Interesting idea. It seems to me that most things which would need to be protected from hidden cameras would be stationary and not require the operator to mount the detectors on his body, but starting with mobile constraints is often helpful.
I would like to draw attention to this gem of wit, easily the best I've seen in a long time:
> I think the idea behind this approach is sound (actually it's light)
I’ve heard of approaches using pulsed IR along with a Mk.1 Human Eyeball to detect the incident reflections, sometimes with the assistance of a filter. Glasses seem like a good form factor for that kind of thing.
Of course, the detecting person’s anti-camera glasses may well light up on the surveiller’s recording, too…
The solution to this (smart glass privacy debate) is Apple releasing smart glasses that automatically anonymize anyone in your photos/videos who isn’t a friend or family member with you at the time (it could be done automatically as Apple knows your friends/family members' faces already). All else appear as random faces, completely removed, a blurred out crowd to whatever privacy config options they offer and you choose.
Not a creep here and use my Meta glasses to record my normal non-creepy life and life experiences. They are really convenient and useful (just suck cause they break easily either from software updates to water splashes)!
This isn't a solution, they would still have the data. Companies can't be trusted, they'll do what is more convenient for them, we need to remove the problem at the root by not allowing people to take pictures/videos if not permitted.
It teaches people to trust "Currently NonEvil Company™" to do the good thing.
First, and obvious problem is that this "trains" us to rely on brands to protect us. And to keep doing this. Companies may have different interests than their consumers. Ideally and sometimes these interests are aligned. But nothing guarantees this remains so. Companies will "Become evil", if only because they are sometimes legally forced to by governments or shareholders.
Second, is that this teaches people not to be responsible but to leave that to companies or technology. Which works if e.g. Apple and Meta are the only providers. But falls apart the moment Focebook glasses, Apelle Gear or Rang Doorbell is available on temu. And becomes worse when HP, Dell, Samsung, IBM and other legitimate producers start competing in the space. We've now been trained that what the first companies did was "The Good Thing", but lack the social structure, laws, or even common sense to manage a world in which this self-constraint of the companies no longer applies.
Apple is the privacy company already .. that's their brand and a brand that the public trusts.
Overall why are we not up in arms about all the video cameras that record in all cities everyday which companies like Clearview and others have our public images in their databases yet we are up in arms about smart glasses?
THis is a solution to this public debate and Apple hasnt released their glasses yet and they are a privacy company and heavily market themselves as such. As the poster notes smart glasses adoption is rising and will only continue to do so... so this debate in time will continue to fade into the background as there is no same amount of debate about all the cameras in cities that are already recording us. With that in mind the smart glass privacy debate is an odd one to me where corporations are already recording us in these same public places.
lol overall this argument is silly the genie is out the bottle and in five to ten years smart glasses are the norm. All you laggards will be wearing them too and or many close to you will be wearing them. Go ahead and downvote me but in five to ten years you know i am right ;)
Reminds me of my 24 year old niece in which her and her friends hate chatGPT/AI. Hippies fighting technological progress futilely. Like the iPhone haters of 2007 to 2010!
As noted Apple already knows your friends' and familys' faces... why are people not up in arms about this fact already? It's been close to a decade or more they have done this.
Also the debate is around a lot of people not wanting to be recorded without permission in public via glasses (yet they are complacent about all the video cameras recording us now.. i dont get it) so with Apple marketing smart glasses with a solution to this debate and millions buying their smart privacy glasses the market forces all others to follow suit (offer smart privacy glass features too).
I've struggled with this in many public spaces even without having a camera on my glasses. Should I feel guilty that some kids are incidentally in my photos when my kids are on the playground when I take a photo of them? Should I never take photos in public because other unwilling people might be included unless I've explicitly asked them?
I want to be able to use glasses with a camera, in situations which warrant it, to prevent people from gaslighting me or others about our conversations. Something like you see in dashcams, where it's always recording to a circular buffer of a few seconds to a minute, and then one can then enable "full" recording which dumps the buffer to storage and then starts saving everything until disabled.
I also live in a US state that only requires one-party consent to record a conversation, meaning it is fully legal in my state to record any conversation I am a participant in, regardless of the consent of the other participants.
Same way as the police body cameras do it: disclose what you’re doing. Which really is all OP is asking of the Ray-Ban spy cam wearers, too. A blinking red light is the conventional method.
In the police’s case, there’s rarely a choice, but at least you’re reminded you’re speaking For The Record instead of with a person. In your case, that way I know not to talk to you.
I wonder why stealth is so foundational to these devices’ success…
I think your ‘freedom’ infringes on other people's ‘rights’. I think rights should trumps freedoms, that is, your liberty ends where someone else's right to privacy begins.
Sounds dystopian to me, I'd want to reconcile it by not allowing "one-party consent" for people to record me.
Not sure if the state laws you're referencing are in reality limited to phone calls, but I strongly dislike unregulated public camera use.
Your vision (no pun intended) is the story of the Black Mirror episode "The entire history of you", IMO from the show's golden age.
edit; I know that surveillance cameras pass this line already, but here they have to be announced with signs. And even when they aren't, to me state or police surveillance is different from potentially everyone stealthily recording me in private or public spaces.
It's possible the state laws in question (Tennessee) only apply to audio recordings, which would suit my desire. I also don't believe that the idea of a rolling buffer that normally discards its contents to be morally against the idea of notification of recording, or of seeking someone's consent.
I'd be fine with glasses that only record audio in such a way, that illuminate an LED once the "record" button has been pressed. If audio is being recorded into a buffer at all times, but then discarded unless triggered to start "recording", then maybe that should not count as "recording" under the law.
As a practical matter, if one is in a situation where such recording is warranted, by the time you press the record button, you've already missed important information that's relevant to the context of the recording. Allowing a 60-second rolling buffer that then gets dumped to storage when "actual" recording starts should be allowed.
1984? It's not the only surveillance state story. Everyone loves when you can dig up something from decades ago that is no longer representative.
Cameras everywhere just keeps everyone honest, right? Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right? What's acceptable now will always be acceptable in the future, right? My mind never changes, whose does?
The point of this idea is that it would be under control of the individual wearing the glasses. I would most definitely not want it to be syncing to the cloud or some stupid shit like that. The buffer, and the storage, would need to be entirely contained within the glasses (or other device, if it turns out audio is a legally safer way to implement something like this).
As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I'm not against a visual notification of such recording once the "start saving to storage" button has been pressed. At the same time, I realize that the 60 seconds or so leading up to pressing that button is also often vital (otherwise dashcams wouldn't use a rolling buffer). And in such a situation where audio (or video, in applicable jurisdictions) is being recorded only in volatile memory and overwritten when the buffer is exhausted, I don't think a recording notification should be necessary unless the user has actively engaged non-volatile recording. In that sense, it's similar to the difference between streaming and downloading media. Both are technically the same, but the intention of "streaming" is to download the media and decode it without storing it in a non-volatile fashion.
I think you're thinking about this a bit naively, concentrating on the utility without considering the detriments.
Look at social media. WE are the ones who surveil ourselves. Yes, the big social media companies process all that data and use it against us, but we are the ones who give the pictures, videos, and words to them. There's really no good way around this either. I put those same things on my blog and they still get scrapped.
So what ends up being the difference? It's not synced to the cloud, but we put it there anyways. Do you really think most people are just going to take the videos and not share them? Do you think most people are just going to run a NAS at home? In an ideal world, yes. But I don't think we're anywhere near that happening. So a good portion of those videos just get put online somewhere and bad actors have access.
Non-volatile recording doesn't really exist. We're on HN and I'd expect most people here to be familiar with how easy it is to download a streamed video. yt-dlp will do that for a lot more than youtube.
Massive problem in Japan where the issue of sex pests and covert recordings comes up every other day in the media. I suspect it's one of the reasons why Japan isn't on the list of supported countries for the Meta glasses. I hope it stays that way.
Do companies sell phones/cameras that take photos without making a sound? Cause they all make sounds in Japan because of how bad the sex pest problem is.
The suggestion seems to be that lax governmental attitudes towards the voyeurism risk indicates that the risk itself is lower but I don't believe that's necessarily true or that it would contradict my statement above even if it were.
The idea of being constantly monitored by a megacorp tracking all my movements wih their swarm of cameras to feed us personalized ads is utterly dystopian indeed.
But I think the only valid way yo prevent this will be legislation though, it's not a fight individuals can win on their own.
Do not expect this from the UK. That fight despite millions of signatures was batted down:
The UK is introducing passed legislation that citizens' digital IDs are owned by a Google or Apple smartphone.
The UK already have such laws active and in force that company directors must submit their information through an app available only from Google or Apple. It is clear 'digital IDs' will go the same way.
It's not about age or attribute verification. It's about tracking. Which Google excel at, the only alternative Apple and their opt-in.
Governments are quite happy making citizens have megacorps track their lives.
We have a similar law in the UK but it does depend on what you mean by public place.
In somewhere like a public toilet block, at least here in the UK, you have an expectation of privacy. If some creep in Meta glasses is filming you take a piss then they are breaking the law.
If you were on a public beach sun bathing then you probably don't have that expectation of privacy.
