We need to move beyond just banning these glasses - all smart glasses of all kinds - to breaking up these companies. Undo the acquisitions of Insta and Whatsapp - I don't care that will be expensive, thats a shareholders problem.
I agree we should do something in this instance, but with the speed of which things are changing? Eventually, this tech is going to be undetectable.
"Oh no that's sci-fi and decades away", I really don't think so. I think neuralink, and competitors too, will next move on to reading the visual cortex. They already have plans to push data to the visual cortex, to enable the blind to "see", reading in healthy people seems quite doable.
I expect something like this to happen before 2030.
Regardless, I agree for now? Yes. But the future? I don't see it as blockable forever.
There are two ways we decide how severe the punishment for broken laws is. One is to enable just punishment. The other is deterrent. This may fall into "deterrent is the bigger part of the sentence", where people posting private information receive years in jail as a result.
There is a little bit of a conversation about this here:
I think it won't be long before it's the posting of non-consensual imagery that is so criminal, that few will do so. For years in Quebec, sharing of images captured in public isn't really legit. You control "images of yourself", regardless of where they are taken, public places or not:
I don't like it but it's totally normal, especially for youth, to have their cell phones out in locker rooms. Targeting only glasses with this concern is largely out of touch with current behavior.
My children's school have an interesting way of dealing with the ever growing list of devices they need a policy for. They borrowed the police term "data carrying devices" and wrote a policy based on that. When Metas glasses started to be come a problem no policy change was needed for the school, they were automatically covered.
That's probably the best solution, deal with the functionality, not the device type.
That isn't normal and it's actively enforced against in gyms and pools where I live.
Glasses are passively recording. Recording with a phone is active (for the most part). You need to take it out and point it at what you are recording...
Also as much as you might like to punish investors (most of whom just have it in their 401k) because you don't like people with money, there are legal protections and the government can't just do something like that without an actual reason.
WhatsApp is definitely part of Meta's distribution and reach strategy. So it's very relevant.
I don't think OP is trying to punish investors. I think they are saying the overall damage of letting these companies continue the current trend will be worse than the cost of unwinding it now.
I'm an advocate of reformed legislation to enable this.
Why shouldn't we punish investors? This is the risk when you invest in these types of companies where regulation is nonexistent. It's not the job of the government to make sure rich shareholders stay green.
I know that shareholders just want monopolies and free money and don't want to compete for it, but we should make them. Like we did before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork shot the kneecaps out of our antitrust law. It's not about punishing shareholders, it's about making them earn their keep. It's just good business.
The government can do whatever it wants. Laws are written by the government. We have a democracy. If enough votes exist to, say, pass a law banning drug dealing (like meta does), then the company will die.
Also as much as you might like to punish investors (most of whom just have it in their 401k) because you don't like people with money, there are legal protections and the government can't just do something like that without an actual reason.
As much as you might like to defend the wealthy because the only thing you care about is money, regardless of the human cost, doesn't mean that we can't use the law and the government to limit the harm being done to humans.
I know what you are going to say. "Fuck people! I only worship money!" but I think you need to look beyond just the financial aspects of this situation.
I think the point is, it's been a good system, but it's out of control. It's not that people don't like people having money, it's people don't like the status quo of watching society and the world be destroyed by generating share holder value alone. We need a better system. Not saying that is communism or whatever, but the monopolies and corruption are off the charts.
Flat out banning a category of product because it is possible to use it for bad things is stupid. Thousands of people are killed by cars every year - should we ban them? (Being killed is far worse than being recorded naked in a locker room. Not saying the latter is great, but it's better than being dead)
There are also potential good uses for this tech. As someone who can't remember anyone's name worth crap, I can't wait for smart glasses with facial recognition and a name tag that hovers over everyone. I'm sure there will be great benefit in industry, giving workers heads up displays of all manner of important information.
Just like any new technology, there is equal potential for good and bad.
People don't generally tolerate me sticking a nametag on them... And they certainly don't tend to wear it for future events where we are both present.
A local only face recognizer with consent of the face owners would be pretty useful for me. Although it would require a lot of 'hey, I'm bad at faces and names, do you mind if I take a picture so baby skynet can help me out?'
> Civilians can’t operate jet engines with a variable nozzle size.
I cannot find any support for that. Variable nozzles are fairly rare (but not non-existent) on non-afterburning engines, and afterburning engines are fairly rare themselves (and sometimes restricted as part of demilitarization of a former military airframe), but both variable nozzles and afterburners are entirely legal for a civilian to own and operate.
> You can’t buy a gun without some kind of check
That comes with a caveat -- this only applies to retail sales. Over half of States do allow private purchases with no background check.
You just unknowingly pointed out the real problem - the system is setup so that we think we are in on it, but as a wise man said "It's a big club and you ain't in it".
Also "lose their personal savings" is a hyperbolic bad faith argument. If anyone's entire net worth is put into Meta stock, they get whats coming. Second, 93% of the stock market is owned by 10% of the population. The average American has more to gain from holding companies accountable than letting them rape and pillage our society so the richest people can have even more money.
93% of equities are held by the top 10% of households. Most middle class wealth in the US is primary residence real estate. The stock market isn’t the economy. No one is entitled to wealth, nor it maintaining it's value.
> As of 2022, about half of households with a worker age 55 and older had no retirement savings, and 32% had no retirement savings or a defined benefit plan.
The scaremongering about equity values and your average person’s holdings and exposure is not grounded in facts and reality. It’s simply scaremongering.
This line of argument ("think of the retirees!!!") could be used in many cases, however when is it acceptable to break companies for the greater (non-financial) good?
On a parallel, can't we criticize any decision reducing the market cap of companies as an attack on the retirement portfolios? Say, if we required connected glasses to display a red light of more than x lumens when recording, would that be ok, even if it decreased Meta's market cap?
> decision reducing the market cap of companies as an attack on the retirement portfolios
Any decision that results in a long term net loss across the entire public economy? Yes.
That's something that hurts a lot of people and that hurt should be carefully weighed against whatever the assumed benefit is. Sometimes that's worth it, sometimes it's not
But it's never OK to just hand wave with "well I don't care about that class of people so screw them"
And let's not move the goalposts. OPs proposal was a corporate breakup of massive scale, not a minimum lumens requirement.
> I'm looking forward to Meta taking down all videos where someone is a bit harassed. Internet will be a much nicer place!
Well, I’m looking forward of Meta going down. Now that would benefit the Internet.
After that, I think the fact that these glasses are allowed in the first place creates a problem that Meta as a platform cannot fix, because Meta is just one of the many many places where videos can be posted.
The argumentative method of rather than saying and doing what you believe and instead doing and saying what you are opposed to, is always weak and usually a great way to shoot yourself in the foot.
That being said. I agree 100% with making Meta Employees feel uncomfortable with their own products.
Asking someone to turn around isn't making them turn around. And he asked multiple men and just one woman in the video. In any case - among real life Meta glasses users, who do you think is going to be perved on more - men, or women?
If you judge this video without any kind of context, then yes he is a weirdo harassing strangers who are just trying to go about their day. The point is that these glasses enable this weird behavior, and the people he's filming are (ostensibly) part of that system.
That was totally unacceptable behavior. I support the choice to take down a video depicting blatant sexual harassment of its employees. I also support launching meta into the sun.
Maybe I'm too European to understand, where exactly is harassment occurring? He's asking Meta employees questions, doesn't seem to follow them around, and when they walk away or say no, he doesn't exactly force them to stay or anything? Doesn't there have to be some intimidation or humiliation or similar for it to be harassment? Or asking employees what they think of the products they develop and support is the harassment part?
Arguing about whether to call this kind of behavior a harassment or "a bit" of a harassment is in my opinion all besides the point.
This video mainly shows a person approaching other people in public and recording them with these glasses. Which is one of the typical scenarios in which such a glasses are probably going to be used. And that video shows that even the Meta employees themselves generally do not seem to like it very much.
I don't know if I agree that man-on-the-street pseudo journalistic stuff is one of the "typical scenarios." Any time I see a product like this I think:
1) Can I use it to watch a more immersive movie without bothering people who may be in the next week?
2) Can I use it to make my games more enjoyable, either console or PC?
3) Can I use it to record IPSC/USPSA matches?
4) Can I use it for work?
I don't think these will make more people bother strangers on the street, it's just another way the same people can do that.
