Meta sparks privacy fears after unveiling $299 Smart Glasses with hidden cameras: ‘You can now film everyone without them knowing’::These stylish shades may look like a regular pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers, but they’re actually Meta’s new Smart Glasses, complete with two tiny cameras and speakers implanted in the arms. The wearable tech was unveiled by Mark Zuckerberg Wednesday at the 2023 Meta Connect conference in Menlo Park, California, sparking a frenzy online.
A quick search on Amazon for “spy camera” finds a bunch of devices small enough to easily conceal inside clothing, built in to pens, and built in to watches. A search for “spy camera glasses” finds exactly that, and most of them are well under $300. We’re already well into the era of being able to film everyone without them knowing.
They aren’t directly connected to a social network and promoted with vast marketing resources however.
I remember playing with one of these about 10 years ago that looked like a car key fob, it recorded somewhat subpar footage in a weird format to a microSD card. A neat novelty but not very practical to use unless you really had a need to do covert surveillance of something, which most people don’t.
However if it’s made to be effortless to push watchable footage to social media, and people are heavily encouraged and incentivised to do so and it’s a different proposition.
I think it is just a matter of convenience. Very few people buy lasers to aim them at airplanes. Give everyone a laser and you’ll get a thousand reports of people aiming lasers at their plane.
People aren’t a fan of those existing either, but not much you can do about it. At least, you can assume that it’s only a tiny fraction of people who own these devices, let alone carry them around, ready to go.
With these glasses, more people will own them and will have them ready to go, on their nose.
Smart glasses outside of specific applications were a fad when Google did them and will continue to be, at best, a fad.
Those at least don’t automatically sync to Zuck.
Those cameras only record locally.
These glasses presumably upload every frame to corporate data centers to be cataloged and used to profile the people in the images.