In most eu countries, you can record in public, but gathering identifying data ("making a database") is strictly regulated, and that includes faces from those photos. You can't even point a security camera at public areas (ie. outdoor camera recording the street infront of your house), because that's enough data to make it a "database".
The easier way of phrasing it is "you can't record in public, except in certain circumstances". Those certain circumstances just happen to encompass most things reasonable people want to do.
In Europe there is very much an expectation of privacy in public. But that expectation is not absolute, it competes with various other rights and public interests.
For example you can make street photography without blurred faces, because art trumps privacy in this instance. If you start making photos of individuals instead of areas then privacy wins out again and you need consent. A surveillance camera is not creating art, so it doesn't have that excuse going for it and needs a really good reason to be pointed at public areas (and "I fear someone's going to break into my private home" is generally not a good enough reason). And even if you can set up the surveillance camera, operating it requires complying with the GDPR, which has a lot to say on that topic
Note the "I fear" is treated differently if you e.g. have to remove graffiti hate speech from your front door on a weekly basis.
It's just about the "you better have a concrete reason to fear, pure abstract fear won't cut it", and as always, data minimization principles do apply.
There's a difference between taking a photo of eg. random people on the street (eg. trying to show someone that there's a big crowd at the bus station) and recording 24/7 the same bus station. A single photo held by a single person makes it hard to establish movement patterns etc. for those people, while a 24/7 recording can be used for creating a database of all those people coming and leaving.
There are many nuances in privacy law, not just pertaining to photo vs. 24/7 recording, but also expectation of privacy, intent, etc. Taking a photo of some random touristy area with people there is ok, singling out a person is not. Same for eg. taking a panoramic shot of a city where someone just happens to be undressing by the window in one of the buildings in the photo, vs using a telephoto lens pointed at that persons window... so, were you taking a touristy photo vs intending to violate their privacy.
Same nuances, mostly regarding intent appear in other laws too.. you can walk in public, you can stand in a public location, you can work the same shift as your coworker and walk the same path as them, since you both finished work at at the same time. But under slightly different circumstances that same "walking down a public road" or "standing in a public location" can be interpreted as eg. stalking if done with different intent.
That's why there are signs at every store entrance about video surveillance, even though it's private property, they must give info to customers who the contact person for the recording is and they need to have some kind of a retention policy defined for those recordings, and even then they cannot record in areas where people expect privacy (bathrooms, dressing rooms, etc.).
So yeah, taking a random photo of your street is not problematic, since it's "random" and done for other reasons (eg. tourism) while recording 24/7 is gathering enough data to be possibly problematic. Some streets (eg highways) are under video surveillance, but there are signs saying that when you enter the highway: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Mj3GjA7m8BLwUfs77
Short answer is its complicated and will vary from member state to member state. My parental unit had a dispute with neighbor over where his camera is pointed and filed some motion to see what he does with it ( 'not making a database' part ), but the law was mostly toothless as the enforcement of it lacked. On the other hand, the dispute part of the real estate was handed real toot sweet, because everyone and their mother cares about outcomes in those.
tldr: I wish I could tell you there is a simple tldr
There's also the UK practice of deliberately mangling French for comedic effect, as in Del Boy's cries of "Bain Marie!" and "chateuneuf-de-paper!" on 1980s TV. Saying "Toot sweet" can fit right into that bucket.
Some right to record in public may be protected by the current jurisprudence invoking the first amendment, but the first amendment itself obviously doesn't say anything about the right to record in public:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It's a bank shot. SCOTUS has recognized that newsgathering gets some first amendment protection because "without some protection for seeking out the news, freedom of the press could be eviscerated" (Branzburg v Hayes).
One could argue that having a contractor of US intelligence service (Google) collecting data on every citizens all the time isn't exactly “news gathering” and ought to be prevented if one wanted to abid to the spirit of the Constitution.
Private businesses, however, can choose to refuse service for any reason as long as it’s not discriminatory. If enough businesses collaborated to create a “no camera glasses” policy, people might be less likely to buy them. This could keep the market small.
Perhaps a good approach would be to pressure businesses about this. Frankly they probably don’t want pervasive recording of their employees anyway.
I highly doubt that businesses will take a stand against these camera glasses. The kind of people that buy these smart glasses are usually a) wealthy, and b) not very frugal. What business would want to turn away the people with lots of money?
> What business would want to turn away the people with lots of money?
Plenty? Random dive bars, for example, probably don’t care how rich you are (it’s not like a millionaire is going to buy 10x more $5 beers than an average person).
Corporations don't need cameras to track people, they have had the ability to track bluetooth emissions for well over a decade. Unless you turn off a lot of connectivity settings, smartphones are pretty much open tracking devices.
So Ring doorbells and networked CCTV? We're there already. Billboards alongside roads containing targeted advertising already exist, too.
I'm not too fussed about the advertisers in this aspect. The people these companies sell data too not meant for advertising are much more dangerous. That includes the government.
> The idea of being constantly monitored by a megacorp tracking all my movements wih their swarm of cameras to feed us personalized ads is utterly dystopian indeed.
That's very similar to the basis of _The Circle_ by Dave Eggers.
It's not only personal advertisements for consumerism. It's also personalized political messages. That is dangerous to the nations and states and their citizens.
"But I think the only valid way yo prevent this will be legislation though, it's not a fight individuals can win on their own."
It will need both. Secretly recording in the public is already prohibited in many if not most jurisdictions, but ad far as I know, not really prosecuted.
So all the people blathering about camera in public have a moot point. All the whining does is prevent the fairly obvious camera being put into devices.
But if someone wants to record you in public otherwise, they will and there's nothing you or any of us can do about it.
The thing is, every beginner lockpicker makes a similar point when they realize how easy most locks are: "what's the point of locking my door if anyone can easily get in anyway?".
I think the same answers apply here: because making it harder to be casually recorded sends a clear signal that you don't want it, and now the act of recording goes from being an oversight to a deliberate, sometimes punishable act.
>The thing is, every beginner lockpicker makes a similar point when they realize how easy most locks are: "what's the point of locking my door if anyone can easily get in anyway?".
No they don't. I'm a beginner lockpicker and so far I've only been able pick a 2 pin lock once. Have not been able to repeat it. Have not been able to rake any lock open. Lockpicking is much more of a skill than people online give credit. People on the Internet always acting like lockpicking is just as easy as using the key for any old novice.
My then-12 or 13 year old picked the lock that came with her beginners lock picking kit within just a few minutes. She picked most of the small locks that I could find - I think an Abus finally defided her. And she has had no interest in the hobby since.
It becomes an oversight to a deliberate act only if the recording person knows that he was detected. So that means that your anti recording glasses should signal 'no recording' in some way. Otherwise it's not really useful.. But at that point.. You can just stick a qrcode on you with the message 'no recording please look away from me'.
I think people are getting lost in the weeds here. The idea with detection is not to prevent public recording, it's to _know_ you're being recorded so you can act accordingly.
I think your point is a little black-and-white — there's tons of behaviour that sits in the "technical possible but frowned upon" bucket.
It's like people listening to music without any headphones on the train — technically has been possible for ages but previously would've gotten you told to turn it off. Now it barely gets a raised eyebrow.
Can you prevent people secretly filming you? No, but most people still don't want it be become accepted behaviour, even if to you that's all just "whining and blathering".
So if someone wants to sucker punch me in pubic, there's also nothing that I or anyone else can do to proactively prevent it.
But I don't get sucker punched very often, so it seems like there probably are things that can be done about. Norms, consequences, etc etc. "We live in a society".
> most things which would need to be protected from hidden cameras would be stationary
Counter-sniper systems that scan for reflections from optics have existed for twenty years already. These are indeed meant for static operation in military bases and other fixed installations.
And even in those few places where publishing identifiable photos of people is theoretically illegal, I'm sure it happens thousands or even millions of times a day. I don't shove a camera in people's faces but you'll find plenty of pics in my public feeds that have identifiable people in them, including from many countries in Europe.
I look forward to the social media rage meltdown shorts that widespread adoption of this tech will precipitate. I think I'm kidding. I should be kidding. But I am curious...
Question for people who resonate with this: whenever someone is holding their cellphone at an angle that "could be inferred" to be imaging you, how do you feel and think?
I grew up on Earth before the cellpocalypse (phone zombies, etc), and went through a stage of noticing all these new 'cameras' everywhere, but then I stoppped attending to it.
It's probably inevitable over time. "Smart" AR glasses that are indistinguishable from just a pair of regular glasses seem like something inevitable over the next decade or two.
Want? I don't know. Outside of draconian regulation and punishment I don't see how you really stop aside from some level of social pressure/norms which can work to a degree. (No, you don't film/livestream the dinner party among friends that you are at.) People post photos from social events all the time. That ship has mostly sailed. Video and audio is mostly just an additional increment.
I'm not understanding how limiting data collection is draconian regulation.
Recording in public is a huge problem overall and is slowly decaying our society. People don't do anything anymore because nothing is sacred. Have you been to a club lately? It's just a room of 500 people standing there.
It gets worse the younger and younger the people are. Kids these days are too petrified to leave their homes. Every aspect of their person is under constant scrutiny.
I'm not sure what I wrote about data collection. But public data/photo/video availability is pretty much a thing and it seems impossible to prevent. Seems you just have to deal with it.