I felt a bit uneasy when the employees indicate they're uncomfortable with the filming and he asks them why, while continuing to film. Given how they're blurred out and that their discomfort is kind-of the point w.r.t. the issue he's trying to raise, I don't think this meets the bar that Meta usually adheres to when it comes to taking down videos, but describing it as "a bit" of harassment doesn't sound too wrong to me.
I am just an American, but I live in Portugal and it is legally not allowed to film people in public without their consent (you also can't have a street facing surveillance camera like in the US). Moreover, people take this rule very seriously. If it appears that you are doing so, they will be visibly bothered (I know some kids who have had uncomfortable interactions because they weren't aware).
I don't think blurring faces fully addresses that (though I'm not commenting on legality in Amsterdam).
I can see the argument that this video is in the public interest (hey, I'm Americanese), but it does seem plausible some people would find it a violation of a norm.
> I am just an American, but I live in Portugal and it is legally not allowed to film people in public without their consent
If that's actual law that's a bit surprising. In many EU countries there are journalistic exceptions (which may or may not apply in this specific case depending on local law)
> (you also can't have a street facing surveillance camera like in the US)
And same here. Usually the limit is that if you do it within GDPR household exemption then you cannot have it facing street, but if you do it on GDPR scope then you need to fulfill the GDPR requirements (e.g. posting notice, be ready to answer GDPR requests, perform balancing tests for recording etc.).
This is true de jure but not de facto and if anyone wants proof just go look up the number of Teslas in portuguese streets and the zero convictions over continuous recording of the public.
Bending down to stare at a female employee's ass at waist level after he asked her to turn around isn't harassment[1]? Like, up until that point it was almost ribbing but that was quite the turn given it'd be the same issue whether he was wearing smart glasses or not.
Not to mention the sarcastic, insincere tone he adopts after being asked what he's doing, claiming he's "such a huge fan" of the Meta glasses. There is a way to draw attention to privacy and this is a poor way to go about it.
[1] Cambridge Dictionary: 'behavior that annoys or upsets someone'
To me he crossed a line by asking the woman to turn around and then crouching down to film her butt. That is a really creepy thing to do and a lot of women would find that threatening. Ask a female friend how they would feel if you find that surprising.
I mean, you are being filmed everywhere you go anyway by flock cameras, police/government cctv, even cctv on business and peoples house/ring doorbells etc. Concent to being filmed in a public place is not really asked anywhere, so I dont see it as a big difference personally.
You don’t understand the difference between recording things in good faith vs recording things because you want a reaction you can exploit for personal gains.
Meta is butt raping our privacy 24/7 but god forbid some dude ask 3 questions to its employees, I'll never understand people bootlicking megacorps like these.
Fuck meta and fuck every single of their employee, you can't keep building hell and complain when people hit back
Hahahaha, "recording things in good faith." What an insane statement to make to paint this guy in a bad light. Should people also be concerned about walking in good faith, or eating their lunch in good faith? Meta created these creep glasses so people could do exactly what this guy is doing: film people in public (without them knowing). There is no "bad faith" when you're just literally doing what the product is for.
I've heard of journalism before, yes. So? Since when is this harassment?
Can't believe we have corporate bootlickers on HN of all places, I thought we still cared a tiny sliver about privacy? It all went away when we all gave away our private data to the AI companies, or what's the deal?
> let's not pretend this is not all also possible with other devices
Let's not pretend being able to beat someone with a rock and shoot them with a M61 Vulcan at 6k rounds per minute are the same thing just because they involve projectiles.
It's harassment when you're doing something slightly inconvenient in a way which doesn't benefit big business or the super rich.
It's fine if you're doing it to benefit them, then you can go much further, you can kill small children with your tractors (as is attempted in The Netherlands) or to murder coast guards or migrant (via drowning or fire) as happens in the UK.
Everyone keeps saying he is dutch but he was speaking a different language in the video thanks to automatic youtube dubbing. I was quite confused because not everything was even dubbed correctly. Also its an auto dubbing through AI. Didn't realize it got automatically selected. So annoying.
Realized too late into the video that I had to switch to original track
He's speaking Dutch and speaking English with a very very heavy west-Netherlands accent. Quite a lot of the Meta employees there can't speak Dutch which is why he switches to English.
I think I should have worded my comment differently. I did not mean the guy does not speak dutch, the video was not playing in dutch because of that shitty auto dubbing of youtube.
Yes exactly. But YouTube selected some AI translation voice over which I did not realize first. So I was quite confused. Once I selected the original audio it was obvious that he is dutch.
It is hypocrisy because Meta are knowingly creating a product that is perfectly suited for filming or photographing people without their knowledge. I find that it speaks ill of someone's character to pretend otherwise. And then they react badly when the very thing that these products enable happens to them. Demonstrating how this is a problem. They try to pretend it isn't a problem and then their actions demonstrate that it IS a problem.
It isn't because we do have laws that actually cover these things already. Of course, they're not the same across the world, law enforcement are not always aware of what the laws are, and this causes confrontations and sometimes overreach. There are also different legal systems that interpret laws differently. For instance in some legal systems the letter of the law carries more weight. In other legal systems the intent of the law is what matters.
There are two great risks here:
1) we pretend we can get by with existing laws. That the existing laws had enough foresight to meaningfully fulfil what the laws were intended to accomplish.
2) we can overreact and damage legitimate freedoms in our eagerness to solve an immediate problem.
For instance, where I live there is a law on the books that prohibits photographing someone being arrested. The law was well-meaning. It was there to protect people from being plastered all over the media until guilt has been determined in a court of law. But it would also prohibit someone from documenting police brutality during an arrest. So the law was never enacted because it failed to balance interests properly.
Right now, where I live, there is a real risk that rules about photography may become overly strict because politicians feel they have to demonstrate an ability to act. So they may end up passing laws that have unforeseen consequences while probably failing to make much of a difference anyway.
We know why these cameras pose a problem. Let's not insult each other's intelligence by pretending they are exactly like poking a traditional camera in someone's face. They're not and we should be able to agree on simple facts. But we also know that we need to have a public discussion about what we're going to do about this so we don't end up introducing draconian laws that take away freedoms we should have. For instance the freedom to document abuses of power, criminal activity, artistic expression etc.
It's not "perfectly suited", it's EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO do that. And it's very well designed and very effective.
But hey it's OK because Meta only want to record everything to train their AI, who cares if some of their friends use it to create CSAM material, their third-world country workers upload it to PornHub and the NSA secretly pipe all of that through their servers (or servers managed by MI5 in the case of Americans).
They added a recording light and made covering it stop recording or photography. They went through extra effort to at least try and provide a public signal someone is recording.
This is their theory of power, that the selected few get access to a state of exception (but you can lose it at any time, so don't slip up).
Trump and oligarchs broadly have offered this franchise to their most loyal.
But! I'd argue it is not precisely hypocrisy, because they never believed in a rules-based order in the first place. They just see a system they can exploit.
break things has always been right there in black and white.
Feel free to point out the hypochrisy. I'll remind you that sharing a video you took of someone without their consent is not the same as recording them and keeping the video strictly for yourself
This person was not trespassing on Meta property and nothing indicates that he was harassing employees who refused to be interviewed. It is perfectly legal in the Netherlands to record people in public places.
You don't need someone's consent to record in public, and if any of the employees objected to the publication of the recording, they could consult with an attorney about a portrait rights claim. Such a claim should be adjudicated by a court, not Facebook.
And let's be clear about the context here: these types of glasses are used by "content creators" to do street interviews that are published online, and they're also used to record all sorts of junk/nonsense ("pranks", pickup artist BS, etc.).
Meta doesn't seem to have a problem with content recorded with these glasses being posted on its platforms, even when it's objectionable, because it's literally everywhere. The only problem here, obviously, was that he was recording Meta employees.
"these types of glasses are used by "content creators" to do street interviews that are published online"
This to me is wild. I use the glasses to film my kids and share it on private hard-drives with grandparents, that's it. It's wild to me that I can surreptitiously film someone on the street and publish it online for views, and the only recourse the person has, is to go to court? Seems insane.
Why does Hollywood require a release but Youtube does not?
EDIT: People are getting hung-up on my use case. But that's not the question posed here.
FALSE! It's legal to record in public spaces and share it if you are not targeting any individual in particular. What the author did was instead purpusefully focus on those particular employees.
