixed and they don't manufacture trash that breaks! Also, maybe Apple will add a privacy feature so your pics and vids anonymize faces not in your personal network.
Do you have children? I frequently want to record things my daughter does but I find that my phone is not close at hand. I am curious if the latency to record is low-enough and I don't want to distract my daughter while she's doing whatever she's doing. I just want to capture the moment for later without interrupting the moment. They advertise it as this but I am curious what it's like in actuality.
I use it all the time for this use case. It's great because your hands are free and you can remain an active participant in play/safety/feeding. I find I capture more moments that I'm more actively involved in vs passively holding the phone and framing the shot.
But would you be worried that the some other guy at the play park is also recording your children?
Thank you and the other responder. I'm going to try to go get one.
This is the best use case for them IMHO. So many wonderful shots taken in the moment, and I don't have to see the world through a phone screen for fear of missing a cute picture.
Quality is iffy and framing is hard, but I'd rather have a OK photo taken while playing than a great photo taken while standing apart from the action trying to get the perfect shot lined up.
They are great just for that and many instances you want to quickly take a pic and not interupt a moment.
Are you making a counterpoint to the author's premise that smart glasses are an "intolerable intrusion?"
I'm having trouble understanding the purpose of your comment since it seems like you're just saying the ray ban glasses are bad for a different reason.
I love smart glasses they are very useful for people who wear sunglasses and use their phone to take pics & videos.
Of course with all new technology people fight against it. When I wore them on rollercoasters at Cedar Point in 2024 ride attendees said take those off and store them in a locker at the front entrance of the park (that kid / ride attendant hated them). Yet as Feb 2026 Six flags now allows smart glasses to be worn thru all its parks and 7 million have been sold.
Overall I am detailing why they are useful, why I think they will be widely adopted and like many technologies before it those who are against them will adopt them too(its a counter argument here). Sure some creeps will use them and with that in mind Apple has the possible ability to solve that privacy issue as they are a privacy company (all pics and vids taken thru APple glasses faces not in your network are randomize/anonymized).
> Of course with all new technology people fight against it.
People have been fighting against smart glasses since 2012.
Apple may end up with a feature to post-edit others out, and versions down the road from that one they may have a feature where you can register faces for a current session and then it auto-blurs others. Making its own assumptions about in-network or not and who should be blurred would be a bad user experience with all it gets wrong; more than a "privacy" company, apple spends a lot more marketing their optimized UX -- "it just works" -- for the average person
Google glass was a joke of a technology in terms of being useful. Meta's when they are working are actual a useful product especially for those who already wear sunglasses and use their phone to take pics/vids. Besides normal pic/videography you can now capture moments when your hands arent free (skiing, rollercoaster, tubing, kayaking, etc)
> Sure some creeps will use them and with that in mind Apple has the possible ability to solve that privacy issue as they are a privacy company (all pics and vids taken thru APple glasses faces not in your network are randomize/anonymized).
This is it's own distopian nightmare. No one exists in the world but those you've asserted you've met. What if you meet someone who was in the background of a picture from childhood? Can you never take your pictures from apple?
If you have an iPhone open the camera app and look under "People & Pets," to see that Apple already has those in your network and their pic matched up. As well if you are taking pic or video of people and they are smiling for the camera that's an indication your more likely with them then not.
Your proposed solution is in itself a privacy nightmare. Imagine Apple having to know your entire network of non-apple users just to not mess up your videos with friends.
Apple already knows those in your network and has for years. If you have an iPhone open the camera app and look under "People & Pets."
You have to specifically identify and name the people in the photos, otherwise all it knows is that it's a person and throws it into that folder. And if you don't use icloud none of it leaves your device. It does the photo processing locally on the phone. It only knows what you tell it.
I've never took any action it just recognizes faces of those ive taken a good amount of pics with and shows them in my network including automatically naming some of them. Tho not all of them seen under People & Pets have their name automatically listed. But and again it automatically already knows whose in my network so if I take a pic of them using my Apple Glasses the glasses tech or app on iPhone could have the pic focused on them and either blur out others in public or anonmyize/randomize all other faces. This is just an idea that would help solve people's concern with smart glasses and Apple is the privacy company.
Also noting my disdain for Meta glasses due to their lack of quality and solid customer service Apple will provide.
I see the privacy issues with smart glasses.
But as someone who can really use the features for daily use - visual assistance (low vision), alwyas worn set of speakers (no need to futz around with airpods everytime i want to listen to audio without looking like a dork)... I really can't wait for android XR smart glasses (sans display)
I believe the problem is not smart glasses per se, but spyware that runs on a lot (if not most) of such devices.
Shame the language makes people intrinsically hate the former by associating it with the latter without even questioning it. The idea of smart glasses is cool, the implementations are not.
Smart glasses are spyware. The ability to record without my knowledge or consent is what I take issue with. I don't particularly care if you self host.
> The ability to record without my knowledge or consent
All major brands have a clear indicator for when they're recording.
Someone could block that indicator out, but someone could also just go to Amazon.com and select one of hundred of available pinhole cameras or not-smart camera glasses.
These aren't enabling an ability that hasn't been enabled for decades. If anything, seeing someone with main brand smart glasses makes it more obvious.
