“Experts in Europe warn that these devices are used to record strangers without their consent, possibly breaching EU law.”
“A small LED light is designed to indicate when recording is taking place, but RTBF’s investigators found that tutorials explaining how to conceal the indicator are abundant and easily accessible online.”
Sometimes I have a hard time deciding who I despise more, parasite Mark Zuckerberg or its witless hosts who keep using its products—yes, Zuck’s pronoun is it. Ban Ray-Ban, for frick’s sake.
A small LED light is designed to indicate when recording is taking place, but RTBF’s investigators found that tutorials explaining how to conceal the indicator are abundant and easily accessible online.
You need a tutorial to use a piece of electrical tape?
I honestly don’t understand why these glasses have become so mainstream
as intended.
Part of me wants to go “well you’re on a public venue, what the hell did you expect?”
But anyone wearing Zuck Glasses should be shot at from the orbit from the EU Anti-Douchebaggotry Satellite, or something. That’s a special exception to public photography laws that I approve of!
If only they had a “legitimate public-interest justification”, then they could feed it straight into Brussels’ Regional Informatics Center (BRIC), together with the thousands of public cameras from: police stations, the subway system, the port of Brussels, the fire and emergency medical assistance department, and the public service department responsible for traffic management, signals and tunnels; to be analyzed by video analytics tools (alerting operators upon “illegal parking or a large group of people, for example”, bookmarking video clips with movement, and where the “next step will be to integrate facial and number plate recognition”), as reported in their Genetec customer story…
… and water is wet?
Who could have predicted this?
Just so people know, Belgium has one-party consent laws regarding the recording of conversations. I’m Belgian, see Art. 314bis in our penal code.
Who would’ve known this would happen? Everyone. Meta knew people would use it for the bad and they still decided to go on with it because money.
Hope there will be a way to prevent being recorded, like some tech that disables it or something.
There are lights that work on some cameras. I’m not sure which (infrared, I think prolly others). Search the web. They exist. But how are you gonna have that at all times everywhere? Easier to set the Meta HQ on fire. And that’s prolly not easy.
But how are you gonna have that at all times everywhere?
Someone made a hoodie with IR LED lights all around the face. I bet one could also build it into a necklace or something, but you’d need some sort of battery in your pocket to power them.
The real problem with these is that they are only really effective at night. In daylight, the blinding effect of the LEDs is minimized.
There are lights that work on some cameras. […] Search the web. They exist.
Or look in real life :-)
They are small and you can see them only from some specific angle. And not quite bright.
I think they are referring to camera-blinding IR lights
like some tech that disables it or something.
The word you’re looking for is “hammer”.
Baseball bats have better range.
Yeah, but nothing delivers the message better than calming grabbing the glasses, put them on the table in front of the glasshole, smash them with the hammer in a single confident blow and then placing the remnants back on their face. No words spoken, just a powerfull message delivered.
there are open source android apps that tell you when a meta rayban is nearby (using the phone’s ability to scan nearby bluetooth devices) which isn’t really good enough but it’s something i guess
https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses
if you’re a woman and the creep is a man, there’s always the option of pepper spray i guess, though then you will have to justify yourself somehow. i don’t think predominantly male chud cops will accept the reasoning of “i feel unsafe” from women, even if it’s true and valid.
as for impractical ideas, you can always carry around a 5W laser pointer and then try and fry the camera. of course does not work irl.
It’s a good thing they brought in “experts” to point this out.
I’ve always thought an EMP bomb would do some good. Snap worker bees out of their unhealthy relationship with working, disable vehicles, make people fulfil their needs physically
I figured that would kill pacemakers, but it might not. it’ll definitely kill electric wheelchairs and insulin fridges though.
kill everyone with a pacemaker, disable emergency systems, create traffic chaos
Damn, poor pacemaker dudes
Satan laughing spreads his wiiiiinngggssss
Years ago I tried calling out the normalization of anybody recording anybody in public without their knowledge or consent, and nobody cared because I was a man so they thought I didn’t deserve privacy. Now the headlines frame it as a women’s issue and suddenly everyone cares.