> is perfectly legal in the Netherlands to record people in public places.
it's perfectly legal to record but publish, especially in but not limited to a commercial context without explicit consent violates portrait rights under the GDPR in the EU. And I strongly suspect if you posted a video in which people explicitly object to being filmed and flag that on Facebook or other platforms it will get taken down.
Where do you get the "without their consent" bit from?
The hypocrisy is probably located around here:
> "I've been making satirical videos about all kinds of things for ten years: Gaza, Ukraine, refugees. Funny videos that push boundaries and provoke discussion. But I've never experienced a video being removed before.
The hypocrisy is that meta is creating a tool that their employees are very uncomfortable seeing used on them.
What the law says about consent is irrelevant to the hypocrisy, and the videos are automatically uploaded to meta without anyone's consent anyway. You know this very well, there is no need to cosplay the smart devil's advocate.
It's incredibly hypocritical. It's like working at Flock and complaining about being filmed on a Flock camera. Or working for a company that sells cars that emit a loud, annoying sound and complaining about those cars in your neighborhood. Or making devices for children but banning your own children from using them because the devices are harmful. They clearly don't care that the product their company is selling can legally (in most places) be used to film people in public until they themselves are filmed in public. How is that not hypocrisy?
Any camera in the world can be used to film people in public without their consent. There are lawful ways to do it (if the people are "background noise" and not the point of the video), and unlawful ways to do it (if the people become the subject of the video).
So tell me now, is a GoPro/Canon/Apple employee who doesn't consent to being the subject of a video taken with a GoPro/Canon/iPhone camera also a hypochrite?
I agree, I cannot control what other people will do. Are you applying this fear to all other facets of your life? I guess not, since that would mean you'd live in a state of constant fear and paranoia.
neither of these things are remotely acceptable. the degree of distinction is relevant to the impact on the victim and in a punitive sense, but doing either of these things is a mark of a severely antisocial behavior disorder that needs to be addressed by mental healthcare and prevention of access to tools that facilitate this behavior.
The mental gymnastics that people do here to defend these untouchable corporations is disgusting. From Meta to OpenAi, for a lot of people here it's just a "yeah, but actually". I've reported everything from holocaust glorification to videos of people being filmed in public in europe just to be humiliated, to obvious far right propaganda done by russian linked accounts, nothing goes against Meta's policy anymore, except when it's about them...
The asymmetry bothers me. No one corporation is going to get it right 100% of the time but it's when you report stuff and it never gets removed but they ban you that you can really see how morally bankrupt they are
(Oh, and they don't care about local solutions. Their sneakiness with Free Basics is clear. Can you blame them for Myanmar? I think you can, but it's also clear they want to supplant all the other social networks, like a system each individual country might come up with)
It does bother me being here on hacker news because it's a good aggregator but you get people standing up for their industry no matter what or flagging anything they disagree with
Sorry but have you looked at AliExpress lately? You think glasses with hidden video cameras are something we have the ability to ban?
Meta has made the concept popular, but hardware feasibility already tipped the scales, these cameras are going to be ubiquitous and if not in glasses then in even more hidden formats like buttons and pinhole wearables.
I hate these glasses, but why do you need to ban them? Meta operates at scale, so it will only stay in this business if a considerable number of people buy this. Vote with your money. There are legitimate uses for camera glasses (journalism, action sports, etc.).
I'm trying to understand how to "vote with my money" for not being recorded by these glasses in public. My best interpretation would be financially supporting private establishments that have banned these devices... Which feels like exactly what you're arguing against.
Your employer has fundamentally undermined the stable functioning of society by systematically provoking outrage, division and hate. You have contributed to a world where we can’t even agree if measles is bad.
Myspace had its run, it wasn't an especially good product. People moved to Facebook for any number of reasons, but those privacy settings ("friends only", etc) if they worked would've been pretty cool and good for the web
Unfortunately Zuckerberg doesn't care about privacy and actively spent time changing those from Friends Only to Public
And graph search. If I search for 'carrot' I can see any post you've ever made in your entire history with carrot in it
There's a reason Facebook's wall thing is now called 'timeline'. It lists everything you've ever done ever. Hope you managed to catch yet another one of their silent privacy changes. Oh, look, guess you have to log in to catch it. That means they rope you back into the system. Oh well. No biggie. Just the absolute antithesis of consent
I just can’t find the user experience different enough for me to feel like my western friends have any point to make about China
the west has a thin partyless corporate layer controlling all facets of life and your ability to participate in life compared to the government doing it directly
but its okay because if you don’t care about any of that you can talk about it (in person only because nobody will hear it for long elsewhere) and you won’t be disappeared? *unless your citizenship status is questioned
I recorded a video harassing the employees of a company, I uploaded it to the servers of said company, and they removed it. Who could have imagined this would happen?
This "ban all kids" kind of take is bananas to me. It implies you either A) believe we should trust famously secure and benevolent tech companies with government ID or B) believe parents have the time or technical know-how to exhaustively monitor the internet access of kids. Even as a software engineer, I've found it insanely tiresome to try operating half-assed parental controls across devices.
Mostly vast amounts of sexism, but I also see racism, antisemitism and islamophobia waaay too much. The 'isms' tend to glom onto certain posts and go nuts. Algorithmic feeds at their finest, I guess.
Was this a action constructed so that its suppression makes the suppressed message easier to understand? If meta takes down the video they reenforce that the glasses can be used in a bad way, and if they leave it up the initial critical message can spread. Like the 2012 Barnaul “toy protest” in Siberia.
Instagram is full of videos of guys harassing and antagonizing people in public as "pranks". And this is not some coincidence, since both products are from the same company, they basically unleashed this for engagement.
Maybe we haven’t seen enough creative applications of these to win us over? Every time I see them on someone they instantly look like Woody Allen. Imagine what art a filmmaker like Woody Allen would make with these glasses.
Just be thankful that they are still obvious, AliExpress is full of knock-off camera glasses and they are only going to get more compact, harder to spot and they won't even bother adding an easily disabled recording light
I don't like it when I'm recorded without my consent. But people do that with their phones all the time for TikTok videos, for meta videos, for YouTube videos. Nobody yet has demanded that smartphones be banned or that cameras be removed from smartphones.
It smacks of hypocrisy to me. Either ban them all or allow them all.
> I wonder what’s next. Constant haze of personal drones over all our heads, incidentally surveilling everyone 24/7 like ring doorbells in the sky?
Sounds about right, though probably it will start with shipping drones. Amazon already has cameras on their drones, of course, so how long until they sell that capability to the highest bidder? And only the FAA can effectively regulate them, which means we are unlikely to see any rollback in the capability. I do not look forward to hearing these things buzzing over my house all day and knowing they are likely recording video of me.
I don't like it, but this is happening. And while we can frown on it socially, it would be self-defeating to ask our government to ban filming in public.
Yes. It appears that there was another person, perhaps with another pair of such glasses, who was filming the interactions from a 3rd person's perspective.
Another thread where the top comment is "We have to do something!!" and no one stepping forward to actually do so. I suppose they know how to divide us, keep us threatening each other and never actually finding agreement.
Outside basic network effects like real names Facebook has contributed essentially nothing of value to the world. (And no, don't tell me "React, Pytorch". People were screaming about React's license) The network effects barely matter too because their AI bans you whenever and feeds are so useless you never see what anyone posts
Instagram went from a site for photographers to Reels everywhere (and login walls on every page)
Other than ad revenue, the company hasn't had any big wins. VR didn't take off. Metaverse didn't take off. AI models didn't take off. All multi-billion dollar ventures. Any other board would have sacked him by now.
He can't be fired as CEO due to the way he set up the company (Class A and Class B stocks, Class A worth 1 vote, Class B worth 10 votes, he owns like 90% of Class B stock)
it's because he controls the board by being the majority voting shareholder.
This is what happens when the gov't decides that it is legal for share classes with different voting rights. It ensures that you can sell equity to obtain money, without actually giving up control of said company at all. In theory, buyers would discount the sold equity due to this, but in practice, they don't (esp. if they're retail buyers).
Thanks for clearing that up. One less thing to sort out.
Interesting consequence.
EDIT: Initially, this is nuts. How can I give "own" part of a company and not have a say. Sounds like a silent partner scheme. Looks like this a per state thing.
There is this ruling Business Roundtable v. SEC (1990) that strikes down an SEC rule that prevented corps from going public if they didn't follow "one-share-one-vote".
Oh, like the video metrics scandal? Or how their ads are shown to more people in an area than physically exist?