Existing alternatives also make me uncomfortable for the exact same reasons. I would prefer to avoid anyone who purchases a pinhole camera for public use, regardless of whether it came with an LED to indicate recording.
To their credit, smart glasses are an obvious signal for me to avoid. That doesn't make me appreciate them any more.
Every cellphone in every hand is a recording device, very often used in public. Where I am, you can look most anywhere, at any time, and see someone on a phone call, taking a picture/video, posing, etc. What's the significant difference that I'm not seeing, especially since the smart glasses have an indicator, and cellphones DO NOT.
No difference. If I see your recording in public, either via cell phone or smart glasses or shoulder mounted news rig, I do my best to steer clear. I don't like Alexa or Flock or whatever else either.
I do not agree that the existence of surveillance tech justifies the expansion of surveillance tech.
I see. This is entirely reasonable. :)
Not only that, but smart glasses have terrible recording time limits. A cheap $30 pinhole camera with a SD card will far surpass meta glasses in recording capabilities.
Hidden cameras have been a thing for a long time now. Stick one in a pair of glasses and give it a super short battery life and people freak out...
Wearing a hidden camera and recording people is also very socially unacceptable. If someone knew you were wearing they would probably also “freak out”.
It used to be if you were caught wearing a hidden camera in a department store the police would be called.
Now they're being billed as fashion accessories.
Sorry, but "normalize hidden cameras" isn't a movement I can get behind.
My point is the tech is nothing new.
Every person holding a cellphone up in their hands could also be pointing a camera around at people, a camera with much higher fidelity, computing power, and one that can take much longer videos.
This is just panic about a new form factor. The same thing happened when cell phones came along, with the exact same talking points.
Totally agree, but that's not a justification. "We already do a thing you don't like so you won't mind if we do it lot more, right?"
The same talking points still apply to cell phones. I think people who record TikToks in public are similarly gross and I go out of my way to avoid them.
I watched a guy setup a cell phone to record his laps in a pool yesterday. He swam one lap right about a meter from the 15 year-old girl playing with her mom, then climbed out of the pool, shut off his phone, and walked away. The remainder of the pool was open. Should I have called him out? I couldn't decide, and therefore didn't. This is normal now.
I don't get the point of this argument. Yes, the people who buy pinhole cameras are creeps too
why is someone protecting their property/children creep?
Pinhole cameras ain't for that
why not? secret camera is sometimes better than letting others know they are being filmed
For what benefit? A secret camera is not a deterrent as by definition it can only be used reactively.
Smart glasses (or any camera-equipped device) don’t have to record anything to provide utility.
If anything, the primary utility of smart glasses is the wearable display, not camera. YMMV, of course.
But even machine vision-capable devices can do a lot of useful things without causing you any trouble, unless your issues are more of a religious concern rather than anything substantial.
I understand there are legitimate usages. There are also usages that make me uncomfortable. My issue is that I'm unequipped to know the difference.
Smart glasses sans camera would address my complaints (I take no issue with smartwatches, for instance), but that admittedly decreases the utility.
I'm not entirely sure what's your exact threat scenario, if someone records your image, especially given that you've said it doesn't matter to you whether it gets siphoned straight into some megacorp database, or private home server, or gets processed on-device only.
But... aren't already existing protections that make it e.g. illegal to distribute your image or its derivatives sufficient? If someone does you wrong, you can seek recourse. If everyone is respectful of each other (and we hate corporations instead of technologies), we enable a lot legitimate uses, making the world better: more accessible, and easier to learn and understand.
Oh, it very much does matter to me what happens to recordings! I should have made that more clear. Self hosting is infinitely preferable than sending that info to Facebook. This isn't enough to flip my opinion on the technology in general, but if I had a friend who wanted to self-host their own smart glasses, I would not mind. The keyword there is friend.
My issue is that I don't have the ability to audit every smart glasses user to find out what their tech stack is, so I'm looking at averages. If I saw that smart glasses were being used and promoted as assistive technology, I would likely form a different opinion. Unfortunately, that's not what I perceive. I am open to the possibility that smart glasses could end up a net positive on our society, but the history of similar technologies does not encourage.
I will think more on your comments here. I find them quite insightful.
Edit: For a rather recent example of my threat model, I will repost part of my comment from elsewhere in the thread:
> I watched a guy setup a cell phone to record his laps in a pool yesterday. He swam one lap right about a meter from the 15 year-old girl playing with her mom, then climbed out of the pool, shut off his phone, and walked away. The remainder of the pool was open. Should I have called him out? I couldn't decide, and therefore didn't. This is normal now.
Do you consider dashcams to also be spyware? I feel like dashcams are just as hidden and nonconsensual but more or less accepted.
A challenge to my beliefs! What a great question! Upon reflection, I don't have anywhere near as much reaction to dashcams. There's certainly some dissonance there.
I think it's an issue of perceived benefit vs perceived risk. I see the utility in both technologies, but I assign significantly higher risk to smart glasses. I really struggle to imagine widespread abuse from dashcams.
Alas, your knowledge or consent is not a requirement if you are in public, and this is a human right worth defending, frankly.