Those are inseparable from data collection, because that is data collection. The only reason we have to worry about things like Flock is because there's people who will die on the hill that filming people in public is okay, even when corporations do it and use that data for your oppression.
I just don't understand how it's impossible to prevent. We haven't even tried. This is a "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" sort of mentality, which is as lazy as it is harmful.
There's plenty of things in public that you CAN do, but which we prevent pretty well. For example, every human being has the ability to flash anyone, at any time. However, we do a pretty good job preventing that via the law, despite the fact there are absolutely zero technical or physical limitations to pulling out your dick. If anything, it's one of the most human things you can do - humans have penises and vaginas because they are animals.
And yet, despite the availability of such actions, I don't have to worry much about seeing a veiny cock at the local starbucks. But you know what I do have to worry about? Being filmed, and that video being uploaded to hundreds of computers globally in real time, where it can be used for any and all purposes. Including denying me a loan, or a job, or even imprisoning me. And humans don't even have cameras built right in to their crotch.
I would really prefer a solution that doesn't result in tangible social harm to me. Ideally, I should be able to live my life in public and have it not be absolutely fucking terrible.
I don't think that's asking too much. Really, I don't. Maybe I'm naive, maybe I have high expectations. Or maybe everyone else is a pathetic loser with no spine who actively advocates for things they know harm them, out of some masochistic desire for punishment.
A few years back there was a prototype contact lens at HotChips for AR. I assume video/audio recording in jewelry of various types today would be fairly straightforward at least in conjunction with recording on a wireless device in a pocket or transmitting over cellular in some manner. Of course, audio recording (wearing a wire) has been practical for decades.
I remember seeing some celebrities in the late 00s / early 10s with IR-emitting sunglasses or accessories to flood the camera sensors of paparazzi and make it harder for photographers to get spyshots of them.
Would this approach work for these camera glasses as well, simply flooding them with so much IR spectrum light that their sensors simply can't see you anymore?
I think fooling facial recognition systems and CCTV-cameras-at-night is easier than fooling professional photographers. Most photograhers' cameras have IR filters, after all. And nobody's got an LED brighter than the sun.
On this topic, is there any benefit of trying to fool facial recognition systems with these type of accessories and or wearables, would the system not just mark you as suspicious and keep an even better track of you
Of course it is a different thing if these are adopted by the masses
Usually those systems are set up to track faces and/or people, and ignore everything else. If you get a low-confidence detection of a face that's much more likely to be a dog or a band t-shirt than somebody tricking your system. So you would typically ignore everything below a threshold, not flag it.
You could train a system to detect these kinds of attacks, but that's a lot more sophistication that these types of systems usually have, and would probably be specific to each "attack" (e.g. those glasses with lights would look completely different than the face paint approach)
The best defense would be a human watching the raw camera feed, since most of these attacks are very obvious to the human eye. But that's expensive. Maybe you could leverage vision-llms, but those are much more expensive than dedicated face-detection or object classification models. Those typically range from sub-million to maybe a hundred million parameters, while you need billions of parameters for a good vision-llm
One of my future ideas was to have the detection trigger turning a bunch of IR LEDs on to do just this! I've only tested it a little bit against my phone camera (with around 5 850nm LEDs), but it didn't work super well (fairly bright but not enough to be useful). It did work much better in low-light though. My guess is modern cameras have better IR-cut filters, but like I mentioned I only tested against my phone and not the Ray-bans yet.
At some point it pretty much becomes a microwave. Radiation get absorbed and turned into heat. On a small scale not very helpful or harmful. On a larger scale nice to heat your food with but not your head.
I heard about similar hats being used during the Hong Kong protests, but most modern cameras filter out IR anyway. Reflective jackets tend to work much better; they basically turn you into an overexposed bright blob on camera.
Just as a heads up, this is likely illegal in many US states. (Legality is not morality - but it's good to know what the law is before you might break it).
What about correlating transmitted wireless frames with a LED flashing pattern? If the glasses stream video with a variable bitrate codec over wireless, flashing vs. non-flashing should change bandwidth and therefore frame frequency. However, with searching over all channels this might be quite slow in practice.
Does anyone work on smart glasses for blind people yet? Something with blackened glass, obviously, that uses image recognition to translate visual input into text via (headphone) audio to the wearer.
That would allow for urgent warnings (approaching a street, walking towards obstacle [say, an electric scooter or a fence]), scene descriptions on request, or help finding things in the view field. There's probably a lot more you could do with this to help improve quality of life for fully blind people.
I’ve heard stories of people using the Meta smart glasses to help with reduced vision, i.e. asking the LLM assistant what you’re looking at, asking it to read a label, etc. The LLM assistant can see the camera feed so it is capable of doing that.
However things like the urgent warnings you mentioned don’t exist yet.
Hearing about the way people with bad vision use these glasses kind of changed my viewpoint on them to be honest; for the average person it might seem useless to be able to ask an LLM about what you’re looking at, but looking at it from an accessibility standpoint it seems like a really good idea.
Every time I read about smart glasses I wonder the same thing. Obviously the technology isn’t perfect, but it seems that even a basic pair of smart glasses with primitive image processing could be life-changing for a completely blind person. Yet as far as I can tell, most blind people don’t use technology at all for this purpose.
Unfortunately, the HN website is extremely unfriendly to users relying on assistive technologies (lack of ARIA tags, semantic elements etc.), otherwise there might be more blind people commenting here who could shed light on such things, no pun intended.
I was just reading about an app in the iOS App Store called Seeing AI that "narrates the world around you". (All disclaimers apply, this is exactly all I know about it.)
If the top-level poster succeeds, the resulting device could possibly disable devices that allow blind people to see. This could open up another liability channel.
Semi-related question. Is there a method to print a picture on a t-shirt that can only be viewed by a camera and not be the naked eye? If so I would like to print images on the front and back of the shirt that would get the glasshole or cell phone cameras banned from their platforms.
Compare human cone cell spectral sensitivity to the camera modules inside the glasses. [0][1]
Usually digital cameras have some major differences from human eyes, particularly near UV and IR. Find dyes with spectral albedo that integrates to the same strengths for (most) humans' cones, but not for the glasses.
Though human eyes have pretty good dynamic range, and some degree of variation. Maybe add dithering around the edges.
You could make a moire pattern, but it would probably be pretty hard to get it flat enough on a shirt, and it wouldn't be distinct enough to get interpreted by AI.
I saw some painting a while a go, looked just like random dots, so I took a picture with my smartphone and that revealed a portrait! Pretty amazing, must have been some moire thing indeed
Sorry for not responding for your request for tech advise and instead commenting on the idea:
1. I would want this.
2. If possible, if the detecting device could be clipped on somewhow and not force me to use different (sun)glasses might be my necessary condition unless you're selling glasses that I like as much as my curreny ones.
3. If I could demand anything, I would demand you pair up with someone who has some streetcred in the privacy tech department (streetcred as in a known public personality with trackrecord on being on the right side of these issues or known to be advocating for them).
Here's why: if Meta decided to add this feature to their glasses, if I found a way to shut down all the other shit, I might go and buy their glasses. Which means if you are sucessful, if I were Meta I would buy you out and shut you down. Hence the public personality or who have you to prevent you fron doing this.
A much-needed project. Making yourself invisible to such privacy-invasive devices will be the need of the day. Of the two approaches you mentioned, blocking/jamming the specific wireless traffic would be pretty interesting, if possible.
At the end of the day, legality is what society settles as an acceptable way of running itself when all the stakeholders reluctantly agree or at least don't protest too much. Right now the 'costs' are sufficiently low that no one cares. As with most things, I suspect that there is a threshold ( though likely much higher than I have previously anticipated ) at which normal person would be unwilling to go as if anything changed.
Nobody cares? Here (sweden) its illegal to possess outside of military use. The US seems to give fines between 20-200 thousand $ for its usage and potential imprisonment for its sale. Even overboosting wifi routers for better range gets people in trouble.
It's among the most illegal things you could easily do with basic electronics equipment.
why? Part of it is historical; it used to be complicated, so being in possession of one got you in trouble with the anti terrorism squad.
These days; it's because it can block emergency services, police and military radio, and burglary alarms.
They may be lenient for a nerd playing with a router but the law its not on your side when push comes to shove.
This is overstating the case. In the US you can buy such devices (usually from Aliexpress but Amazon has devices capable of some jamming/deauth). They are illegal to use for intentional jamming of other people’s equipment. However, unless you go around jamming important safety equipment or making local hams angry then nothing will happen. The FCC has its hands full and can’t even seem to address persistent issues on the ham bands until they get really bad.
Implementing it is trivial. you can just overlook the radio from openWRT and drown out every 2.4-2.5 gHz device in a 100M radius.
Doing it targeted is more difficult since it does frequency hopping, but you could probably reverse the frequency hopping algorithm to target specifically Bluetooth and force high packet loss.
This is still illegal for radio jamming reasons, and also patent infringement since a misbehaving Bluetooth device has not gotten permission to use Bluetooth patents held by SIG.
I'll feel much safer when I'm visible only to every single ATM camera, traffic camera, random smartphone camera and doorbell camera, but not to people's glasses.
