“Experts in Europe warn that these devices are used to record strangers without their consent, possibly breaching EU law.”
“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.”
Sometimes I have a hard time deciding who I despise more, parasite Mark Zuckerberg or its witless hosts who keep using its products—yes, Zuck’s pronoun is it. Ban Ray-Ban, for frick’s sake.
It’s the whole entire point of these glasses so this surely cannot be a surprise.
I’m just waiting for bans on these glasses now, because that is inevitably where this is headed as the public at large simply cannot be trusted to handle this kind of technology responsibly.
And the harder these glasses become to spot, the broader the bans will be, undoubtedly right up the point where they’ll just straight up refuse anybody with any kind of thick framed glasses.
Given that cameras are readily available to the public, these glasses will likely only be banned in specific controlled locations.
I mean I can literally just put my phone in a shirt pocket with camera rolling.
Well, fucking don’t.
I actually have done this, but nothing nefarious. Work-related in a non-public environment. Video calling a coworker for assistance and needed to be able to use my hands.
Are mobile phones banned in public? Cameras?
In my world there is a non-trivial difference between pointing your phone in someone’s general direction and just having inconspicuous looking glasses film everything implicitly.
There shouldn’t really be. Phones can easily record people without their knowledge even as you walk right past them.
People could do lots of things, but it really isn’t as trivial to secretly get eye level footage of what you’re looking at with a smartphone, as you’re making it out to be.
Things like phones peeking out of breastpockets with their camera stick out like a sore thumb and aren’t nearly as easily directed at whatever you intend to record without people realizing you’re recording something.
And the open prescence of a phone always has some implication of a possibility of recording. Glasses do (or rather did) not.
Also, this specific device is a Meta product. And those, by definition, deserve all the hate they can get on the count of them being a gigantic privacy problem due to the nature of the business Meta is ultimately in.