Your desire to consent to being recorded in public places does not counteract my right to record everything I can perceive in public. Period.
You're assuming every country has laws similar to, I'm guessing, america.
It's a more fundamental issue than those legal oddities of the day. It's whether people have a right to remember, right to share their memories (there must be lots of nuances here), and whether others have a right to be forgotten or deny some or all of such sharing - and how all those play together.
I can't wait for the day brain-machine interfaces will become more advanced and commonplace (so cyborgs become something way more advanced than just limb prosthetics), and hope the day comes fast enough so the true issue is forced before any decisions are made off the ill-informed assumptions and the shuttle designs are left to depend on a width of horse's ass.
I have a right to collect evidence in my own defense, and that evidence may not be abrogated by by-standers to the event who might attempt to prevent me gathering that evidence.
Its the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and it covers you whether you like it or not, thankfully. You might not like it but thats gonna change the moment you need to exercise that very right yourself.
How do you figure? There is no "right to record," nor is surveillance mentioned in the Declaration of Human Rights. In fact, it points out in Article 12 and 29 that rights and freedoms can and should be limited by law if they impinge on the rights and freedoms of others, such as those mentioned in Article 12:
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
That doesn't seem as clear cut as you're implying.
Article 19:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Seeking and receiving information covers gathering facts, evidence, or observations from public events or spaces (e.g., documenting protests, government actions, police conduct, or everyday occurrences visible in public).
You might not like it, but its a key mechanism by which we, the people, keep despots and the police state in check.
I do like it, and agree it's an important mechanism, but it's not a blank check as it's in tension with the other articles. I do not read that as granting you the right to any and all information you might desire. For instance, I hope we can agree that allowing the public to film bathrooms or gynecology appointments crosses a line.
Oh, there are always going to need to be exceptions to the rights, such as the tacit contract one enters into, abrogating the right to record, when entering a privacy-respecting space that is marked as such and is not part of the public commons but rather that of a private entity whose intent was to create a private bathroom in which people are definitely not to record each others activities without additional contract - i.e. consent - of all parties involved.
But it still has to be iterated in light of such exceptions, that the rights encoded in the UDHR are there to protect humanity, as a species, so that we can indeed form our own cultures freely as we see fit.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has as much teeth as The New Colossus does. It's a bunch of prose with absolutely no binding or enforcement mechanisms.
Following the notion that one needs force to get things done is rather a tempestuous path to take.
The rights are there for all of us, and indeed they are generally aligned along natural human phenemonen, specifically for the purpose of allowing the weak and the strong to live as equals, universally.
Sure, you have the right as long as you have the gun. But you still have the rights once you lose the gun too, human.
That's fair. You have the legal right.
I'm still going to avoid you like the plague.
Yeah, that is totally okay, its why human rights are so important to protect. You wouldn't want to be in a situation where an authority doesn't allow you to avoid them like the plague, would you? It is, therefore, your right to record those authorities .. so that they will go away, too.
Totally agree. To be clear, I'm not arguing for a ban on smartglasses. I'm simply explaining why they make me uncomfortable.
The ability to record authorities is something I fully support, but I still don't want to be in that video if I can help it.
On top of that, most smartglasses are not private. If authorities can access the feeds, then my neighbor with RayBans becomes an authority, and it makes it that much harder for me to avoid them like the plague. This similarly applies to Ring doorbells and Flock ALPRs.
It would be a shame if somebody modified this to trigger Bluetooth and Wi-Fi deauthentication attacks.
I just re-watched Ghost in the Shell SAC Laughing Man last night, and wouldn't mind seeing these things get hacked with the Laughing Man logo replacing any face it was looking at, re-writing signs, etc.
meddlesome priests?
there's always room for another software arms race. the personal area network is not ready and the evolution will be painful and good for someone - us, or them, without regard for what those divisions are, it's going to hurt.
Can the app run on smart glasses, warning you of other smart glasses users nearby? You might not see the notification on your phone.
That would be like antropic and google crying about china stealing the weights that were originally built by scraping as fuck stolen content :-)
> That would be like antropic and google crying about china stealing the weights that were originally built by scraping as fuck stolen content :-)
do you really see a relation between the two, or are you just willfully 'buying an advertisement' by trying to shape a metaphor from the social qualms that you wish to rebroadcast to people?
in other words, no -- this isn't at all similar to the companies that steal media in order to train models only to complain about similar theft from other companies targetted towards them -- but I agree with the motivation, fuck em; they're crooks...
but don't weaken metaphors simply to advertise a social injustice. If you want to do that, don't hijack conversations abroad.
Well, at least Chinese paid for api access and all the tokens.
"Glasses detected within 3 inches."
Cheeky
Aside from the project itself: They are eusing a "Polyform License" I haven't encountered that before. So it's not "open source" as many people might expect from GitHub and Polyform licenses seem to inherit the "what exactly is the boundary between non-commercial and commercial" issue as do CC licenses.
https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses/blob/main/LI...
I use CC for most of my "work", and it's pretty clear to me what "commercial" means. If someone uses my work to earn any money, then it's commercial. Unless they contact me and explain why it isn't, then i can grant them a license that allows them that.