It’s not a gendered thing. It’s a privacy issue. People didn’t care when I raised concerns about it, and I’m not surprised that it’s biting people on the ass.
I still think it’s wrong, I just don’t find it surprising given people’s reactions whenever I raised concerns about it.
Also, ray-ban was stupid for allowing this because obviously nobody is going to buy their shit anymore. They had a distinctive design that now nobody is going to trust…
I can tell you the vast majority of people don’t care AND Raybans gets their name in the media more often so it’s marketing for them.
That’s putting a lot of weight in the “all publicity is good publicity” assumption
When nobody gives a fuck, it unfortunately holds true.
They’ve made crap sunglasses for a while now. I went to another company for my Aviators.
I hate to tell you, but whatever the other company you went to is, it’s almost certainly Luxottica, the same people who make Ray-Ban now.
I never said I liked raybans, but for a while over a decade ago they were all the rage with the hipster/indie crowd. People liked them, and their style was distinctive. So distinctive that even a cheap knockoff were called “raybans” for the shape of the frame and lenses.
Now no one in their right mind besides annoying tech bros are going to wear raybans, because anyone who sees them is going to assume they have cameras with facial recognition linked to meta’s servers.
People will always find ways to abuse technology.
There was a similar news article in Germany a few days ago. It was about a “pick-up artist/dating coach/influencer” named Erick Ronaldo secretly filming some girl at the Oktoberfest and posting it to his channel where that girl was ridiculed in the comments. (Fun fact: when the news media approached that guy and asked for a statement, he demanded $7,500 for an interview - which they, of course, didn’t pay)
he demanded $7,500 for an interview
Is he going to ask the police to pay him for interrogation?
heimliches Filmen ist aktuell in Deutschland nicht per se strafbar. Besonders in öffentlichen Räumen sind Betroffene kaum geschützt.
(Roughly in English)
covert filming isn’t currently illegal in Germany per se. Those filmed are rarely protected, especially in public
Filming in public not being illegal, I get, but he’s profiting off of her likeness. Ideally that would be illegal itself, but even if not, could she not sue him for a share? Obviously, putting the burden on victims is not a great remedy, especially because it’s expensive, a huge hassle, and risks the Streisand effect, but I could see a women’s rights organization orchestrating it for her and it might be possible to keep her identity secret.
Again, I don’t think that’s ideal, but it seems better than nothing and wouldn’t preclude criminal charges from going through if the government does figure out how to prosecute this
Filming by itself isn’t illegal in Germany, but publishing the footage without consent of everyone in the video is. (“Recht am eigenen Bild”) Don’t know how this applies if the perpetrator is from the USA and publishes the recording there, though.
And even if - good luck in suing someone from the US while you’re still in Germany.
You could at least get it taken down from YouTube through German privacy rights, since it was filmed in Germany.
Yeah, probably. But this doesn’t help much when the damage is already done, i.e. people have already commented bad things. And might even entice people (that might’ve downloaded it) to upload it again. Also, not sure whether this works as easy on e.g. TikTok.
I think that could fall under “Recht am eigenen Bild” (right to your own picture). It gives you the right to decide how images of you are used. If he profits off of photos/videos of her, she should have the right to sue him. It might also be illegal to publish the videos under GDPR law, especially in combination with more personal information like first name or city.
However, big festivals like the Oktoberfest often have a disclaimer that you agree to being filmed and your picture being published due to TV, press etc. being there. I don’t know how that would work.
right to your own picture
That’s pretty handy. Seems like that means you should therefore have the right for it not to be non-consensually sucked into the Meta AI training corpus (and you know it is) or sold to face recognition companies etc.
Just some evidence away from a massive class action lawsuit against Meta. Yes please, spank 'em hard.
I would love that. I’m not sure if that works, since afaik the law only regulates the publication of your picture and profiting off of someone’s photo. In cases of AI training you usually publish it yourself and for example Facebook and Reddit already make you agree to using your photo however they want.
I wonder if AI companies could be sued for using pictures from a private website for training.
I believe (not a lawyer or expert in that field) that this does not cover covert and targeted filming.
I’d argue it’s there to allow TV to make background shots and perform interviews without trouble.