Comparable to what I read someone say about AI the other day: we're living in the small sliver of history where smart-glasses with cameras are technically feasible yet are still (kind of) detectable.
There's no reason why stealth technology should have to advance faster than detection technology. In fact, in many applications with strong incentives to advance both stealth and detection capabilities, the modern world has trended towards being increasingly transparent.
If we culturally/economically wanted it, I'm sure we could all have cheap nonlinear junction detectors in our pockets.
I could see the guards at the courthouse, wearing these.
Cameras are so small, these days, that I don't think it's realistic to be able to detect them. I just go through every day, assuming that I'm on Candid Camera.
When I worked for a big Hollywood media conglomerate, there was a project to detect cameras in theaters. (There was a piracy problem where people would record the movie on a camcorder). It worked by detecting the IR filter that’s in front of the CMOS detector in almost all cameras. It’s a retroreflector for UV range. Shine a UV light to the audience and look for spots of light. I’d imagine this would work for cameras in any darkened environment even today.
Sorry I'm still confused. Do you have a reliable way to detect if a smart glass is recording or not? I never used smart-glasses regularly, but wouldn't it be "on" all the time if one is using it, so detecting the power-on and pairing is kinda useless?
Regular pairing, advertising and control likley use Bluetooth LE for simplicity and battery life. Streaming or transferring video likley use Bluetooth classic for increased bandwidth.
These are two different protocols with different radio behaviour.
So beyond detecting the glasses themselves, which seem like the focus of the project; detecting recording is feasible at the point of transfer to a phone.
The issue is distinguishing it from any other high bandwidth Bluetooth device nearby, such as headphones.
They don't stream to your phone when taking a video or picture. The data is on device and transferred later. It also uses wifi direct not BLE. It seems many many people on HN have absolutely no clue how the meta glasses work lol, there's barely any accurate information in this thread.
Like I mentioned in the text, I haven't looked into Wi-Fi yet. The picture/video -> transfer through the app is correct, and why an alternative method for detecting actual recording is necessary, but I'd expect to see that most events like battery status updates would be over directed BLE, since the initial boot + battery status is broadcast. And likely BTC for streaming audio. I'm unfamiliar with Wi-Fi Direct specifically, are you familiar with the process of scanning for active Wi-Fi Direct services?
Sorry don't mean to demean your effort, I read the GH post and like the hacker spirit :D. It's the rest of the people in the HN comments with 0 clue.
I like my glasses and don't really agree with your goals (nor see the point of letting you know when someone's wearing them; in my city your device would be beeping constantly) so I'm not interested in helping unfortunately. But I do wish you luck, as I said I like the spirit.
Tangentially related it's also useful to quickly gauge if your smarts-wielding neighbors are home or not so noise levels can be adjusted accorsingly (:
Thank you for the technical write up. I have no expertise in the BTE area but it's clear enough for me to understand.
The swap pattern is very interesting but even if it's silly, maybe experimenting with an actual camera to detect cameras may give you a good base line to what to expect from a working Rayban banner.
Are there any smart glasses being developed for people with prosopagnosia or really bad face memory?
I often bump into people I know on the street but can’t place their faces. A lot of them get offended when I don’t immediately recognize them, even though I remember who they are—just not what they look like.
I have them and like them. I don't wear them constantly, but on days when I'm doing something interesting, they help me document much more than I otherwise would.
I have a pen camera and a key fob camera. These are widely available. Obviously they won’t give you real time intel on what you’re looking at, but if you’re worried about being surreptitiously recorded, smart glasses are just a small part of the problem.
I think this generation will be remembered for how desperately it tried to cling onto privacy over our public image well beyond what should have been the reasonable time to acknowledge its passing.
Super interesting project, at first I thought it would be a naive implementation of YOLO but I wasn't aware about retro-reflections. The papers he linked in the GH discuss very interesting ideas
You can find devices on ebay that should detect cameras by using a polarized glass and LED lights as cameras tend to reflect back well and you'd see a shining spot where sensor is.
Before putting yourself in the mind of QA, you have to be 100% sure on what the goals and priorities of the product is supposed to be in the first place.
Only a subset of use potential cases will be worried with false positives, but this approach says to drive the cost greater for all potential use cases.
Isn't there some kind of fluorescent effect that you can use? I.e., send one very specific wavelength onto the camera sensor, and receive one other very specific wavelength back.
They were not quickly defeated. And as it stands currently, I thought there was only 1 somewhat involved hardware mod that worked. as opposed to any spy cam that you can guy purchase from amazon for a fraction of the cost.
My social media algorithm may be tricking me into thinking it’s more ubiquitous than it is, but i was fed quite a bit of content about it until I ‘dislike’d it into oblivion (its a norms change i am not aligned with).
I have no experience in this area, so I’ll just ask a noob question:
Can we make it so that if someone is looking at me through smart-glasses without my consent, my glasses respond with some form of interference that gives them a tiny headache?
And if I do grant someone consent to record me, I can just turn my glasses off.
And of course, my glasses don’t record anything, so they wouldn’t be hurting my own eyes.
Interesting idea. It seems to me that most things which would need to be protected from hidden cameras would be stationary and not require the operator to mount the detectors on his body, but starting with mobile constraints is often helpful.
I would like to draw attention to this gem of wit, easily the best I've seen in a long time:
> I think the idea behind this approach is sound (actually it's light)
It's me. I want to be protected from hidden cameras from other peoples glasses.
Project Codename: Allen Funt
Project Description: Glasses that have a speaker and appropriately say “You’re on Candid Camera!” when it detects others being recorded.
... by using your own glasses with a hidden camera? Sounds like a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.
”I would feel pretty silly if my solution uses its own camera. So I'll be avoiding that.”
From the GitHub link.
Yeah but that approach using "sweeps" doesn't seem to be working. It's possible it actually requires a camera to do it reliably well.
I’ve heard of approaches using pulsed IR along with a Mk.1 Human Eyeball to detect the incident reflections, sometimes with the assistance of a filter. Glasses seem like a good form factor for that kind of thing.
Of course, the detecting person’s anti-camera glasses may well light up on the surveiller’s recording, too…
The solution to this (smart glass privacy debate) is Apple releasing smart glasses that automatically anonymize anyone in your photos/videos who isn’t a friend or family member with you at the time (it could be done automatically as Apple knows your friends/family members' faces already). All else appear as random faces, completely removed, a blurred out crowd to whatever privacy config options they offer and you choose.
Not a creep here and use my Meta glasses to record my normal non-creepy life and life experiences. They are really convenient and useful (just suck cause they break easily either from software updates to water splashes)!
This isn't a solution, they would still have the data. Companies can't be trusted, they'll do what is more convenient for them, we need to remove the problem at the root by not allowing people to take pictures/videos if not permitted.
Indeed, this solution is in some way even worse.
It teaches people to trust "Currently NonEvil Company™" to do the good thing.
First, and obvious problem is that this "trains" us to rely on brands to protect us. And to keep doing this. Companies may have different interests than their consumers. Ideally and sometimes these interests are aligned. But nothing guarantees this remains so. Companies will "Become evil", if only because they are sometimes legally forced to by governments or shareholders.
Second, is that this teaches people not to be responsible but to leave that to companies or technology. Which works if e.g. Apple and Meta are the only providers. But falls apart the moment Focebook glasses, Apelle Gear or Rang Doorbell is available on temu. And becomes worse when HP, Dell, Samsung, IBM and other legitimate producers start competing in the space. We've now been trained that what the first companies did was "The Good Thing", but lack the social structure, laws, or even common sense to manage a world in which this self-constraint of the companies no longer applies.
Apple is the privacy company already .. that's their brand and a brand that the public trusts.
Overall why are we not up in arms about all the video cameras that record in all cities everyday which companies like Clearview and others have our public images in their databases yet we are up in arms about smart glasses?
THis is a solution to this public debate and Apple hasnt released their glasses yet and they are a privacy company and heavily market themselves as such. As the poster notes smart glasses adoption is rising and will only continue to do so... so this debate in time will continue to fade into the background as there is no same amount of debate about all the cameras in cities that are already recording us. With that in mind the smart glass privacy debate is an odd one to me where corporations are already recording us in these same public places.
> Apple is the privacy company already .. that's their brand and a brand that the public trusts.
...for now. What happens if they end up with a future CEO who is more like Zuck?
lol overall this argument is silly the genie is out the bottle and in five to ten years smart glasses are the norm. All you laggards will be wearing them too and or many close to you will be wearing them. Go ahead and downvote me but in five to ten years you know i am right ;)
Reminds me of my 24 year old niece in which her and her friends hate chatGPT/AI. Hippies fighting technological progress futilely. Like the iPhone haters of 2007 to 2010!
As noted Apple already knows your friends' and familys' faces... why are people not up in arms about this fact already? It's been close to a decade or more they have done this.
Also the debate is around a lot of people not wanting to be recorded without permission in public via glasses (yet they are complacent about all the video cameras recording us now.. i dont get it) so with Apple marketing smart glasses with a solution to this debate and millions buying their smart privacy glasses the market forces all others to follow suit (offer smart privacy glass features too).