This is only relevant if the CC is CC-NC, otherwise commercial use is "ok". it's pretty straightforward.
Is it commercial if a non-profit sports club uses it to collect member fees?
Is it fornprofit if I use it and somewhere in a small note on my website it has a way to give me a tip?
It's trivial to come up with more such cases.
And you being fine with my usage, doesn't mean I can rely on it.
And then let's go international.
In case of doubt the answer is to avoid it, which can be fine and match the author's intention. However it can be nom-trivial.
> If someone uses my work to earn any money, then it's commercial.
it really is that simple. It's meant for creative works, but not just; if i make a song and license it CC-NC, you can't use it in a video if that video gets ad revenue, patreon, snail-mail donations.
> Meaning "done for the sake of financial profit" (of art, etc.), "prepared for the market or as an article of trade" is from 1871.
It is trivial, unless you are looking for loopholes to get around licensing.
Are we not doing "glassholes" anymore?
I don’t want to be attacked by some vigilante for using speech to text glasses.
We are really getting into the cyberpunk dystopia now. Adversarial tech in everyday wearables, hardware cat and mouse. Next step is offence as defence, ICE daemons counter hacking autonomously in the background.
Wow, it's been a while since I haven't read ICE and parsed it this way. Black ICE, even?
Trappin before it was a thing!
Need an iOS.
But I think very soon the whole detection won’t be enough, because most people will have glasses, phones, CCTV, etc., I think the best is protecting yourself, so a cloak mask or similar, where for humans it’s barely visible but for machines it blocks you from being scanned or recorded.
an invisibility cloak! crazy times, maybe we can make anti-smart-glasses glasses that detect smart glasses and have an invisible beam that can target and blind the cameras
> anti-smart-glasses glasses that detect smart glasses and have an invisible beam that can target and blind the cameras
I love it! I literally thought of something similar while writing the above comment, something like an EMP that disables all nearby camera sensors for 10min or so.
> an EMP that disables all nearby camera sensors for 10min or so
Some years ago, there was a guy that got arrested (may have been in Chicago), for riding on the train, and running a cellphone jammer, because he hated people on the phone, while on the train.
Might be considered somewhat similar. It could definitely earn you a beatdown, if someone catches you.
How did they catch him?! I remember I read something similar of a guy having a cell jammer in his car, because he didn’t want people being busy on their phones while driving, but they caught him because the cell towers detected the jammer and eventually triangulated him, not sure about a guy in a train.
On the topic: if the glasses can be impacted with anything RF, it would be an easy job, but it’s a camera, optical sensors, etc. and only an optical way could counter that, imo.
He was sitting on the train, with it in his lap. Someone snapped a pic. Looked a bit like one of those Cradlepoint routers, with 4 antennas.
yeah they generally look like a 3"x5" device an inch thick with antennas coming out one of the 3"x1" sides, from the ones i have seen.
I’m thinking it could be active enough to actually obscure the camera recording in real time whenever you are in the frame, like an actual beam that goes into the camera lens making the normal light intake all distorted, so it wouldn’t appear to malfunction or fail, it would just be like a refracting smudge in the feed.
I know these below existed, but it only works against IR enabled cameras aka CCTV, but definitely they won’t against smart glasses, but I love your idea, a glass distort the lights, hmmm maybe emit IR?
wear a hat/beanie with IR LEDs, you need a few frequencies of "IR", but it's invisible (or barely visible) to humans, but it's the same as shining a light into a sensor to a "machine". could have it built in to a jacket collar, too. you'd have to wear pants to foil gait detection, too. Something with a lot of angles and squiggles that is hard to see as "distinct" against the background.
The Quantum Thief series by Hannu Rajaniemi depicts a society where the protection point in "smart glasses" is addressed by making shared info opt-in and handling that centrally (vulnerability of which is a major plot point), so people see a non-distinct blob instead of a person if they don't have access. There's more to it in the books, but I won't spoil, I highly recommend reading these instead.
- People can film you on their phone, while seemingly just browsing a webpage.
- People can film you with a hidden miniature camera
- People who want to discreetly film people without their knowledge won't use smart glasses, because they're too obvious
This is similar to this 2014 project https://julianoliver.com/projects/glasshole/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meta-trial-mark-zuckerberg-ai-g...
> Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who is presiding over the trial, ordered anyone in the courtroom wearing AI glasses to immediately remove them, noting that any use of facial recognition technology to identify the jurors was banned.
I am not a believer in Zuckerberg's idea of humanity's future.
I was actually hoping it could be paired with speech to text very well and help along with hearing aids when the latter do not perfectly work. There are legitimate use cases.
Real time speech to text already exists on glasses with displays and works reasonably well.
Does that need a camera though?
Not an expert, but my suspicion is that the camera following lips can add an extra streaming data point making transcription accuracy much higher even at low volumes. Again a hunch and I guess the computational power and battery needs might still be insurmountable
There are legitimate use cases and illegitimate ones. Unfortunately, I'm seeing more examples of the latter. I somehow suspect Mark's entourage aren't all hard of hearing.
It's pointed AT US ... not for us.
> I am not a believer in Zuckerberg's idea of humanity's future.
