The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media’s coverage of how people are using Meta’s Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to be a tiny part of resistance against surveillance tech.”
more at: @feed@404media.co
Absolutely fantastic.
I dislike Facebook and deleted my account even before they changed to “Meta”. I also value privacy.
But what privacy violations do “smart glasses” provide that weren’t already trivially available? Tiny cameras are insanely cheap. A reasonably handy person could hide several on their person and there are plenty of “spy shops” that sell actual wearable hidden cameras.
The “I love ICE” kid was wearing Meta Ray Bans but the first video I saw of it was from someone else’ camera. I can’t leave the house without getting filmed from multiple angles. The only thing those glasses do is make it really obvious that the wearer is a dumbass.
The difference is that meta glasses constantly upload to their creepy servers to do automatic face recognition.
True, but understand, every wireless-connected smart device you wear or interact with in any way is doing the same.
Meta’s nonsense isn’t unique, and should be regulated into nonexistence, but unless you’re keeping your phone in a Faraday bag you too are being constantly filmed, tracked, and snooped upon.
No, my iPhone is not doing that because they give you a switch to turn it off and encrypt anything Apple touches. It disables some handy features but it’s a worthwhile trade off in my opinion.
Found the fanboy.
“HEY GUYS IT’S NO BIG DEAL NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT. I DISLIKE FACEBOOK BUT DEFINITELY DON’T SEE THE PROBLEM WITH THESE ALWAYS ON SPY DEVICES THAT ARE CONSTANTLY CONNECTED TO DEMONSTRABLY EVIL PEOPLE”
Not actually what they said, though.
Downplaying in the war for privacy is vouching for the enemy.
Well, my glasses don’t give off bluetooth signal or record but I’m afraid I’ll end up caught in the crossfire with my XR glasses on trains and planes. I travel for work so it’s nice to have a big screen to watch media on when I’m traveling for 20+ hours.
Not the purpose of the thread I know but would you care to share additional information? Model, price, comfort, compatibility, are they good?
I picked up the Viture Luma Cyberpunk edition for like $550 USD, they’re sold out now but so far I think they’re okay. They definitely don’t fully live up to the hype but that’s part of being an early adopter in the enthusiast space I guess. The app kinda sucks and it’s seriously limited, so if you’re looking for that 3DoF or lightweight use on the 180VR you’ll be out of luck there. The immersive 3d is a neat party trick and seems to work well enough. I like that function for showing off videos that I’ve taken while traveling or at work. They have built in diopters so you can get the focus right while you’re using them as a follow screen. For watching movies or playing games on your tablet while traveling, I think they’ll be hard to beat. They have apps for android, windows, ios, and mac. I haven’t tried them on PC yet but I’m hoping the pc app is far more flushed out. So far, comfort is pretty good and it seems like they’ll be okay for burning a few hours. I also work in a remote location with frequent weather days, so having a private method of watching big screen content in my cabin was a big selling point for me.
Overall, neat little device, but it’s definitely quite early in the product development cycle and I’m excited to see what the next few years hold.
Sorry for the incoherent bits and poor formatting, I’m actively falling asleep while typing this out. I’ll be more than happy to answer any additional follow-up questions you may have when I’m fully awake.
Wasnt there a ton of outrage and such incl people not being allowed on planes, back when google glass was released?
Why is it all OK now?
Years of privacy violations going deeper and deeper under pretend of “progress” and “pRoTeCt the cHiLdReN”. I am glad that people started rebelling against Flock, and some removed their Amazon cameras following the Superbowl’s ads, but that’s not even close to how much we should be mad at these mass surveillance actors.
Same reason our governments suck ass. Something unpopular tries to get passed again, and again, and again, and again, and eventually people get desensitized and worn out from trying to fight against it. That or it hits on the right time when people are distracted by something else bigger or more important.
I remember Google Glass itself receiving a ton of outrage actually: People hated it and anyone wearing one was made fun of (“glassholes” was a popular insult at the time).
Many years of indoctrination. When Google glass was introduced, it was just ‘a neat idea’. Now it’s a product, and therefore it’s clearly more trustworthy because someone is profiting from it. (/s)
You know what sucks?
In that AR glasses, in theory, are such an interesting technology with lots of potential, and certainly a piece of tech I would love to have and work with and on. Not to secretly record people, but to, well… augment my field of view with whatever digital tools or displays I would like. It would be so useful
It’s honestly kinda saddening to me that it most likely will get completely ruined by our current toxic relationship to technology. A step towards our ever increasing cyberdystopia, and not towards enchanting our limited lives
Obviously either way I don’t trust Meta, but an open-hardware device running a FOSS AR system? It would be nice…
I still hold out hope that this somehow could be resolved, and I would love to contribute to open software for these devices. Maybe one day soon-ish I will. My expertise should be well applicable, after all
Using an AR display on those glasses with frames that thick is such a horrible idea. Google was on the right track with the HUD displayed on a frame-less prism that doesn’t block half your vision.
Last thing I’d want is to be in the middle of something with my hands full and the display bugs out, blocking the one eye, making me screw something up.
It would be incredibly useful in construction. Having a digital overlay telling you exactly where to put up the framing for a separating wall, or an overlay showing the correct distance between screws, or where wires and pipes are inside a wall? There are so incredibly many awesome possible uses for AR in construction.