Of course the counter-argument is "makes money". That first of all doesn't make a good CEO (if you put no money into maintaining your site, for example), second of all it ignores all the fraud
Interesting - yes, Epstein glasses. Hmm.. Pervert glasses, epstein glasses, pervert glasses, Epstein glasses. Pervstein glasses? <looks at coffee>, <looks outside>, <wonders why this world is so dumb>, <wonders when the revolution will come>
All over the US people are freaking out about Flock cameras and that's justified.
Meanwhile, these Meta glasses are far more ubiquitous, far more intrusive, being sold all over the world (not only the US) and their images have a lot less oversight than Flock's. And I don't need to tell anyone how irresponsible Meta is with other people's privacy.
Huh? Not in my area. I've seen one pair of these in the wild and dozens of Flock cameras. Will that change? Maybe. For now, the _freak outs_ about Flock are absolutely justified.
Their footprints are also completely different. I can't avoid Flock cameras unless I want to change my path of travel and take back roads, which costs me time and money. Whereas I _might_ encounter someone wearing Meta glasses _if_ I happen to cross paths with them.
Yeah, I also find it weird to make a comparison with a random private individual and/or corporation with an actor that has the monopoly on violence.
The government doing surveillance is much much worse.
And, ultimately, the issue here is that individuals are using these products in a bad way. Go to Japan and this shit is prolifically bad. Upskirt cameras on shoes and all this shit. Banning these glasses doesn't get rid of bad behaviors. Japan has been at the forefront of pervy invasive shit for decades.
Corporate censorship. Do we want such a future in general,
where big companies decide onto you what you can see and what
you can not see? These walled digital gardens they built up
are already such a huge issue.
Now I don't depend on CIAbook, formerly
known as Facebook, in any way, shape or form. And I don't use
Suckerberg's Spyglasses either - hopefully others feel in a
similar way, but unfortunately money convinces people, and I
noticed a few "auditors" using spyglasses allegedly for
"protection" (though, why they don't use normal vide cameras
instead, beats me - perhaps they are not truthful). I fear
that the spyglasses will be a success since Suckerberg is so
sold on spying on mankind. If Google were not to exist, Facebook
would be the number #1 evil company right now.
I cant believe this is a thing. I just turned on dead comments and there are loads of them, most I dont consider offensive or bad in any way. I had no idea HN was so severely censored, my opinion of it has gone down (even though I assume this comment will now be killed).
Anyone can just go on Temu and easily buy stalking gadgets like gps trackers and tiny spy cameras etc for very little money. Any legislation against this type of thing would need to be very wide reaching to be effective, as there are much cheaper and easier to obtain devices which secretly film than meta glasses.
The title is misleading - it sounds like they specifically went there to harass employees by filming them, and Meta took down the videos for harassment, like they routinely do if this is reported on their platforms. I'm really not sure what the issue is.
Meta only cares about this video because it directly targets Meta. If this guy was asking questions to employees of any other company they would not give a shit.
I have read news article about people wearing meta glasses, removing the red recording LED and filming woman and girls at beaches in bikini without their knowledge. And these video often stay up on metas Instagram, accounts don't get suspended. THAT is the issue.
We need to move beyond just banning these glasses - all smart glasses of all kinds - to breaking up these companies. Undo the acquisitions of Insta and Whatsapp - I don't care that will be expensive, thats a shareholders problem.
We should together stop calling devices which film in dressing / locker rooms smart.
These devices record video & sound track serve Ads and do Data fusion
What if you took a cam corder to a locker room? People would be upset, that is not allowed. That would not be nice. This is not nice either
Much like a cell phone, nobody would even really care if you brought a camcorder down so long as you aren't operating it (which is very obvious).
What makes these things gross is that it's not obvious when someone is recording.
Which Meta Glasses try to counter by making it obvious when someone is recording with the recording light; arguably more obvious than cell phones.
I agree we should do something in this instance, but with the speed of which things are changing? Eventually, this tech is going to be undetectable.
"Oh no that's sci-fi and decades away", I really don't think so. I think neuralink, and competitors too, will next move on to reading the visual cortex. They already have plans to push data to the visual cortex, to enable the blind to "see", reading in healthy people seems quite doable.
I expect something like this to happen before 2030.
Regardless, I agree for now? Yes. But the future? I don't see it as blockable forever.
There are two ways we decide how severe the punishment for broken laws is. One is to enable just punishment. The other is deterrent. This may fall into "deterrent is the bigger part of the sentence", where people posting private information receive years in jail as a result.
There is a little bit of a conversation about this here:
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/other-autre/cndii-cdncii...
And the above certainly covers Meta glasses too.
I think it won't be long before it's the posting of non-consensual imagery that is so criminal, that few will do so. For years in Quebec, sharing of images captured in public isn't really legit. You control "images of yourself", regardless of where they are taken, public places or not:
https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/your-right-to-control-pho...
And they're so worried about problems with image sharing, they've almost automated the process to deal with it:
https://www.quebec.ca/en/justice-and-civil-status/support-vi...
So this is already being criminalized in a lot of places.
They're basically Flock Cameras, except they could appear anywhere. Nobody wants mobile surveillance potentially brought into any room.
Yep, they're spy glasses / perv glasses.
I don't like it but it's totally normal, especially for youth, to have their cell phones out in locker rooms. Targeting only glasses with this concern is largely out of touch with current behavior.
My children's school have an interesting way of dealing with the ever growing list of devices they need a policy for. They borrowed the police term "data carrying devices" and wrote a policy based on that. When Metas glasses started to be come a problem no policy change was needed for the school, they were automatically covered.
That's probably the best solution, deal with the functionality, not the device type.
That isn't normal and it's actively enforced against in gyms and pools where I live.
Glasses are passively recording. Recording with a phone is active (for the most part). You need to take it out and point it at what you are recording...
How fo you think we can go about this the politicians are not in our pocket
What does this have to do with WhatsApp?
Also as much as you might like to punish investors (most of whom just have it in their 401k) because you don't like people with money, there are legal protections and the government can't just do something like that without an actual reason.
WhatsApp is definitely part of Meta's distribution and reach strategy. So it's very relevant.
I don't think OP is trying to punish investors. I think they are saying the overall damage of letting these companies continue the current trend will be worse than the cost of unwinding it now.
I'm an advocate of reformed legislation to enable this.
Why shouldn't we punish investors? This is the risk when you invest in these types of companies where regulation is nonexistent. It's not the job of the government to make sure rich shareholders stay green.
I know that shareholders just want monopolies and free money and don't want to compete for it, but we should make them. Like we did before Ronald Reagan and Robert Bork shot the kneecaps out of our antitrust law. It's not about punishing shareholders, it's about making them earn their keep. It's just good business.
The government can do whatever it wants. Laws are written by the government. We have a democracy. If enough votes exist to, say, pass a law banning drug dealing (like meta does), then the company will die.
Simple as that
Also as much as you might like to punish investors (most of whom just have it in their 401k) because you don't like people with money, there are legal protections and the government can't just do something like that without an actual reason.
As much as you might like to defend the wealthy because the only thing you care about is money, regardless of the human cost, doesn't mean that we can't use the law and the government to limit the harm being done to humans.
I know what you are going to say. "Fuck people! I only worship money!" but I think you need to look beyond just the financial aspects of this situation.
I think the point is, it's been a good system, but it's out of control. It's not that people don't like people having money, it's people don't like the status quo of watching society and the world be destroyed by generating share holder value alone. We need a better system. Not saying that is communism or whatever, but the monopolies and corruption are off the charts.
Flat out banning a category of product because it is possible to use it for bad things is stupid. Thousands of people are killed by cars every year - should we ban them? (Being killed is far worse than being recorded naked in a locker room. Not saying the latter is great, but it's better than being dead)
There are also potential good uses for this tech. As someone who can't remember anyone's name worth crap, I can't wait for smart glasses with facial recognition and a name tag that hovers over everyone. I'm sure there will be great benefit in industry, giving workers heads up displays of all manner of important information.
Just like any new technology, there is equal potential for good and bad.
[delayed]
> I can't wait for smart glasses with facial recognition and a name tag that hovers over everyone.
What stops you from using a notepad? I do not want my face uploaded to Facebook.
People don't generally tolerate me sticking a nametag on them... And they certainly don't tend to wear it for future events where we are both present.