I don't know what Zuckerberg's idea of humanity's future is but I believe it's basically inevitable that most people will be wearing always on cameras on their face in the future. The same way they carry always on phones today.
The use cases will be too compelling. There have already been demos. Ask the AI watching over your shoulder anything about your past and present and have it act on it.
I'm sure as a hater of that future you don't beleive. For me, I'd pick 2040 as the latest that people wearing always on cameras will be as common as smart phones in 2010 and grow at or faster than smartphones when they get it to actually work and be stylish. I'm not saying I'll enjoy being watched by all of those cameras. I'm saying I don't believe I'll have a choice any more than I have a choice of people having smartphones today.
This sounds like a regulation issue to me. If it's regulated it can't be inevitable that "most people" are breaking the law. And if there is a resistance among people then hopefully it will be regulated (I'm talking outside the US now, i.e. where there is a positive correlation between what people in general want and what laws eventually become).
In the united states the first amendment of the constitution makes it so that any public usage of camera tech cannot be controlled by the state. Except in some very specific scenarios.
> In the united states the first amendment of the constitution makes it so that any public usage of camera tech cannot be controlled by the state
I'm repeating a comment of mine from another thread, but this is not true. Both recording the audio of a conversation that you aren't party to and deriving biometrics from video without consent are both broad categories that are regulated depending on the state you're doing the "public usage" in.
I don't mind anyone taking my photo in a public place. That was always legal. It's what's done with it that could be illegal. E.g. if they use my photo in a commercial without my consent? Illegal.
If it was also illegal to (for example) input a photo of someone non-consenting into any kind of AI model or post it to any other online service? Then I don't see much problem.
The regulation needs to get ahead of the product, otherwise you'd be criminalising existing behaviour and that doesn't work
People normalised installing spy doorbells, so every doorstep is centrally available to large organisations who want to do harm (government, amazon, meta, whoever)
It's inconvenient to make people criminals over night with new regulation, but it's by no means impossible to do so.
I can't install a Ring doorbell if it takes a picture of the street outside my house. That was preexisting regulation (about surveillance cameras requiring permits for public spaces). Of course, people who now install Ring doorbells DO often record the street. But that's more a matter of enforcing the law.
You can absolutely start regulating behaviour after the fact. Australia famously bought a bunch of guns back from people who had previously legally bought and owned them, and melted them down. There's no reason you couldn't offer people money in exchange for the surrender of their previously legally purchased surveillance racket goods. You can also frankly just regulate the central service/company out of existence in the case of, say, Ring.
OK you can do a lot of things. It becomes far harder to implement it after it becomes normal
It's easier to ban ring from selling devices in 2010 when nobody had them, then to take them away from millions who feel their personal benefits of not having to get off the couch to see who's at the door outweighs the societal harm.
That's before the arguments about societal benefits (coperganda does well at this). You change the argument from a hypothetical "this could help stop crime" to a concrete example "in this case we found out who robbed little old granny thanks to our surveillance network".
But their willingness to just make stuff up has escalated so far… I don't think copaganda has the effectiveness it once had. It's gotten burned through gratituous abuse.
That's way off base.
There's a very significant chunk of people who rarely if ever use the camera on their phone right now. It's not even a matter of who they are or their personal opinions. Cameras simply aren't an exclusive gateway to anything critically important. In many cases a photo or video is an objectively worse format than text.
Smartphones became common because they are now the only way to access certain information or authenticate. It's to the extent that we eliminated hard copy documents and changed publishing and proving identity irreversibly. People frequently use smartphones because they have to, and a smartphone without a working camera is still perfectly usable and always will be.
This isn't a matter of the public being wooed by a sales pitch or wanting anything in particular. Images require less accessible and reliable methods of interpretation to convey information whereas text is the information. If you're not convinced then consider that both can be generated by AI. A generated image can be convincing and so can generated text, yet we depend on special forms of text such as keys which cannot be generated by AI and any image trying to encode the same is always inferior. An image is never acceptable as a sole or even primary means of authentication. For all these reasons and more, an image is never the only format available.
I would disagree that a smartphone without a working camera is perfectly usable. A lot of the world — especially in developing countries — runs on QR Codes for everything from restaurant menus to electronic payments. Without a camera, other stuff too, like KYC, just doesn't work. These are the sorts of changes that, as you mentioned, are forcing people to use smartphones. And they rely on the camera.
QR codes can be unreliable and unnecessary to convey a URL. That's why I said "an image is never the only format available". If it's a deliberate thing people must pay attention to, the friction is already too high.
Most QR codes are not permalinks. Nobody wants to print out another one or retry scanning with better lighting only to find it doesn't work. When it really matters the link is dynamic and invisible. It's baked into a script your phone runs when you perform a more interesting higher level task in an app, tap-to-pay when you arrive, etc.
The pushback to and ultimate failure of Google Glass proves it’s not inevitable.
The fact that every new technology has had pushback before adoption makes your claim meaningless.
That is simply not true. There was no pushback for washing machines or vacuum cleaners or refrigerators, to name just a few.
Furthermore, the point isn’t the pushback but the ultimate failure and thus lack of adoption. I feel like that’s fairly obvious.