I've struggled with this in many public spaces even without having a camera on my glasses. Should I feel guilty that some kids are incidentally in my photos when my kids are on the playground when I take a photo of them? Should I never take photos in public because other unwilling people might be included unless I've explicitly asked them?
Going by data, most likely a path with prior success.
I want to be able to use glasses with a camera, in situations which warrant it, to prevent people from gaslighting me or others about our conversations. Something like you see in dashcams, where it's always recording to a circular buffer of a few seconds to a minute, and then one can then enable "full" recording which dumps the buffer to storage and then starts saving everything until disabled.
I also live in a US state that only requires one-party consent to record a conversation, meaning it is fully legal in my state to record any conversation I am a participant in, regardless of the consent of the other participants.
How should this be reconciled?
Same way as the police body cameras do it: disclose what you’re doing. Which really is all OP is asking of the Ray-Ban spy cam wearers, too. A blinking red light is the conventional method.
In the police’s case, there’s rarely a choice, but at least you’re reminded you’re speaking For The Record instead of with a person. In your case, that way I know not to talk to you.
I wonder why stealth is so foundational to these devices’ success…
Other people don’t have to agree to be around you if you insist on using a camera all the time. I wouldn’t.
I think your ‘freedom’ infringes on other people's ‘rights’. I think rights should trumps freedoms, that is, your liberty ends where someone else's right to privacy begins.
Sounds dystopian to me, I'd want to reconcile it by not allowing "one-party consent" for people to record me.
Not sure if the state laws you're referencing are in reality limited to phone calls, but I strongly dislike unregulated public camera use.
Your vision (no pun intended) is the story of the Black Mirror episode "The entire history of you", IMO from the show's golden age.
edit; I know that surveillance cameras pass this line already, but here they have to be announced with signs. And even when they aren't, to me state or police surveillance is different from potentially everyone stealthily recording me in private or public spaces.
It's possible the state laws in question (Tennessee) only apply to audio recordings, which would suit my desire. I also don't believe that the idea of a rolling buffer that normally discards its contents to be morally against the idea of notification of recording, or of seeking someone's consent.
I'd be fine with glasses that only record audio in such a way, that illuminate an LED once the "record" button has been pressed. If audio is being recorded into a buffer at all times, but then discarded unless triggered to start "recording", then maybe that should not count as "recording" under the law.
As a practical matter, if one is in a situation where such recording is warranted, by the time you press the record button, you've already missed important information that's relevant to the context of the recording. Allowing a 60-second rolling buffer that then gets dumped to storage when "actual" recording starts should be allowed.
Cameras everywhere just keeps everyone honest, right? Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right? What's acceptable now will always be acceptable in the future, right? My mind never changes, whose does?
The point of this idea is that it would be under control of the individual wearing the glasses. I would most definitely not want it to be syncing to the cloud or some stupid shit like that. The buffer, and the storage, would need to be entirely contained within the glasses (or other device, if it turns out audio is a legally safer way to implement something like this).
As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I'm not against a visual notification of such recording once the "start saving to storage" button has been pressed. At the same time, I realize that the 60 seconds or so leading up to pressing that button is also often vital (otherwise dashcams wouldn't use a rolling buffer). And in such a situation where audio (or video, in applicable jurisdictions) is being recorded only in volatile memory and overwritten when the buffer is exhausted, I don't think a recording notification should be necessary unless the user has actively engaged non-volatile recording. In that sense, it's similar to the difference between streaming and downloading media. Both are technically the same, but the intention of "streaming" is to download the media and decode it without storing it in a non-volatile fashion.
I think you're thinking about this a bit naively, concentrating on the utility without considering the detriments.
Look at social media. WE are the ones who surveil ourselves. Yes, the big social media companies process all that data and use it against us, but we are the ones who give the pictures, videos, and words to them. There's really no good way around this either. I put those same things on my blog and they still get scrapped.
So what ends up being the difference? It's not synced to the cloud, but we put it there anyways. Do you really think most people are just going to take the videos and not share them? Do you think most people are just going to run a NAS at home? In an ideal world, yes. But I don't think we're anywhere near that happening. So a good portion of those videos just get put online somewhere and bad actors have access.
Non-volatile recording doesn't really exist. We're on HN and I'd expect most people here to be familiar with how easy it is to download a streamed video. yt-dlp will do that for a lot more than youtube.
"Secret" camera recorder on a phone. Runs in the background, so you just need to keep the gaslighting person in view.
Isn't the biggest mobile use case where you don't want to be secretly recorded in public? This was a big concern with the original Google Glass.
Massive problem in Japan where the issue of sex pests and covert recordings comes up every other day in the media. I suspect it's one of the reasons why Japan isn't on the list of supported countries for the Meta glasses. I hope it stays that way.
> sex pests and covert recordings comes up every other day in the media.
These are also issues where we live, they just don't get the same media attention.
Do companies sell phones/cameras that take photos without making a sound? Cause they all make sounds in Japan because of how bad the sex pest problem is.
The suggestion seems to be that lax governmental attitudes towards the voyeurism risk indicates that the risk itself is lower but I don't believe that's necessarily true or that it would contradict my statement above even if it were.
The idea of being constantly monitored by a megacorp tracking all my movements wih their swarm of cameras to feed us personalized ads is utterly dystopian indeed.
But I think the only valid way yo prevent this will be legislation though, it's not a fight individuals can win on their own.
Do not expect this from the UK. That fight despite millions of signatures was batted down:
The UK is introducing passed legislation that citizens' digital IDs are owned by a Google or Apple smartphone.
The UK already have such laws active and in force that company directors must submit their information through an app available only from Google or Apple. It is clear 'digital IDs' will go the same way.
It's not about age or attribute verification. It's about tracking. Which Google excel at, the only alternative Apple and their opt-in.
Governments are quite happy making citizens have megacorps track their lives.
Digital ID legislation has not been introduced.
Company directors do not have to use the app. The app is one of three ways of doing it.
In the USA, at least, the right to record in public is protected by the First Amendment.
We have a similar law in the UK but it does depend on what you mean by public place.
In somewhere like a public toilet block, at least here in the UK, you have an expectation of privacy. If some creep in Meta glasses is filming you take a piss then they are breaking the law.
If you were on a public beach sun bathing then you probably don't have that expectation of privacy.
In most eu countries, you can record in public, but gathering identifying data ("making a database") is strictly regulated, and that includes faces from those photos. You can't even point a security camera at public areas (ie. outdoor camera recording the street infront of your house), because that's enough data to make it a "database".
You can record in public, but you can’t point cameras at public areas? That seems contradictory
Or is it the fact that it’s always recording that makes the difference or something?
The easier way of phrasing it is "you can't record in public, except in certain circumstances". Those certain circumstances just happen to encompass most things reasonable people want to do.
In Europe there is very much an expectation of privacy in public. But that expectation is not absolute, it competes with various other rights and public interests.
For example you can make street photography without blurred faces, because art trumps privacy in this instance. If you start making photos of individuals instead of areas then privacy wins out again and you need consent. A surveillance camera is not creating art, so it doesn't have that excuse going for it and needs a really good reason to be pointed at public areas (and "I fear someone's going to break into my private home" is generally not a good enough reason). And even if you can set up the surveillance camera, operating it requires complying with the GDPR, which has a lot to say on that topic
Note the "I fear" is treated differently if you e.g. have to remove graffiti hate speech from your front door on a weekly basis. It's just about the "you better have a concrete reason to fear, pure abstract fear won't cut it", and as always, data minimization principles do apply.
There's a difference between taking a photo of eg. random people on the street (eg. trying to show someone that there's a big crowd at the bus station) and recording 24/7 the same bus station. A single photo held by a single person makes it hard to establish movement patterns etc. for those people, while a 24/7 recording can be used for creating a database of all those people coming and leaving.
There are many nuances in privacy law, not just pertaining to photo vs. 24/7 recording, but also expectation of privacy, intent, etc. Taking a photo of some random touristy area with people there is ok, singling out a person is not. Same for eg. taking a panoramic shot of a city where someone just happens to be undressing by the window in one of the buildings in the photo, vs using a telephoto lens pointed at that persons window... so, were you taking a touristy photo vs intending to violate their privacy.
Same nuances, mostly regarding intent appear in other laws too.. you can walk in public, you can stand in a public location, you can work the same shift as your coworker and walk the same path as them, since you both finished work at at the same time. But under slightly different circumstances that same "walking down a public road" or "standing in a public location" can be interpreted as eg. stalking if done with different intent.
That's why there are signs at every store entrance about video surveillance, even though it's private property, they must give info to customers who the contact person for the recording is and they need to have some kind of a retention policy defined for those recordings, and even then they cannot record in areas where people expect privacy (bathrooms, dressing rooms, etc.).
So yeah, taking a random photo of your street is not problematic, since it's "random" and done for other reasons (eg. tourism) while recording 24/7 is gathering enough data to be possibly problematic. Some streets (eg highways) are under video surveillance, but there are signs saying that when you enter the highway: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Mj3GjA7m8BLwUfs77
Short answer is its complicated and will vary from member state to member state. My parental unit had a dispute with neighbor over where his camera is pointed and filed some motion to see what he does with it ( 'not making a database' part ), but the law was mostly toothless as the enforcement of it lacked. On the other hand, the dispute part of the real estate was handed real toot sweet, because everyone and their mother cares about outcomes in those.
tldr: I wish I could tell you there is a simple tldr
> toot sweet
Not sure if intentional but just in case: the usual term is "tout de suite"
It might be in the original French, but it’s been anglicised and adopted as an English language term:
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/toot-sweet_adv?tl=true
I love this way English has of swallowing and digesting terms from other languages. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/the-tooter-the-sweeter_phr
Quelle surprise (wink wink)!