A local only face recognizer with consent of the face owners would be pretty useful for me. Although it would require a lot of 'hey, I'm bad at faces and names, do you mind if I take a picture so baby skynet can help me out?'
Plenty of precedent to regulate harmful technology and behavior:
Cars are defacto illegal to operate in public. You must have a license to drive one.
You can’t yell fire to scare people.
You can’t buy a gun without some kind of check, or at all depending on location.
Civilians can’t operate jet engines with a variable nozzle size.
> Civilians can’t operate jet engines with a variable nozzle size.
I cannot find any support for that. Variable nozzles are fairly rare (but not non-existent) on non-afterburning engines, and afterburning engines are fairly rare themselves (and sometimes restricted as part of demilitarization of a former military airframe), but both variable nozzles and afterburners are entirely legal for a civilian to own and operate.
> You can’t buy a gun without some kind of check
That comes with a caveat -- this only applies to retail sales. Over half of States do allow private purchases with no background check.
> I don't care that will be expensive, thats a shareholders problem.
"I have no empathy for the two-thirds of Americans who will lose their personal savings that they need to retire" really undermines your case.
Edit: thoughtful tradeoffs against the stock market are reasonable. "I don't care" is not a carefully weighed tradeoff
You just unknowingly pointed out the real problem - the system is setup so that we think we are in on it, but as a wise man said "It's a big club and you ain't in it".
Also "lose their personal savings" is a hyperbolic bad faith argument. If anyone's entire net worth is put into Meta stock, they get whats coming. Second, 93% of the stock market is owned by 10% of the population. The average American has more to gain from holding companies accountable than letting them rape and pillage our society so the richest people can have even more money.
It's also possible that it would benefit those same people. It doesn't necessarily need to be expensive.
93% of equities are held by the top 10% of households. Most middle class wealth in the US is primary residence real estate. The stock market isn’t the economy. No one is entitled to wealth, nor it maintaining it's value.
> As of 2022, about half of households with a worker age 55 and older had no retirement savings, and 32% had no retirement savings or a defined benefit plan.
The scaremongering about equity values and your average person’s holdings and exposure is not grounded in facts and reality. It’s simply scaremongering.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357337 (citations)
This line of argument ("think of the retirees!!!") could be used in many cases, however when is it acceptable to break companies for the greater (non-financial) good?
On a parallel, can't we criticize any decision reducing the market cap of companies as an attack on the retirement portfolios? Say, if we required connected glasses to display a red light of more than x lumens when recording, would that be ok, even if it decreased Meta's market cap?
> decision reducing the market cap of companies as an attack on the retirement portfolios
Any decision that results in a long term net loss across the entire public economy? Yes.
That's something that hurts a lot of people and that hurt should be carefully weighed against whatever the assumed benefit is. Sometimes that's worth it, sometimes it's not
But it's never OK to just hand wave with "well I don't care about that class of people so screw them"
And let's not move the goalposts. OPs proposal was a corporate breakup of massive scale, not a minimum lumens requirement.
> Undo the acquisitions of Insta and Whatsapp - I don't care that will be expensive, thats a shareholders problem.
Yikes. I thought this was America.
That sounds like “we’ve always done things this way and therefore will continue doing things this way”.
Which is a great mindset if you want to ignore new information and avoid improving the status quo.
The US has laws against monopolies and trusts.
Those laws have been nerfed since the Ronald Reagan / Robert Bork / Consumer Welfare Standard takeover. We should un-nerf the anti-trust laws.
Yep, and heck, on occasion we even enforce them.
When we do, it can be pretty effective.
I just wish we did so more frequently, and, more importantly, that the consumer welfare principle hadn't emerged as the prevalent antitrust standard.
If anyone wants to see the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHKhYL3is5o
He did harass them a bit. I'm looking forward to Meta taking down all videos where someone is a bit harassed. Internet will be a much nicer place!
> I'm looking forward to Meta taking down all videos where someone is a bit harassed. Internet will be a much nicer place!
Well, I’m looking forward of Meta going down. Now that would benefit the Internet.
After that, I think the fact that these glasses are allowed in the first place creates a problem that Meta as a platform cannot fix, because Meta is just one of the many many places where videos can be posted.
I think he could've gotten his point across without making her turn around and then putting his face behind her ass.
He did it to men too.
The argumentative method of rather than saying and doing what you believe and instead doing and saying what you are opposed to, is always weak and usually a great way to shoot yourself in the foot.
That being said. I agree 100% with making Meta Employees feel uncomfortable with their own products.
Asking someone to turn around isn't making them turn around. And he asked multiple men and just one woman in the video. In any case - among real life Meta glasses users, who do you think is going to be perved on more - men, or women?
If you judge this video without any kind of context, then yes he is a weirdo harassing strangers who are just trying to go about their day. The point is that these glasses enable this weird behavior, and the people he's filming are (ostensibly) part of that system.
That was totally unacceptable behavior. I support the choice to take down a video depicting blatant sexual harassment of its employees. I also support launching meta into the sun.
> He did harass them a bit.
Maybe I'm too European to understand, where exactly is harassment occurring? He's asking Meta employees questions, doesn't seem to follow them around, and when they walk away or say no, he doesn't exactly force them to stay or anything? Doesn't there have to be some intimidation or humiliation or similar for it to be harassment? Or asking employees what they think of the products they develop and support is the harassment part?
Arguing about whether to call this kind of behavior a harassment or "a bit" of a harassment is in my opinion all besides the point.
This video mainly shows a person approaching other people in public and recording them with these glasses. Which is one of the typical scenarios in which such a glasses are probably going to be used. And that video shows that even the Meta employees themselves generally do not seem to like it very much.
That is the point.
I don't know if I agree that man-on-the-street pseudo journalistic stuff is one of the "typical scenarios." Any time I see a product like this I think:
I don't think these will make more people bother strangers on the street, it's just another way the same people can do that.Do you know how harnessed I feel by people wearing pervert glasses around my kids?
I felt a bit uneasy when the employees indicate they're uncomfortable with the filming and he asks them why, while continuing to film. Given how they're blurred out and that their discomfort is kind-of the point w.r.t. the issue he's trying to raise, I don't think this meets the bar that Meta usually adheres to when it comes to taking down videos, but describing it as "a bit" of harassment doesn't sound too wrong to me.
They feel uncomfortable with being filmed while going about their day to day life? Maybe they should stop making products that enable such a thing.
I am just an American, but I live in Portugal and it is legally not allowed to film people in public without their consent (you also can't have a street facing surveillance camera like in the US). Moreover, people take this rule very seriously. If it appears that you are doing so, they will be visibly bothered (I know some kids who have had uncomfortable interactions because they weren't aware).
I don't think blurring faces fully addresses that (though I'm not commenting on legality in Amsterdam).
I can see the argument that this video is in the public interest (hey, I'm Americanese), but it does seem plausible some people would find it a violation of a norm.
> it is legally not allowed to film people in public without their consent
Lots places have laws like that. Maybe Meta shouldn't sell a device that makes it easy to do it anyway.
Working at meta is a violation of the norm, it's hard to care.
Then I guess Meta glasses will be banned in Portugal.
> I am just an American, but I live in Portugal and it is legally not allowed to film people in public without their consent
If that's actual law that's a bit surprising. In many EU countries there are journalistic exceptions (which may or may not apply in this specific case depending on local law)
> (you also can't have a street facing surveillance camera like in the US)
And same here. Usually the limit is that if you do it within GDPR household exemption then you cannot have it facing street, but if you do it on GDPR scope then you need to fulfill the GDPR requirements (e.g. posting notice, be ready to answer GDPR requests, perform balancing tests for recording etc.).
This is true de jure but not de facto and if anyone wants proof just go look up the number of Teslas in portuguese streets and the zero convictions over continuous recording of the public.
>you also can't have a street facing surveillance camera like in the US
That's wild. Their solved crime rate must be in the gutter.
Bending down to stare at a female employee's ass at waist level after he asked her to turn around isn't harassment[1]? Like, up until that point it was almost ribbing but that was quite the turn given it'd be the same issue whether he was wearing smart glasses or not.
Not to mention the sarcastic, insincere tone he adopts after being asked what he's doing, claiming he's "such a huge fan" of the Meta glasses. There is a way to draw attention to privacy and this is a poor way to go about it.