This idea that all new tech faces pushback is at best ignorant and at worst a wilful deception to justify every draconian idea pushed forward by tech bros who only care about extracting money from people at all costs.
> There have already been demos. Ask the AI watching over your shoulder anything about your past and present and have it act on it.
Demo, or verbatim plot of Black Mirror episode?
Demo.
As much I enjoyed Black Mirror I thought it's Season 1, "The Entire History of You" entertaining but was poorly conceived. It showed catching your partner cheating as a "would rather not know" thing and it ignored any possible positives. The episode wasn't really about the tech, it was about a failing relationship, a cheating partner, and an untrusting obsessive person.
In any case, in that world, which didn't have AI to review and catalog what you saw but only playback of recorded sight, positives they could have mentioned
* an end to almost all date rape - since it would be recorded - leaving only the ambiguous cases
* a likely decrease in various crimes - since they'd all be recorded
* harder for execs/government to make backroom deals - since they're be recordings of them
* might end gaslighting in personal relationships
* eyewitness reports/testimony would be way more reliable
* medical symptom checking - when did some symptom start would be recorded
* better performance review - like a pilot reviewing a training landing or an athlete reviewing their own performance.
* proof of abuse by customers or by staff.
* checking your actual time spent vs you're perceived time spent - I studied for 4 hours, checking though you studied for 45 minutes and kept getting distracted with non-study
* less lost items - check where you left your keys, etc....
* more accountable police - everyone is recording them
* no more need to take photos for memos, since you know everything you looked at is recorded
* all car accidents recorded - easier to determine blame
Of course adding AI to all of that would add orders of magnitude more usefulness.
I'm not saying there are no downsides. As one example, every bowl movement, shower, self pleasure, sex, cold, vomit, misspoke word, awkward situation, etc would be also recoreded.
> The episode wasn't really about the tech, it was about a failing relationship, a cheating partner, and an untrusting obsessive person.
Good (or decent) science fiction is never about the tech, but about its impact on people.
Yes, this is sort of the point. Technology in science fiction is just there as a lens through which to observe humanity (if the point were the technology itself, we'd be writing science-fantasy instead). Not clear that a bunch of the people in charge of bringing tech products to market understand this distinction (see also, Torment Nexus).
And this tech in the show had zero impact. The guy would have had the same issues with or without the tech. The rest of society was doing fine in that episode and nearly everyone had the tech
The impact isn't felt by most. That's the point.
Most people in China get along fine with their social credit system. I don't think that's an argument for the tech in Nosedive (S03E01).
because the tech is hard to envision right (or sci-fi writers would be rich), but the consequences are clearer
There weren’t any consequences of the tech shown. There as just a justifiably untrusting person catching their partner’s infidelity. They’d have had problems anyway. The tech didn’t cause or exacerbate the issue.
To point out it was this particular person’s issue and not the tech, everyone one else in tbe show also had the tech yet were doing fine. They were shocked when they meet one person who didn’t have it. so clearly from the writing itself it was normalized and no one was having issues, otherwise they’d have all brought up the issues
No, it’s because it aims to be a relatable, compelling story, and not a technical instructions manual.
Not everyone thinks about getting rich all the time.
And yet we live in a world where even a basic surveillance camera, dashcam, or bodycam are often broken, missing, or turned off.
It's not always nefarious. The friction is just too high and people don't actually care about any of those things you listed as much as you might believe. If they did, we'd just as easily employ people performing audits on every interaction of every waking moment since the beginning of humanity. A nanny, if you will.
In the real world, simplicity wins. You can say it's irrational all you want. Nobody cares. Cost, reliability, and impedance are more important. No amount of engineering or economy of scale will overcome those things. Doing nothing is always an option and so this is all ultimately political.
What humanity has learned again and again is that trust is too important and intrinsic to leave it up to politics. All that will result in is brittle rules that are easily abused worse than the original problem they intended to solve. It's much easier to convince people to socialize accordingly and ignore or punish the people who refuse to comply.
Making sure that every decision in a flowchart leads somewhere is not necessarily valuable or even desirable to anyone.
I did’t say anyone wanted those things. I said they were positives the show ignored and don’t require AI
with Ai added the use cases are so compelling they fly off th shelves once they get the form and ux right.
Everything you wrote above was said about PDAs in the 90s and yet here we are in 2025 an 85% of the planet has a PDA, renamed smartphone
> Everything you wrote above was said about PDAs in the 90s
No it wasn't. PDAs were seen as crappy little computers, but the applications were obvious because the bigger much more impressive computers were everywhere by then. There was no question about the value of personal computing anymore.
Everything regarding probabilistic AI is either about optimization or trading off costs. All such applications are intrinsically and perpetually lost in the weeds. The use cases aren't new because "generative" is a marketing buzzword desperately trying to cover up what is actually just "imitation".
AI makes what was already possible more accessible. It is useful, but not a revolution for the layperson or even most businesses apart from bridging knowledge gaps. It's a new way to search, but iterative at best. People are in awe of the money being exchanged, but are also in denial that it's almost entirely defense spending.
If it was just a matter of cost, scale, capability, etc. then why am I not allowed to own a flying car with my existing driver's license? Why doesn't everyone own full auto guns? Why do we serve horrible food in hospitals? Why do corporate offices thrive on work that technically never needed more than one person to accomplish even before computers were commonplace? The answers are all political.