This is the first time I've ever seen "toot sweet" used. The more you learn :)
To be clear, it’s a jokey informal English language term, not a standard one.
“The English language doesn't exist, it's just badly pronounced French” strikes again.
There's also the UK practice of deliberately mangling French for comedic effect, as in Del Boy's cries of "Bain Marie!" and "chateuneuf-de-paper!" on 1980s TV. Saying "Toot sweet" can fit right into that bucket.
Some right to record in public may be protected by the current jurisprudence invoking the first amendment, but the first amendment itself obviously doesn't say anything about the right to record in public:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It's a bank shot. SCOTUS has recognized that newsgathering gets some first amendment protection because "without some protection for seeking out the news, freedom of the press could be eviscerated" (Branzburg v Hayes).
One could argue that having a contractor of US intelligence service (Google) collecting data on every citizens all the time isn't exactly “news gathering” and ought to be prevented if one wanted to abid to the spirit of the Constitution.
Recording is writing, which is speech, which is protected.
“Performance is speech, murder is performance, hence murder is protected”
Fortunately it doesn't work like that.
Also not every speech is protected, you aren't allowed to leak classified info even though doing that is purely speech.
Private businesses, however, can choose to refuse service for any reason as long as it’s not discriminatory. If enough businesses collaborated to create a “no camera glasses” policy, people might be less likely to buy them. This could keep the market small.
Perhaps a good approach would be to pressure businesses about this. Frankly they probably don’t want pervasive recording of their employees anyway.
I highly doubt that businesses will take a stand against these camera glasses. The kind of people that buy these smart glasses are usually a) wealthy, and b) not very frugal. What business would want to turn away the people with lots of money?
Walmart? Target? Other large retailers who don’t want people covertly filming employee interactions for “content?”
Plus the footage goes on social media as free advertising.
> What business would want to turn away the people with lots of money?
Plenty? Random dive bars, for example, probably don’t care how rich you are (it’s not like a millionaire is going to buy 10x more $5 beers than an average person).
I’m d assume businesses like social media attention, so if these cameras post to Social Media that’s free advertising.
Also, how would you differentiate banning cameras on glasses vs cameras on smartphones. It could get murky
> I’m d assume businesses like social media attention, so if these cameras post to Social Media that’s free advertising.
If you care about attention, a move like that is likely going to create enough controversy to get you a great deal of attention actually.
Corporations don't need cameras to track people, they have had the ability to track bluetooth emissions for well over a decade. Unless you turn off a lot of connectivity settings, smartphones are pretty much open tracking devices.
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...
The kinetic solution starts at misdemeanour.
So Ring doorbells and networked CCTV? We're there already. Billboards alongside roads containing targeted advertising already exist, too.
I'm not too fussed about the advertisers in this aspect. The people these companies sell data too not meant for advertising are much more dangerous. That includes the government.
> The idea of being constantly monitored by a megacorp tracking all my movements wih their swarm of cameras to feed us personalized ads is utterly dystopian indeed.
That's very similar to the basis of _The Circle_ by Dave Eggers.
It's not only personal advertisements for consumerism. It's also personalized political messages. That is dangerous to the nations and states and their citizens.
"But I think the only valid way yo prevent this will be legislation though, it's not a fight individuals can win on their own."
It will need both. Secretly recording in the public is already prohibited in many if not most jurisdictions, but ad far as I know, not really prosecuted.
If I want to record you, you'd never know.
https://www.dpreview.com/news/4272574802/omnivision-has-crea...
So all the people blathering about camera in public have a moot point. All the whining does is prevent the fairly obvious camera being put into devices.
But if someone wants to record you in public otherwise, they will and there's nothing you or any of us can do about it.
The thing is, every beginner lockpicker makes a similar point when they realize how easy most locks are: "what's the point of locking my door if anyone can easily get in anyway?".
I think the same answers apply here: because making it harder to be casually recorded sends a clear signal that you don't want it, and now the act of recording goes from being an oversight to a deliberate, sometimes punishable act.
>The thing is, every beginner lockpicker makes a similar point when they realize how easy most locks are: "what's the point of locking my door if anyone can easily get in anyway?".
No they don't. I'm a beginner lockpicker and so far I've only been able pick a 2 pin lock once. Have not been able to repeat it. Have not been able to rake any lock open. Lockpicking is much more of a skill than people online give credit. People on the Internet always acting like lockpicking is just as easy as using the key for any old novice.
For some people it is.
My then-12 or 13 year old picked the lock that came with her beginners lock picking kit within just a few minutes. She picked most of the small locks that I could find - I think an Abus finally defided her. And she has had no interest in the hobby since.
It becomes an oversight to a deliberate act only if the recording person knows that he was detected. So that means that your anti recording glasses should signal 'no recording' in some way. Otherwise it's not really useful.. But at that point.. You can just stick a qrcode on you with the message 'no recording please look away from me'.
I think people are getting lost in the weeds here. The idea with detection is not to prevent public recording, it's to _know_ you're being recorded so you can act accordingly.
I think your point is a little black-and-white — there's tons of behaviour that sits in the "technical possible but frowned upon" bucket.
It's like people listening to music without any headphones on the train — technically has been possible for ages but previously would've gotten you told to turn it off. Now it barely gets a raised eyebrow.
Can you prevent people secretly filming you? No, but most people still don't want it be become accepted behaviour, even if to you that's all just "whining and blathering".
So if someone wants to sucker punch me in pubic, there's also nothing that I or anyone else can do to proactively prevent it.
But I don't get sucker punched very often, so it seems like there probably are things that can be done about. Norms, consequences, etc etc. "We live in a society".
> most things which would need to be protected from hidden cameras would be stationary
Counter-sniper systems that scan for reflections from optics have existed for twenty years already. These are indeed meant for static operation in military bases and other fixed installations.
I could see these being worn by walking-around security in a place where filming by the audience isn’t allowed. Super cool.
I agree, I laugh out loud at that pun.
[flagged]
Switzerland is quite unusual in that regard.
I would imagine most Hacker News users live in places where recording or photography in a public place is not illegal.
Your suggestion of violence certainly isn't legal in most places!
And even in those few places where publishing identifiable photos of people is theoretically illegal, I'm sure it happens thousands or even millions of times a day. I don't shove a camera in people's faces but you'll find plenty of pics in my public feeds that have identifiable people in them, including from many countries in Europe.
Relax Rambo
I look forward to the social media rage meltdown shorts that widespread adoption of this tech will precipitate. I think I'm kidding. I should be kidding. But I am curious...
Question for people who resonate with this: whenever someone is holding their cellphone at an angle that "could be inferred" to be imaging you, how do you feel and think?
I grew up on Earth before the cellpocalypse (phone zombies, etc), and went through a stage of noticing all these new 'cameras' everywhere, but then I stoppped attending to it.
It's probably inevitable over time. "Smart" AR glasses that are indistinguishable from just a pair of regular glasses seem like something inevitable over the next decade or two.
I hope that eventually ‘smart’ localised and portable EMPs become a thing. Arms race. I'm only partially kidding.
is this the future we actually want????
or one that is truly inevitable and can’t be stopped?
Want? I don't know. Outside of draconian regulation and punishment I don't see how you really stop aside from some level of social pressure/norms which can work to a degree. (No, you don't film/livestream the dinner party among friends that you are at.) People post photos from social events all the time. That ship has mostly sailed. Video and audio is mostly just an additional increment.
I'm not understanding how limiting data collection is draconian regulation.
Recording in public is a huge problem overall and is slowly decaying our society. People don't do anything anymore because nothing is sacred. Have you been to a club lately? It's just a room of 500 people standing there.
It gets worse the younger and younger the people are. Kids these days are too petrified to leave their homes. Every aspect of their person is under constant scrutiny.
I'm not sure what I wrote about data collection. But public data/photo/video availability is pretty much a thing and it seems impossible to prevent. Seems you just have to deal with it.
Those are inseparable from data collection, because that is data collection. The only reason we have to worry about things like Flock is because there's people who will die on the hill that filming people in public is okay, even when corporations do it and use that data for your oppression.
I just don't understand how it's impossible to prevent. We haven't even tried. This is a "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" sort of mentality, which is as lazy as it is harmful.
There's plenty of things in public that you CAN do, but which we prevent pretty well. For example, every human being has the ability to flash anyone, at any time. However, we do a pretty good job preventing that via the law, despite the fact there are absolutely zero technical or physical limitations to pulling out your dick. If anything, it's one of the most human things you can do - humans have penises and vaginas because they are animals.
And yet, despite the availability of such actions, I don't have to worry much about seeing a veiny cock at the local starbucks. But you know what I do have to worry about? Being filmed, and that video being uploaded to hundreds of computers globally in real time, where it can be used for any and all purposes. Including denying me a loan, or a job, or even imprisoning me. And humans don't even have cameras built right in to their crotch.