[1] Cambridge Dictionary: 'behavior that annoys or upsets someone'
To me he crossed a line by asking the woman to turn around and then crouching down to film her butt. That is a really creepy thing to do and a lot of women would find that threatening. Ask a female friend how they would feel if you find that surprising.
Yes but isn't that what those glasses were made for by those Meta employees?
I don’t know the legal of boundary harassment but he’s clearly trolling them and making people uncomfortable.
That's the point.
If everyone is wearing the glasses, wherever you go, you'll be filmed all the time, with most people not bothering to ask.
I mean, you are being filmed everywhere you go anyway by flock cameras, police/government cctv, even cctv on business and peoples house/ring doorbells etc. Concent to being filmed in a public place is not really asked anywhere, so I dont see it as a big difference personally.
You don’t understand the difference between recording things in good faith vs recording things because you want a reaction you can exploit for personal gains.
Meta is butt raping our privacy 24/7 but god forbid some dude ask 3 questions to its employees, I'll never understand people bootlicking megacorps like these.
Fuck meta and fuck every single of their employee, you can't keep building hell and complain when people hit back
Hahahaha, "recording things in good faith." What an insane statement to make to paint this guy in a bad light. Should people also be concerned about walking in good faith, or eating their lunch in good faith? Meta created these creep glasses so people could do exactly what this guy is doing: film people in public (without them knowing). There is no "bad faith" when you're just literally doing what the product is for.
I've heard of journalism before, yes. So? Since when is this harassment?
Can't believe we have corporate bootlickers on HN of all places, I thought we still cared a tiny sliver about privacy? It all went away when we all gave away our private data to the AI companies, or what's the deal?
He's specifically bending down to look at the behinds of the persons, also asks them to turn around "scanning" them.
If anything I think the employees are all nice people. I get the message but it's cringy to watch.
I'm also against cameras everywhere, but let's not pretend this is not all also possible with other devices.
Of course, Meta taking this down but not a lot of other, completely the same, stuff is the bad thing.
> let's not pretend this is not all also possible with other devices
Let's not pretend being able to beat someone with a rock and shoot them with a M61 Vulcan at 6k rounds per minute are the same thing just because they involve projectiles.
Facebook started explicitly (https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creat...) as a way to creep on women.
Isn't that the point? The camera glasses add a 10x harassment factor.
Asking questions is harassment now?
It's obvious he's making a point, but there is no harassment that I see.
FFS ... it's this kind of goal-post shifting that ends with sign-holding grannies being arrested for terrorism.
It's harassment when you're doing something slightly inconvenient in a way which doesn't benefit big business or the super rich.
It's fine if you're doing it to benefit them, then you can go much further, you can kill small children with your tractors (as is attempted in The Netherlands) or to murder coast guards or migrant (via drowning or fire) as happens in the UK.
Everyone keeps saying he is dutch but he was speaking a different language in the video thanks to automatic youtube dubbing. I was quite confused because not everything was even dubbed correctly. Also its an auto dubbing through AI. Didn't realize it got automatically selected. So annoying.
Realized too late into the video that I had to switch to original track
He's speaking Dutch and speaking English with a very very heavy west-Netherlands accent. Quite a lot of the Meta employees there can't speak Dutch which is why he switches to English.
I think I should have worded my comment differently. I did not mean the guy does not speak dutch, the video was not playing in dutch because of that shitty auto dubbing of youtube.
Once you realize you are wrong, try to edit your comment. It doesn’t add to the discussion.
I edited it. It was not clear enough that I am referring to the auto dubbing not the guy.
As far as I know he is Dutch and he sounds like a native Dutch speaker. But he but also uses English with some of the people that do not speak Dutch.
Yes exactly. But YouTube selected some AI translation voice over which I did not realize first. So I was quite confused. Once I selected the original audio it was obvious that he is dutch.
This hypocrisy is not at all surprising. The modus operandi for these people has been rules for thee, but not for me for quite a while now.
Well, it is and it isn't hypocrisy.
It is hypocrisy because Meta are knowingly creating a product that is perfectly suited for filming or photographing people without their knowledge. I find that it speaks ill of someone's character to pretend otherwise. And then they react badly when the very thing that these products enable happens to them. Demonstrating how this is a problem. They try to pretend it isn't a problem and then their actions demonstrate that it IS a problem.
It isn't because we do have laws that actually cover these things already. Of course, they're not the same across the world, law enforcement are not always aware of what the laws are, and this causes confrontations and sometimes overreach. There are also different legal systems that interpret laws differently. For instance in some legal systems the letter of the law carries more weight. In other legal systems the intent of the law is what matters.
There are two great risks here:
1) we pretend we can get by with existing laws. That the existing laws had enough foresight to meaningfully fulfil what the laws were intended to accomplish.
2) we can overreact and damage legitimate freedoms in our eagerness to solve an immediate problem.
For instance, where I live there is a law on the books that prohibits photographing someone being arrested. The law was well-meaning. It was there to protect people from being plastered all over the media until guilt has been determined in a court of law. But it would also prohibit someone from documenting police brutality during an arrest. So the law was never enacted because it failed to balance interests properly.
Right now, where I live, there is a real risk that rules about photography may become overly strict because politicians feel they have to demonstrate an ability to act. So they may end up passing laws that have unforeseen consequences while probably failing to make much of a difference anyway.
We know why these cameras pose a problem. Let's not insult each other's intelligence by pretending they are exactly like poking a traditional camera in someone's face. They're not and we should be able to agree on simple facts. But we also know that we need to have a public discussion about what we're going to do about this so we don't end up introducing draconian laws that take away freedoms we should have. For instance the freedom to document abuses of power, criminal activity, artistic expression etc.
It's not "perfectly suited", it's EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO do that. And it's very well designed and very effective.
But hey it's OK because Meta only want to record everything to train their AI, who cares if some of their friends use it to create CSAM material, their third-world country workers upload it to PornHub and the NSA secretly pipe all of that through their servers (or servers managed by MI5 in the case of Americans).
They added a recording light and made covering it stop recording or photography. They went through extra effort to at least try and provide a public signal someone is recording.
Citation needed buddy…
We should be thankful for the small mercy they their manta at least rhymes.
> rules for thee, but not for me
This is their theory of power, that the selected few get access to a state of exception (but you can lose it at any time, so don't slip up).
Trump and oligarchs broadly have offered this franchise to their most loyal.
But! I'd argue it is not precisely hypocrisy, because they never believed in a rules-based order in the first place. They just see a system they can exploit.
break things has always been right there in black and white.
Feel free to point out the hypochrisy. I'll remind you that sharing a video you took of someone without their consent is not the same as recording them and keeping the video strictly for yourself
This person was not trespassing on Meta property and nothing indicates that he was harassing employees who refused to be interviewed. It is perfectly legal in the Netherlands to record people in public places.
You don't need someone's consent to record in public, and if any of the employees objected to the publication of the recording, they could consult with an attorney about a portrait rights claim. Such a claim should be adjudicated by a court, not Facebook.
And let's be clear about the context here: these types of glasses are used by "content creators" to do street interviews that are published online, and they're also used to record all sorts of junk/nonsense ("pranks", pickup artist BS, etc.).
Meta doesn't seem to have a problem with content recorded with these glasses being posted on its platforms, even when it's objectionable, because it's literally everywhere. The only problem here, obviously, was that he was recording Meta employees.
"these types of glasses are used by "content creators" to do street interviews that are published online"
This to me is wild. I use the glasses to film my kids and share it on private hard-drives with grandparents, that's it. It's wild to me that I can surreptitiously film someone on the street and publish it online for views, and the only recourse the person has, is to go to court? Seems insane.
Why does Hollywood require a release but Youtube does not?
EDIT: People are getting hung-up on my use case. But that's not the question posed here.
FALSE! It's legal to record in public spaces and share it if you are not targeting any individual in particular. What the author did was instead purpusefully focus on those particular employees.
But we are talking about Meta removing content from their own website, right?
In contrast to what people think, Facebook IS NOT public infrastructure.
If Meta removes some content from Meta website, and you don't like that, it's a you problem, right?
> portrait rights claim
Note that the employees were not recognisable; their faces were blurred out.
> is perfectly legal in the Netherlands to record people in public places.
it's perfectly legal to record but publish, especially in but not limited to a commercial context without explicit consent violates portrait rights under the GDPR in the EU. And I strongly suspect if you posted a video in which people explicitly object to being filmed and flag that on Facebook or other platforms it will get taken down.