> Zuckerberg's idea of humanity's future.
It gets worse.
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/02/meta-zuckerberg-ai-bots-fri...
That's because you are intentionally not included in it. Only him and his rich owning class buddies are, the rest of us are only profit-generating NPCs.
Epstein class fits here, might as well use it.
Now we only need tiny drones that locate those glasses, grab them and drop them on the nearby street.
After flying as high as they can go
So the bodycam that I have because of threats to my person is okay and somehow different?
I might be misreading your comment so that being said:
If you wear a body cam because you feel threatened, hopefully you tell others that you're potentially recording them. The other catch is that the smart glasses do more than simply record video such as facial recognition and so on. Often these are things that have privacy ramifications that neither the wearer or the observer know exactly.
In public you should assume you are being recorded on video. The idea that my bodycam can't be connected to cloud identification tools is weird.
Do you misunderstand the risks or just accept them personally?
The issue is usually that you are imposing the risks onto others without consent. I did not sign the terms and conditions of your cloud providers data collection.
You can be recorded in public, it is not a forgone conclusion that everyone can be run through data capture systems without their consent, society is still working through that. We can still decide on a more fair outcome.
That doesn’t seem to actually address anything I said.
No, that honestly sounds like something I'd prefer to avoid being around too.
This is a real issue. I met up with someone for lunch today and we have both been harassed and stalked by the same individual. She has called the police about him before, and he is likely a psychopath. He would love to get his hands on a set of these. He already uses multiple phones and other tech to track people.
relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1251/
The dichotomy between the statement in the repo "False positives are likely" and the app message "Smart Glasses are probably nearby" is interesting.
I don't think those are contradictory. Say each notification has a 90% chance of being true, so it's reasonable to say "probably". After 10+ notifications, each of which was individually probable, it is still very likely that at least one of them was a false positive.
Perceptions of probability:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
I love how some of the curves go negative
There are no ticks so I assume 0% is on the left edge and not directly over the label.
“When using the app you are likely to experience false positives, and when the app alerts you, smart glasses are probably nearby.”
Nothing contradictory there.
Even “…when the app alerts you, smart glasses are likely nearby” might be reasonable.
That's not a dichotomy.
Sooo technically this is on the edge of legal/not legal, depending on your intent and what the judge had for lunch that day. ID'ing devices without consent is a grey area at best.
> Sooo technically this is on the edge of legal/not legal, depending on your intent and what the judge had for lunch that day. ID'ing devices without consent is a grey area at best.
It's looking at the BLE advertising packets that they send out to everybody. The only thing stored is manufacturer ID, not a device ID (which you wouldn't be able to get anyways).
You might as well try to press charges against Apple or Google for putting readable names for nearby devices that aren't yours in the bluetooth pairing screen.
Filming/video and lookups of people filtered through a corporate data mining operation without their consent should also be illegal. I'll take my chances, thank you.
I recently had to interact with an idiot wearing meta glasses. There should be a mandatory consent requirement AND an "on air" red led.
Do you mean in the courtroom or anywhere? Because filming and photographing people in public is legal everywhere in the U.S., and no consent is required.
> Do you mean in the courtroom or anywhere? Because filming and photographing people in public is legal everywhere in the U.S., and no consent is required.
First, note that "filming" in public is not necessarily legal in every state if you include recording audio of conversations you're not party to.
Second, the GP said should be illegal without consent, so clearly was talking about what's they consider right, not necessarily what is.
But most importantly, "filming and photographing people in public" is also obviously not what the GP was talking about. They said:
> Filming/video and lookups of people filtered through a corporate data mining operation without their consent should also be illegal.
And, actually, extracting biometrics from video of people and tracking them/data mining them without consent is in fact not legal in several states already, and potentially federal law, depending on what they do.
I'd probably go for "the device explicitly allowed itself to be ID'd by intentionally broadcasting a signal intended for this purpose."
What region has laws that you're not allowed to look at a packet that was broadcast from a device? This sounds prima facie absurd, but I know a lot of strange laws exist out there.
This is a case where any law is strange, but so is a lack of a law, for some.
Either way, someone thinks it's weird.* What do you mean it's allowed for people to record me while I'm telling them off? * What do you mean I'm not allowed to remember (with high fidelity) what someone said to me?
So if I run a Wi-Fi Monitor Mode pcap and Wireshark automatically renders MACs as the company they belong to, that's not legal now?
Precisely. Don't ask me why I looked into this, but the legislation is what it is.
> judge had for lunch
This would be a criminal matter, so a jury would have to decide if you're guilty. I feel like you'd have a hard time convincing 12 jurors that you're doing something wrong here.
Is this legal advice?
[citation needed]
I'm a bit torn on this because (at least in the sci-fi utopia stories) when a critical mass of people are recording full time then interpersonal crime and anti-social behavior is strongly discouraged. It's like an honor-based culture at scale.
> It's like an honor-based culture at scale.