Stories like this are gonna get worse. These glasses naturally self-select for assholes.
Glassholes.
Right? It’s a collab between Meta and Ray-Ban ffs, what kind of people did they think were going to be buying them?
I kinda like Ray-Ban (their luxotica ties notwithstanding) and my current eyeglasses and sunglasses are RB. But the partnership with Meta is what really turns me off, and may actually persuade me to make sure my next pair are not RB.
I’m being filmed without my consent by corporations everywhere I go
Yes but they have the right
In Europe, they often don’t. Enforcement is difficult though.
Yeah, unwritten laws are a silly idea.
Thank goodness they wrote in down then.
If the company puts up a sign notifying that there are cameras on the premises then under Article 6.1(f) https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/ it is allowed due to “legitimate interest” in deterring crime, securing premises, promoting general safety. This could be argued in a court that it fails the balancing test and that they could and should use more narrow means of collection but the way the courts have ruled I don’t think you’d win that case. Although to be fair the EU doesn’t use common law or case law for decisions so it could be up to the particular judge.
Going back to the article though, if a person with the glasses is filming for “purely personal or household activity,” the entire GDPR is exempt under Article 2(2)© https://gdpr-info.eu/art-2-gdpr/
GDPR regulates the data and the processing, not the act of filming or the expectation of privacy for an exempt usage. If they decide to sell this on a creeper site that is different but I wouldn’t look to GDPR to be the primary legal framework for this being explicitly illegal. The actions under original article would more directly be a violation of multiple other national laws like Germany’s “KunstURHG” and France’s “Droit à l’image”
Oh. So somebody in power is going to do something about it. I’m glad.
Another privacy epidemic unfolding, only waiting when it auto link people you see om the streets to their social media profiles
Didnt that already get done to demonstrate the complete lack of privacy caused by this?
Checking…
Yeah this was what I was thinking of: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/rsac-meta-smart-glasses-facial-recognition-hacked-live-demo-2026/
The free app NearbyGlasses can detect their Bluetooth signal and tell you if someone is wearing them in range of your phone.
This could save you from being filmed by influencers, or creeps. Let the women in your life know.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.pocketpc.nearbyglasses
Ugh watch me install this then have it just be government owned spyware
Developed by a PhD professor in the Sociology of Gender and the Applied Sciences at LMU Munich:
This is apparently their first app, as they’re a programming hobbyist. Their research is in technology’s effects on women and gender relations.
as they’re a programming hobbyist.
So they vibe-coded it. No thanks.
If you actually looked at the link that they gave you, it’s pretty obvious that the person has a lot of programming experience. I would say less than 2% of the developers I’ve ever met have an app on the app store so for a lot of them it would be their first app if they published one too.
Removed by mod
https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses
it is öpen source
I think we have some Meta Glasses owners replying as well.
deleted by creator
Wow, this violates privacy! You mean this scans for nearby devices? Completely exposing nearby consumers of those devices? Totally illegal
\sbtw
I never understood why a well-known brand like RayBan would want to be associated with this.
Most people are so stupid and just do whatever they’re told to the extent that if meta releases these glasses and tells you that they’re cool, then people will be like, wow, these glasses are cool. Rayban just wants in on it. It makes a lot of sense unfortunately.
They were bought by Luxotica years ago.
as literally almost all glasses brands
Yes exactly. Their question was parallel to asking why a company like gatorade ([Pokesi]) would put hfcs and barely any vitamins in their sports drinks. Its a mega corp now and only cares about profit, not image.
Gatorade never had vitamins, even in its original formulation. It was flavored water with salt to help athletes with electrolyte depletion.
Also, Gatorade is owned by Pepsi. Maybe you’re thinking of Powerade, which was crap.
Yeah, i seem to have gotten their parent corp mixed but idgaf about which soda mega corp is giving people diabetes as a sports supplement, so…
Powerade has more electrolytes and vitamins that support recovery. They are both ass but powerade is def the better options of the two. Gatorade is fr just sugar water.
I can’t see the word electrolyte without thinking “it’s what plants crave”.
And Meta probably have Luxotica a large sack of cash to make these glasses.