It's illegal to record people in public spaces in Germany. Not sure how NL is important here, did I miss something?
Users of these devices already share that data with Meta.
Where do you get the "without their consent" bit from?
The hypocrisy is probably located around here:
> "I've been making satirical videos about all kinds of things for ten years: Gaza, Ukraine, refugees. Funny videos that push boundaries and provoke discussion. But I've never experienced a video being removed before.
The hypocrisy is that meta is creating a tool that their employees are very uncomfortable seeing used on them.
What the law says about consent is irrelevant to the hypocrisy, and the videos are automatically uploaded to meta without anyone's consent anyway. You know this very well, there is no need to cosplay the smart devil's advocate.
Since you can apparently read my mind, there is no need for me to reply
They made a device that will create this problem by the millions for other people, they should have it inflicted on them every day.
It's incredibly hypocritical. It's like working at Flock and complaining about being filmed on a Flock camera. Or working for a company that sells cars that emit a loud, annoying sound and complaining about those cars in your neighborhood. Or making devices for children but banning your own children from using them because the devices are harmful. They clearly don't care that the product their company is selling can legally (in most places) be used to film people in public until they themselves are filmed in public. How is that not hypocrisy?
Any camera in the world can be used to film people in public without their consent. There are lawful ways to do it (if the people are "background noise" and not the point of the video), and unlawful ways to do it (if the people become the subject of the video).
So tell me now, is a GoPro/Canon/Apple employee who doesn't consent to being the subject of a video taken with a GoPro/Canon/iPhone camera also a hypochrite?
It is not as you feel any different when you are being recorded. Once recorded, you don't know what they will do with the video.
I agree, I cannot control what other people will do. Are you applying this fear to all other facets of your life? I guess not, since that would mean you'd live in a state of constant fear and paranoia.
neither of these things are remotely acceptable. the degree of distinction is relevant to the impact on the victim and in a punitive sense, but doing either of these things is a mark of a severely antisocial behavior disorder that needs to be addressed by mental healthcare and prevention of access to tools that facilitate this behavior.
Feel free to cite scientific studies proving your unhinged claim
The mental gymnastics that people do here to defend these untouchable corporations is disgusting. From Meta to OpenAi, for a lot of people here it's just a "yeah, but actually". I've reported everything from holocaust glorification to videos of people being filmed in public in europe just to be humiliated, to obvious far right propaganda done by russian linked accounts, nothing goes against Meta's policy anymore, except when it's about them...
The asymmetry bothers me. No one corporation is going to get it right 100% of the time but it's when you report stuff and it never gets removed but they ban you that you can really see how morally bankrupt they are
(Oh, and they don't care about local solutions. Their sneakiness with Free Basics is clear. Can you blame them for Myanmar? I think you can, but it's also clear they want to supplant all the other social networks, like a system each individual country might come up with)
It does bother me being here on hacker news because it's a good aggregator but you get people standing up for their industry no matter what or flagging anything they disagree with
Spoken as a man with no children or partner. Any women or child being recorded by a stranger will feel unsafe.
Do you have a point beside saying something completely unrelated while making up stuff about me?
Meta glasses are already officially banned in our office and in front of our laptops.
Are you filming? - Can't you see the light?
Case closed. People that are very familiar with these glasses need to ask. These devices need to get banned.
Sorry but have you looked at AliExpress lately? You think glasses with hidden video cameras are something we have the ability to ban?
Meta has made the concept popular, but hardware feasibility already tipped the scales, these cameras are going to be ubiquitous and if not in glasses then in even more hidden formats like buttons and pinhole wearables.
I hate these glasses, but why do you need to ban them? Meta operates at scale, so it will only stay in this business if a considerable number of people buy this. Vote with your money. There are legitimate uses for camera glasses (journalism, action sports, etc.).
I'm trying to understand how to "vote with my money" for not being recorded by these glasses in public. My best interpretation would be financially supporting private establishments that have banned these devices... Which feels like exactly what you're arguing against.
How does me not buying these glasses stop creeps from buying them to film people surreptitiously?
the legit uses don't need to be surreptitious.
>Vote with your money
That doesn't work in a society with such extreme wealth inequality.
> so it will only stay in this business if a considerable number of people buy this. Vote with your money.
How many billions of dollars have been wasted on the Metaverse?
There are some Meta employees reading this thread and thinking: "well, he did harass them!"
That said, I hope that real harassment starts to happen. Meta doesn't care about social boundaries when it benefits them, so it's fair game
I've always wondered if people who work for Meta/Twitter/whoever think that the Nuremberg defense is valid
I'll take the bait. I work on ads at Meta.
What am I on trial for that I need to use the nuremberg defense?
Your employer has fundamentally undermined the stable functioning of society by systematically provoking outrage, division and hate. You have contributed to a world where we can’t even agree if measles is bad.
Zuckerberg has a knack for creating the most anti-human products possible. It is a mystery he didn't create or buy out OF.
I can't think of a more human place .
Facebook included, by the way
Myspace had its run, it wasn't an especially good product. People moved to Facebook for any number of reasons, but those privacy settings ("friends only", etc) if they worked would've been pretty cool and good for the web
Unfortunately Zuckerberg doesn't care about privacy and actively spent time changing those from Friends Only to Public
And graph search. If I search for 'carrot' I can see any post you've ever made in your entire history with carrot in it
There's a reason Facebook's wall thing is now called 'timeline'. It lists everything you've ever done ever. Hope you managed to catch yet another one of their silent privacy changes. Oh, look, guess you have to log in to catch it. That means they rope you back into the system. Oh well. No biggie. Just the absolute antithesis of consent
Great idea for protests outside meta offices. Just stand on the public right of way outside the entrance, smiling in your meta ray bans.
Would only be an effective protest if you stole the glasses.
Why does the effectiveness of the protest be contingent on stealing the glasses?
I'd guess because buying the meta glasses to use them is in a way helping it succeed.
In China the government controls the discourse. Here it's the corporations.
agreed
I just can’t find the user experience different enough for me to feel like my western friends have any point to make about China
the west has a thin partyless corporate layer controlling all facets of life and your ability to participate in life compared to the government doing it directly
but its okay because if you don’t care about any of that you can talk about it (in person only because nobody will hear it for long elsewhere) and you won’t be disappeared? *unless your citizenship status is questioned
amusing cope
And you let it happen.
Ok I don't anymore. Are we good now?
I recorded a video harassing the employees of a company, I uploaded it to the servers of said company, and they removed it. Who could have imagined this would happen?
It's a bit frustrating to see this video immediately sniped while Meta continues to host some of the most insidious content on the internet.
It actually scares me that kids can read IG comment sections.
They cant if they dont have an Instagram account. Easy solution.
This "ban all kids" kind of take is bananas to me. It implies you either A) believe we should trust famously secure and benevolent tech companies with government ID or B) believe parents have the time or technical know-how to exhaustively monitor the internet access of kids. Even as a software engineer, I've found it insanely tiresome to try operating half-assed parental controls across devices.
I've found Instagram comments to be heavily censored. What exactly are you worried about?
Mostly vast amounts of sexism, but I also see racism, antisemitism and islamophobia waaay too much. The 'isms' tend to glom onto certain posts and go nuts. Algorithmic feeds at their finest, I guess.
They host literal child porn as of now but ok... looks like they have their priorities in check
That's not very "digital town square" of them
You okay bro? Blink twice if the Meta has your family in danger.
Hopefully the Streisand effect will be in full force on this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Barbra_Streisand
When did they stop calling them "spy glasses"?
The marketers must be doing a great job.
The correct term is "perv glasses"
Was this a action constructed so that its suppression makes the suppressed message easier to understand? If meta takes down the video they reenforce that the glasses can be used in a bad way, and if they leave it up the initial critical message can spread. Like the 2012 Barnaul “toy protest” in Siberia.
Who remembers the picture of inside Zuckerberg's home that got leaked with the grotesks living their private lives?
It's a good bit.
My guess is if you went to the Apple Campus and held up an iPhone recording its employees, you'd have the same thing happen to you.
Instagram is full of videos of guys harassing and antagonizing people in public as "pranks". And this is not some coincidence, since both products are from the same company, they basically unleashed this for engagement.
Yes, having a taste of their own medicine.
taste of their own poison*
Maybe we haven’t seen enough creative applications of these to win us over? Every time I see them on someone they instantly look like Woody Allen. Imagine what art a filmmaker like Woody Allen would make with these glasses.