Maybe start just wearing a mask.
I would really prefer a solution that doesn't result in tangible social harm to me. Ideally, I should be able to live my life in public and have it not be absolutely fucking terrible.
I don't think that's asking too much. Really, I don't. Maybe I'm naive, maybe I have high expectations. Or maybe everyone else is a pathetic loser with no spine who actively advocates for things they know harm them, out of some masochistic desire for punishment.
I don't know, you decide.
Just wait for the bionic eyeballs!
A few years back there was a prototype contact lens at HotChips for AR. I assume video/audio recording in jewelry of various types today would be fairly straightforward at least in conjunction with recording on a wireless device in a pocket or transmitting over cellular in some manner. Of course, audio recording (wearing a wire) has been practical for decades.
It's like "Everyone can be Q" now.
I remember seeing some celebrities in the late 00s / early 10s with IR-emitting sunglasses or accessories to flood the camera sensors of paparazzi and make it harder for photographers to get spyshots of them.
Would this approach work for these camera glasses as well, simply flooding them with so much IR spectrum light that their sensors simply can't see you anymore?
Well, there's https://www.nii.ac.jp/userimg/press_details_20121212.pdf
I think fooling facial recognition systems and CCTV-cameras-at-night is easier than fooling professional photographers. Most photograhers' cameras have IR filters, after all. And nobody's got an LED brighter than the sun.
On this topic, is there any benefit of trying to fool facial recognition systems with these type of accessories and or wearables, would the system not just mark you as suspicious and keep an even better track of you
Of course it is a different thing if these are adopted by the masses
Usually those systems are set up to track faces and/or people, and ignore everything else. If you get a low-confidence detection of a face that's much more likely to be a dog or a band t-shirt than somebody tricking your system. So you would typically ignore everything below a threshold, not flag it.
You could train a system to detect these kinds of attacks, but that's a lot more sophistication that these types of systems usually have, and would probably be specific to each "attack" (e.g. those glasses with lights would look completely different than the face paint approach)
The best defense would be a human watching the raw camera feed, since most of these attacks are very obvious to the human eye. But that's expensive. Maybe you could leverage vision-llms, but those are much more expensive than dedicated face-detection or object classification models. Those typically range from sub-million to maybe a hundred million parameters, while you need billions of parameters for a good vision-llm
> nobody's got an LED brighter than the sun
It's low density silly fun but I did see these folk attempt to do such a thing with entertaining results https://youtu.be/m1S1r9I6DN4
One of my future ideas was to have the detection trigger turning a bunch of IR LEDs on to do just this! I've only tested it a little bit against my phone camera (with around 5 850nm LEDs), but it didn't work super well (fairly bright but not enough to be useful). It did work much better in low-light though. My guess is modern cameras have better IR-cut filters, but like I mentioned I only tested against my phone and not the Ray-bans yet.
Have you thought about the potential eye/skin damage you would be causing with IR LEDS.
Potentially as much as none, because it's UV that does the damage?
At some point it pretty much becomes a microwave. Radiation get absorbed and turned into heat. On a small scale not very helpful or harmful. On a larger scale nice to heat your food with but not your head.
You'd have to be moving pretty fast to red-shift IR radiation into microwaves, I think.
I guess IR can be harmful (IR lasers, military grade IR LEDs). But yes, likely not the consumer grade IR LED.
That only works against night vision cameras. Most cameras have an IR filter that flips into place when when in daylight mode
I heard about similar hats being used during the Hong Kong protests, but most modern cameras filter out IR anyway. Reflective jackets tend to work much better; they basically turn you into an overexposed bright blob on camera.
I have been thinking of a device to thwart license plate readers by dumping a ton of IR and/or visible light on the plate before it gets read.
Perhaps combined with some reflective coating? Retroreflectors are promising
Repo men use those readers to track cars to be repossessed. And as it happens, it is very successful industry these days.
Just as a heads up, this is likely illegal in many US states. (Legality is not morality - but it's good to know what the law is before you might break it).
What about correlating transmitted wireless frames with a LED flashing pattern? If the glasses stream video with a variable bitrate codec over wireless, flashing vs. non-flashing should change bandwidth and therefore frame frequency. However, with searching over all channels this might be quite slow in practice.
Does anyone work on smart glasses for blind people yet? Something with blackened glass, obviously, that uses image recognition to translate visual input into text via (headphone) audio to the wearer.
That would allow for urgent warnings (approaching a street, walking towards obstacle [say, an electric scooter or a fence]), scene descriptions on request, or help finding things in the view field. There's probably a lot more you could do with this to help improve quality of life for fully blind people.
I’ve heard stories of people using the Meta smart glasses to help with reduced vision, i.e. asking the LLM assistant what you’re looking at, asking it to read a label, etc. The LLM assistant can see the camera feed so it is capable of doing that.
However things like the urgent warnings you mentioned don’t exist yet.
Hearing about the way people with bad vision use these glasses kind of changed my viewpoint on them to be honest; for the average person it might seem useless to be able to ask an LLM about what you’re looking at, but looking at it from an accessibility standpoint it seems like a really good idea.
Every time I read about smart glasses I wonder the same thing. Obviously the technology isn’t perfect, but it seems that even a basic pair of smart glasses with primitive image processing could be life-changing for a completely blind person. Yet as far as I can tell, most blind people don’t use technology at all for this purpose.
Unfortunately, the HN website is extremely unfriendly to users relying on assistive technologies (lack of ARIA tags, semantic elements etc.), otherwise there might be more blind people commenting here who could shed light on such things, no pun intended.
Makes me wonder just how big the market for such a device would be, and if it would attract investors…
there's a lovely documentary by a blind British comedian about exactly this: https://connect.open.ac.uk/seeingintothefuture/
I was just reading about an app in the iOS App Store called Seeing AI that "narrates the world around you". (All disclaimers apply, this is exactly all I know about it.)
If the top-level poster succeeds, the resulting device could possibly disable devices that allow blind people to see. This could open up another liability channel.
vOICe is a vision to sound sensory sub system. Works pretty well apparently.
Semi-related question. Is there a method to print a picture on a t-shirt that can only be viewed by a camera and not be the naked eye? If so I would like to print images on the front and back of the shirt that would get the glasshole or cell phone cameras banned from their platforms.
Compare human cone cell spectral sensitivity to the camera modules inside the glasses. [0][1]
Usually digital cameras have some major differences from human eyes, particularly near UV and IR. Find dyes with spectral albedo that integrates to the same strengths for (most) humans' cones, but not for the glasses.
Though human eyes have pretty good dynamic range, and some degree of variation. Maybe add dithering around the edges.
[0]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cone-fundamentals-wi...
[1]: https://www.strollswithmydog.com/camera-spectral-sensitivity...
You could make a moire pattern, but it would probably be pretty hard to get it flat enough on a shirt, and it wouldn't be distinct enough to get interpreted by AI.
I saw some painting a while a go, looked just like random dots, so I took a picture with my smartphone and that revealed a portrait! Pretty amazing, must have been some moire thing indeed
Infrared LEDs, or a green screen if you have enough access
Sorry for not responding for your request for tech advise and instead commenting on the idea:
1. I would want this.
2. If possible, if the detecting device could be clipped on somewhow and not force me to use different (sun)glasses might be my necessary condition unless you're selling glasses that I like as much as my curreny ones.
3. If I could demand anything, I would demand you pair up with someone who has some streetcred in the privacy tech department (streetcred as in a known public personality with trackrecord on being on the right side of these issues or known to be advocating for them).
Here's why: if Meta decided to add this feature to their glasses, if I found a way to shut down all the other shit, I might go and buy their glasses. Which means if you are sucessful, if I were Meta I would buy you out and shut you down. Hence the public personality or who have you to prevent you fron doing this.
I am curious what you would do if you found it detected glasses that did have a camera?
A much-needed project. Making yourself invisible to such privacy-invasive devices will be the need of the day. Of the two approaches you mentioned, blocking/jamming the specific wireless traffic would be pretty interesting, if possible.
> blocking/jamming the specific wireless traffic would be pretty interesting, if possible.
And probably highly illegal.
At the end of the day, legality is what society settles as an acceptable way of running itself when all the stakeholders reluctantly agree or at least don't protest too much. Right now the 'costs' are sufficiently low that no one cares. As with most things, I suspect that there is a threshold ( though likely much higher than I have previously anticipated ) at which normal person would be unwilling to go as if anything changed.
Nobody cares? Here (sweden) its illegal to possess outside of military use. The US seems to give fines between 20-200 thousand $ for its usage and potential imprisonment for its sale. Even overboosting wifi routers for better range gets people in trouble.
It's among the most illegal things you could easily do with basic electronics equipment.
why? Part of it is historical; it used to be complicated, so being in possession of one got you in trouble with the anti terrorism squad.
These days; it's because it can block emergency services, police and military radio, and burglary alarms.
They may be lenient for a nerd playing with a router but the law its not on your side when push comes to shove.
https://legalclarity.org/are-signal-jammers-illegal-in-the-u...