Except the basis of that culture would not be honour, would it? A critical mass of people scrutinizing and reporting others' actions might lead to a compliance-based culture. It's different IMO. i.e. intrinsic motivation to behave well (honour, morality, decency) versus extrinsic motivation to behave well (fear of unpopularity, law enforcement, mob reaction, etc.)
It's like how people misunderstand trust. "I trust open source software because I can review the code." No you don't. If you need to review the code then you are already not trusting it. Same deal with "honor" — the entire point of honor is you don't need eyes everywhere to look for misbehavior. You trust people to do the right thing. There is no trust in a police state.
Right. God help you in such a society if the power goes out.
I think you're missing the point. Or, on re-reading, the parent is missing the point.
"Honor culture" or "Culture of honor" is the term for people who are thin-skinned, quick to offense, and worried more about appearances than substance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_Uni...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing
It's all about a shame-based society. When someone is made to feel ashamed, they might lash out. It's practically the opposite of guilt, which is directed inwardly.
At the margins, a shamed person might commit mass murder, while a guilty person might commit suicide.
Before you get to the margin, both guilty people and shamed people might alter their behavior in beneficial ways, but they do it for subtly different reasons.
Thanks. I had to be reminded about that phrase "honor culture" and, yes, I've heard that definition before.
I was focused on how I think an "honourable person" behaves, which is ... IMO ... someone who behaves well regardless of whether or not someone is watching them. i.e. being guided by a personal moral compass, without cultural shame, guilt, government laws, religious conventions, or physical fear being primary motivators
But of course, if I adopt a religion's or legal system's idea of morality as my personal compass (certainly the easiest way to go, and easily installed in youth) ... then the distinction falls apart. Cheers.
> But of course, if I adopt a religion's or legal system's idea of morality as my personal compass (certainly the easiest way to go, and easily installed in youth) ... then the distinction falls apart.
That's obviously part of it, but not the entirety of it. Guiding your own behavior is different than feeling compelled to also dictate others' behavior. Honor culture is usually putatively religious, yet is diametrically opposed to "judge not lest ye be judged."
To be fully immersed in it is to feel personally slighted by any perceived transgressions against the normal order of things, and to have zero sense of proportion about which things are truly harmful to all of us, and which things are simply not how we would do things or prefer things to be done.
You were right, zephen is wrong. The "honor" of "honor killings"--which is about prestige within certain sick societies, has nothing at all to do with the notion of being honorable--that is, acting with integrity.
Yes look at this article showing all of the wonderful anti-social behaviour prevented by smart glasses: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go
(hint: smart glasses encourage anti social behaviour for online clout.)
Which sci-fi utopia stories exactly are you referring to? Please remind me, because all the scifi with ubiquitous surveillace I recall are about dystopias instead.
Right, this is more like Black Mirror S1E3 "The Entire History of You"
I can't recall exactly but it may have been The Light of Other Days
I believe The Light of Other Days has slow-glass that you expose to a scene, it drinks it in, and then plays it back later.
Mass recording discourages social behavior, not anti-social behavior.
Recording people going about their day is anti social behaviour.
50 years ago anti-social behavior included homosexuality.
Also included drinking from the fountain or sitting in seats or eating at a restaurant with people colored differently from you. I wonder what we're going to make "antisocial" in the next 50 years and whether or not we'll be punishing people for things we'll consider benign again in 75 years. The whole "let's surveil everything to stop all antisocial behaviors" might be going too far just like the idea that everyone should open carry to reduce crime.
Can you show your math on how an example of the opposite of what the person you are responding to you can also mean the same thing? Feel free to skip if you live in a non-Euclidian geometry, but the OP was saying such a thing would have been likely to get people killed in the past for violating a society's mores.
Would you consider East Germany a sort of social Utopia?
That's the opposite of honor-based, and those stories are warnings about going down that path.
"Honor-based" has a specific meaning, and it is not good.
If the parent is torn about whether this is good or bad, they're really not paying attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_Uni...
P.S. The response to my comment is complete nonsense. "honor-based", as used here to mean acting with integrity, has nothing at all to do with honor killings.
Again, "honor-based" as used in this discussion is about integrity and has nothing to do with cultures of honor ... notably the word "based" doesn't occur anywhere in the cited material. No one is trying to change anything but someone is trolling hard (and not acting with integrity), and threats about things not going well are unwelcome.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/honor
> 1. honesty, fairness, or integrity in one's beliefs and actions.
Enough (more than enough) said. Over and out forever.
P.P.S.
"Honor-based" has a historic meaning. It is you who are attempting to change it.
That...
Usually doesn't go well.
https://social.psych.iastate.edu/about-my-research/research-...
It will be a delight for anyone who ever wished there existed footage of every time they vomited in public or face-planted after tripping on a cobblestone.
Honor culture is what happens when there's no reliable institutions or evidence, so people have to defend reputation themselves - usually with retaliation and interpersonal violence. Always-on cameras are the opposite idea: enforcement moves outside the individual, which is basically how honor cultures stop being a thing.
from my recollection in most of the stories that is the primary starting point of the narrative but as the story goes along it turns out what you have is a dystopia, which is what it looks like we would actually get.
Firstly, fear and honor are far from being the same thing. Second, we already have this in our society today via smartphones and things have not changed for the better. If anything, society is more torn than ever.