Zuckerberg should be in jail.
Meta glasses are a great sign the wearer is a midwit. Feels like a favor/heads up on someone's personality and mindset, which is nice.
Just be thankful that they are still obvious, AliExpress is full of knock-off camera glasses and they are only going to get more compact, harder to spot and they won't even bother adding an easily disabled recording light
I don't like it when I'm recorded without my consent. But people do that with their phones all the time for TikTok videos, for meta videos, for YouTube videos. Nobody yet has demanded that smartphones be banned or that cameras be removed from smartphones.
It smacks of hypocrisy to me. Either ban them all or allow them all.
We talked about it when it was a newer phenomenon. Some of us grew up when that didn’t exist. Nothing happened.
Now this might be normalized (which feels ugly) but in a few years it could just be “the way things are.”
I wonder what’s next. Constant haze of personal drones over all our heads, incidentally surveilling everyone 24/7 like ring doorbells in the sky?
> I wonder what’s next. Constant haze of personal drones over all our heads, incidentally surveilling everyone 24/7 like ring doorbells in the sky?
Sounds about right, though probably it will start with shipping drones. Amazon already has cameras on their drones, of course, so how long until they sell that capability to the highest bidder? And only the FAA can effectively regulate them, which means we are unlikely to see any rollback in the capability. I do not look forward to hearing these things buzzing over my house all day and knowing they are likely recording video of me.
Yeah, and it's got to be that we allow them all.
I don't like it, but this is happening. And while we can frown on it socially, it would be self-defeating to ask our government to ban filming in public.
But the video was not just the view from his glasses?
Yes. It appears that there was another person, perhaps with another pair of such glasses, who was filming the interactions from a 3rd person's perspective.
Privacy for me but not for thee.
That's hilarious. Keep it up!
Another thread where the top comment is "We have to do something!!" and no one stepping forward to actually do so. I suppose they know how to divide us, keep us threatening each other and never actually finding agreement.
this will inspire short-range EMP
Outside basic network effects like real names Facebook has contributed essentially nothing of value to the world. (And no, don't tell me "React, Pytorch". People were screaming about React's license) The network effects barely matter too because their AI bans you whenever and feeds are so useless you never see what anyone posts
Instagram went from a site for photographers to Reels everywhere (and login walls on every page)
Zuckerberg is awful. Awful, awful, awful.
I sometimes wonder how he's still CEO.
Other than ad revenue, the company hasn't had any big wins. VR didn't take off. Metaverse didn't take off. AI models didn't take off. All multi-billion dollar ventures. Any other board would have sacked him by now.
He can't be fired as CEO due to the way he set up the company (Class A and Class B stocks, Class A worth 1 vote, Class B worth 10 votes, he owns like 90% of Class B stock)
> wonder how he's still CEO.
it's because he controls the board by being the majority voting shareholder.
This is what happens when the gov't decides that it is legal for share classes with different voting rights. It ensures that you can sell equity to obtain money, without actually giving up control of said company at all. In theory, buyers would discount the sold equity due to this, but in practice, they don't (esp. if they're retail buyers).
Thanks for clearing that up. One less thing to sort out.
Interesting consequence.
EDIT: Initially, this is nuts. How can I give "own" part of a company and not have a say. Sounds like a silent partner scheme. Looks like this a per state thing.
There is this ruling Business Roundtable v. SEC (1990) that strikes down an SEC rule that prevented corps from going public if they didn't follow "one-share-one-vote".
Other than making buttloads of money, what has he accomplished?
If that’s your only criterion then you must be really upset that El Chapo is in the jail instead of making buttloads of money for his cartel
Fair. Meta seems to be as an advertisement utility, not really a tech company that is taking said buttloads and breaking into new areas.
In my mind, eventually it has the same fate as twitter? KTLO ops for printing money.
Oh, like the video metrics scandal? Or how their ads are shown to more people in an area than physically exist?
Of course the counter-argument is "makes money". That first of all doesn't make a good CEO (if you put no money into maintaining your site, for example), second of all it ignores all the fraud
> I sometimes wonder how he's still CEO.
Because of the existence of Class B shares.
I personally think React made webdev worse. Overcomplicated shite I call it.
meta's pervert glasses
Epstein Glasses by Meta. For people who don't do consent.
Interesting - yes, Epstein glasses. Hmm.. Pervert glasses, epstein glasses, pervert glasses, Epstein glasses. Pervstein glasses? <looks at coffee>, <looks outside>, <wonders why this world is so dumb>, <wonders when the revolution will come>
All over the US people are freaking out about Flock cameras and that's justified.
Meanwhile, these Meta glasses are far more ubiquitous, far more intrusive, being sold all over the world (not only the US) and their images have a lot less oversight than Flock's. And I don't need to tell anyone how irresponsible Meta is with other people's privacy.
And, yet, very few make a scandal about it.
> and their images have a lot less oversight than Flock's
Given what I've read about Flock recently, I'm actually not sure that is true.
> these Meta glasses are far more ubiquitous
Huh? Not in my area. I've seen one pair of these in the wild and dozens of Flock cameras. Will that change? Maybe. For now, the _freak outs_ about Flock are absolutely justified.
Their footprints are also completely different. I can't avoid Flock cameras unless I want to change my path of travel and take back roads, which costs me time and money. Whereas I _might_ encounter someone wearing Meta glasses _if_ I happen to cross paths with them.
Yeah, I also find it weird to make a comparison with a random private individual and/or corporation with an actor that has the monopoly on violence.
The government doing surveillance is much much worse.
And, ultimately, the issue here is that individuals are using these products in a bad way. Go to Japan and this shit is prolifically bad. Upskirt cameras on shoes and all this shit. Banning these glasses doesn't get rid of bad behaviors. Japan has been at the forefront of pervy invasive shit for decades.
Corporate censorship. Do we want such a future in general, where big companies decide onto you what you can see and what you can not see? These walled digital gardens they built up are already such a huge issue.
Now I don't depend on CIAbook, formerly known as Facebook, in any way, shape or form. And I don't use Suckerberg's Spyglasses either - hopefully others feel in a similar way, but unfortunately money convinces people, and I noticed a few "auditors" using spyglasses allegedly for "protection" (though, why they don't use normal vide cameras instead, beats me - perhaps they are not truthful). I fear that the spyglasses will be a success since Suckerberg is so sold on spying on mankind. If Google were not to exist, Facebook would be the number #1 evil company right now.
Btw, I found out a few days ago HN censors comments. Not just down voting, but if you say something they HN finds offensive it disappears.
You can enable viewing dead comments in your settings.
I cant believe this is a thing. I just turned on dead comments and there are loads of them, most I dont consider offensive or bad in any way. I had no idea HN was so severely censored, my opinion of it has gone down (even though I assume this comment will now be killed).
Okay I'll bite. What do you mean by auditors in scare quotes? Like actual auditors of business practices? Or something else?
Corporation under no obligation to uphold journalistic standards. In other news, water still wet.
Why are these Mets glasses still allowed to be sold? It needs to be stopped and the product recalled.
Google glasses came and went. Mets glasses should follow a similar fate.
Some countries are already discussing just that. From Norway (where people call them "pervobriller" or "pervert glasses"): https://www.nrk.no/norge/regjeringa-vurderer-forbud-mot-meta...
Anyone can just go on Temu and easily buy stalking gadgets like gps trackers and tiny spy cameras etc for very little money. Any legislation against this type of thing would need to be very wide reaching to be effective, as there are much cheaper and easier to obtain devices which secretly film than meta glasses.
The title is misleading - it sounds like they specifically went there to harass employees by filming them, and Meta took down the videos for harassment, like they routinely do if this is reported on their platforms. I'm really not sure what the issue is.
Having watched the video, this hardly meets the standard of 'harassment' or bullying. This is a vox pop, that people can (and do) walk away from.
TBH this is tamer than 99% of the content published by Creeper Glasses users that Meta itself relentlessly shows to me.
Meta only cares about this video because it directly targets Meta. If this guy was asking questions to employees of any other company they would not give a shit.
I didn't see any harassment.
They made a product, interviewer is using it as intended. He walked up to people, asked questions while using their product.
If they don't like it, walk away. Zero harassment.
I have read news article about people wearing meta glasses, removing the red recording LED and filming woman and girls at beaches in bikini without their knowledge. And these video often stay up on metas Instagram, accounts don't get suspended. THAT is the issue.