This is overstating the case. In the US you can buy such devices (usually from Aliexpress but Amazon has devices capable of some jamming/deauth). They are illegal to use for intentional jamming of other people’s equipment. However, unless you go around jamming important safety equipment or making local hams angry then nothing will happen. The FCC has its hands full and can’t even seem to address persistent issues on the ham bands until they get really bad.
Deauth attacks weer common in the Google Glasses days. Nobody got arrested as far as I can remember.
Yeah, true. Implementing this would be tricky.
Implementing it is trivial. you can just overlook the radio from openWRT and drown out every 2.4-2.5 gHz device in a 100M radius.
Doing it targeted is more difficult since it does frequency hopping, but you could probably reverse the frequency hopping algorithm to target specifically Bluetooth and force high packet loss.
This is still illegal for radio jamming reasons, and also patent infringement since a misbehaving Bluetooth device has not gotten permission to use Bluetooth patents held by SIG.
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I'll feel much safer when I'm visible only to every single ATM camera, traffic camera, random smartphone camera and doorbell camera, but not to people's glasses.
Comparable to what I read someone say about AI the other day: we're living in the small sliver of history where smart-glasses with cameras are technically feasible yet are still (kind of) detectable.
There's no reason why stealth technology should have to advance faster than detection technology. In fact, in many applications with strong incentives to advance both stealth and detection capabilities, the modern world has trended towards being increasingly transparent.
If we culturally/economically wanted it, I'm sure we could all have cheap nonlinear junction detectors in our pockets.
I could see the guards at the courthouse, wearing these.
Cameras are so small, these days, that I don't think it's realistic to be able to detect them. I just go through every day, assuming that I'm on Candid Camera.
I would love to actually buy a similar product (but a one that won't make you look like a Frankenstein)
How about Elton John's windshield wiper glasses?
https://fabukmagazine.com/elton-john-glasses-in-the-frame-at...
When I worked for a big Hollywood media conglomerate, there was a project to detect cameras in theaters. (There was a piracy problem where people would record the movie on a camcorder). It worked by detecting the IR filter that’s in front of the CMOS detector in almost all cameras. It’s a retroreflector for UV range. Shine a UV light to the audience and look for spots of light. I’d imagine this would work for cameras in any darkened environment even today.
Sorry I'm still confused. Do you have a reliable way to detect if a smart glass is recording or not? I never used smart-glasses regularly, but wouldn't it be "on" all the time if one is using it, so detecting the power-on and pairing is kinda useless?
Regular pairing, advertising and control likley use Bluetooth LE for simplicity and battery life. Streaming or transferring video likley use Bluetooth classic for increased bandwidth.
These are two different protocols with different radio behaviour.
So beyond detecting the glasses themselves, which seem like the focus of the project; detecting recording is feasible at the point of transfer to a phone.
The issue is distinguishing it from any other high bandwidth Bluetooth device nearby, such as headphones.
They don't stream to your phone when taking a video or picture. The data is on device and transferred later. It also uses wifi direct not BLE. It seems many many people on HN have absolutely no clue how the meta glasses work lol, there's barely any accurate information in this thread.
Like I mentioned in the text, I haven't looked into Wi-Fi yet. The picture/video -> transfer through the app is correct, and why an alternative method for detecting actual recording is necessary, but I'd expect to see that most events like battery status updates would be over directed BLE, since the initial boot + battery status is broadcast. And likely BTC for streaming audio. I'm unfamiliar with Wi-Fi Direct specifically, are you familiar with the process of scanning for active Wi-Fi Direct services?
Sorry don't mean to demean your effort, I read the GH post and like the hacker spirit :D. It's the rest of the people in the HN comments with 0 clue.
I like my glasses and don't really agree with your goals (nor see the point of letting you know when someone's wearing them; in my city your device would be beeping constantly) so I'm not interested in helping unfortunately. But I do wish you luck, as I said I like the spirit.
Can they detect Agency Glasses? 8)
Wearable Eyes Turn You Into Emotional Cyborg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhvHxz1NePQ
>The device, called AgencyGlass, was developed by Dr. Hirotaka Osawa from Tsukuba University.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/wearable-eyes-agencyglass-emotiona...
Pretty neat idea! I love the BLE detection approach, would be pretty amazing if this works. I'll be following this with some interest!
Tangentially related it's also useful to quickly gauge if your smarts-wielding neighbors are home or not so noise levels can be adjusted accorsingly (:
Thank you for the technical write up. I have no expertise in the BTE area but it's clear enough for me to understand.
The swap pattern is very interesting but even if it's silly, maybe experimenting with an actual camera to detect cameras may give you a good base line to what to expect from a working Rayban banner.
Are there any smart glasses being developed for people with prosopagnosia or really bad face memory?
I often bump into people I know on the street but can’t place their faces. A lot of them get offended when I don’t immediately recognize them, even though I remember who they are—just not what they look like.
It is interesting to see the consensus that nobody is enthusiastic about meta Ray-Bans except Zuckerberg.
It's creepy.
The only real usage I've seen is on Instagram reels etc. where people are using them in red light districts like in Amsterdam to film the women.
I've seen a plumber use it to document a repair that he was doing. Being able to record in tight spaces seems to be a good use case for this tech
I've also seen a home inspector use them to document issues with a new construction
There's also a ton of people using it for cooking videos
I have them and like them. I don't wear them constantly, but on days when I'm doing something interesting, they help me document much more than I otherwise would.
I have a pen camera and a key fob camera. These are widely available. Obviously they won’t give you real time intel on what you’re looking at, but if you’re worried about being surreptitiously recorded, smart glasses are just a small part of the problem.
I think this generation will be remembered for how desperately it tried to cling onto privacy over our public image well beyond what should have been the reasonable time to acknowledge its passing.
Super interesting project, at first I thought it would be a naive implementation of YOLO but I wasn't aware about retro-reflections. The papers he linked in the GH discuss very interesting ideas
You can find devices on ebay that should detect cameras by using a polarized glass and LED lights as cameras tend to reflect back well and you'd see a shining spot where sensor is.
Putting myself in the shoes of a qa for a second...
What is the cheapest way for me to trigger a false positive on such a detection device?
And what can we do about it?
Rinse and repeat until the cheapest cost exceeds a standard pair of smart glasses.
Before putting yourself in the mind of QA, you have to be 100% sure on what the goals and priorities of the product is supposed to be in the first place.
Only a subset of use potential cases will be worried with false positives, but this approach says to drive the cost greater for all potential use cases.
Bluetooth packets similar to smart glasses and IR filters used by a popular brand should probably be enough.
Isn't there some kind of fluorescent effect that you can use? I.e., send one very specific wavelength onto the camera sensor, and receive one other very specific wavelength back.
I know some cameras have IR filters but is there something similar that can emit enough brightness to render the person as a white spot?
That’s a really interesting project! It sounds like you’ve already explored some creative approaches with IR reflections and BLE traffic.
I was thinking about this just the other day. You're on your way to implementing your own real-life stealth meter! Very cool!
This is seriously neat. Love the name too
Thank you! To settle a debate between me and a friend, do you think Ray-BANNED or Ban-Rays is the better name?
Ray-Banned is a good pun, but might bring you legal trouble. I’d go with Ban-Rays
But you’d agree Ray-Banned is better
Only because I’m a pun addict. Don’t take my biased opinion on board.
Ban-Rays. Ray-BANNED could be read to mean that you've been banned by Ray-Ban IMO, the opposite of what's happening.
I think Ray-BANNED is the better name, by far.
the former
Cool project, but I'd use the first mode to look for hidden cameras at Airbnbs!
I think it's time we normalize carrying mini EMP devices.
Do you have a parts list for what's in the zuck glasses?
Taping over the recording indicator is illegal.
Is there any way your device can find the MAC address of the glasses through bluetooth or something and file a lawsuit automatically?
I don't think taping over the indicator is illegal.
The zuckerberg glasses supposedly detect attempts to cover the indicator, though.
it’s not illegal. meta raybans will detect the tape blocking a light sensor and not allow you take photos.
That is a feature Meta has implemented, but those protections were quickly defeated.
They were not quickly defeated. And as it stands currently, I thought there was only 1 somewhat involved hardware mod that worked. as opposed to any spy cam that you can guy purchase from amazon for a fraction of the cost.
My social media algorithm may be tricking me into thinking it’s more ubiquitous than it is, but i was fed quite a bit of content about it until I ‘dislike’d it into oblivion (its a norms change i am not aligned with).
Why is it illegal?
Now integrate it with ink jet technology to spray the offending camera lens like a squid!
next: smart glasses app to detect glasses that can detect smart glasses that have cameras
the esp32 in the side of the head should give it away
I love both names - ban-ray and ray-banned.
I have no experience in this area, so I’ll just ask a noob question: Can we make it so that if someone is looking at me through smart-glasses without my consent, my glasses respond with some form of interference that gives them a tiny headache?
And if I do grant someone consent to record me, I can just turn my glasses off.
And of course, my glasses don’t record anything, so they wouldn’t be hurting my own eyes.
It's a lovely idea.
spiderman-pointing.jpg
An eye for an eye and soon everyone's blind...
How is this an eye for an eye? Doesn't seem like the expression fits here.
One more gizmo throwing IR at MY eyes? No, thanks!
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