Or playing Pokémon GO
It’s already used in construction as a documentation device. Photos are big as a documentation tool and some inspectors already use wearable cameras as a tool.
I always wanted to build an AR app for inside data centers. Imagine looking at a server and being able to open a terminal or desktop that you can immediately interact with on the floor. or have it display resource information like hardware utilization, temps, network throughput and configuration, etc.
it would make a difficult job just bit more manageable.
I really like the special tagged tape that could bring up AR tags and details about it. Organization and directions are so more useful.
It would be so cool to have something like this integrated into your monitoring platform. Imagine being able to “tap” on a switch in a rack and be able to view it’s mac table or port assignments
I’m in the AEC industry. Almost any implementation of on site augmentation sucks ass most especially because the tech nerds making them have a really hard time truly understanding the needs OF tradespeople and installers.
Almost all of them are top down implementations meant to assess tooling and field quality rather than actually acting as an overlay aid in construction (which, like, 90% of tradespeople worth their salt don’t actually need FYI).
Also, I’ve found, most of these tech nerds making this shit don’t know how to actually put a building together and are constantly flummoxed by the methodology.
Drop the cameras and microphones and replace them with a couple accelerometers and gyros. Paired with your phone’s GPS tracking, the glasses can tell where you’re looking without actually seeing anything. You can get handy features like a floating ‘turn here’ sign over your exit while driving with GPS navigation without recording anyone or anything at any time. Better battery life, too.
Tbh I don’t even mind cameras that much if they were entirely controlled by the individuals themselves. I have a much bigger issue with it when you’re streaming my facial recognition data to Evil Megacorp 2™ servers that also feed directly to the “Not Spying… Again” agency, though.
Is that what you’re referring to? https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-facial-recognition-glasses These people have no ethics and no moral code. They know we’ll hate it, so they want to sneak it!
I don’t think that would work particularly well with AR: People get sick if movement isn’t synced up properly, not having any sort of cameras or sensors at all would exacerbate that problem.
If you are talking about a simple HUD, then that might be a lot more viable, but for AR and the tech we currently have, some sort of camera or sensor array is kind of a requirement practically speaking.
Except that one cool thing with AR is being able to have it tell what you’re looking at is. Not just positioning things in space. A lot of cool shit that could be done with AR, like real time text translation, object identification, etc needs some kind of camera, even if it just sees IR light. Lotta cool shit needs a microphone, too.
I agree, it would be nice.
Perfect response. Record someone without consent, it should be the last time those glasses are wearable.
Paywalled article. Here’s the link to the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.pocketpc.nearbyglasses
Edit: it’s licensed under a license I never heard of. I’m curious, I don’t understand why it was needed.
“Why draft new licenses? Until now, there has been no standardization of this kind of source code license, even though it has become increasingly common. This has resulted in confusing and overlapping licenses, which need to be analyzed one at a time. Lack of standardization has used up the time and resources of many in the software industry, as well as their lawyers. The objective of the PolyForm Project is standardization and reduction of costs for developers and users.”
Seems like that exact XKCD about standards.
That license looks like Creative Commons Non-Comercial, which is not an open source license.
This is an unpopular opinion, but using licenses to actively prevent commercial exploitation of voluntary communal labor is not a bad thing. I would even argue that allowing commercial exploitation of free, communally-maintained software is downright unethical. I don’t tolerate this pejorative “it’s not open source unless the rich and powerful can exploit it” bullshit.
This is not a remotely unpopular opinion, sharing is awesome and corpos can suck it
Thank you for writing down my own thoughts down. I see this so often and it always irks me.
"oh but you’re limiting your reach with this license because the companies won’t want to us— boo fucking hoo, maybe not everything is about market-share and having a morbillion downloads.
I know, and yet the code is open source. Confusing.
No, the code is available, which is not the same as open source.
True, but I have no issue preventing commercial use. I view that as just as good if not better than traditional open source.
They do call it “open source” in the docs though.
That’s called “source available”. FUTO basically did the same thing with their stuff after the community rightfully got angry over their use of “open source” in their docs.
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Say no more
Yeah I noticed it in the favicon too. Bad aftertaste.
Admittedly, this is cyberpunk as fuck.
Should not be needed… but it’s a fucking cool solution.
Install this on kali nethunter and make glassholes pay for their crimes.
I’d fork this just to name it more appropriately: “Glasshole radar”
Open season on meta wearers when?
Green light!
Now if they can just notify you that some asshole is recording you on their cell phone instead of reading reddit. probably 0.001% of people out there stalking are using smart glasses.
Now if they can just notify you that some asshole is recording you on their cell phone instead of reading reddit.
If you’re out in public, always assume you’re on someone’s camera. That isn’t really new either.
I’ve never seen an online discussion about privacy without some version of this comment. Never gets old. Is there an Android keyboard with an apathy button that I’m unaware of?
Apathy? Not at all. Its simply a matter of established law, in the USA anyway. I can’t speak to the legal systems of the other 140+ countries on planet Earth.
Can you cite a law in the USA or in your own country where you have a right to privacy making photographing you simply standing in a public park an illegal act perpetrated by another person or government entity?
Hat ✅
Hood ✅
Head down in my phone ✅
Hmm… I wonder if there’s any solid way to detect a camera lens being in active focus or use. This app works by parsing Bluetooth traffic, but a person locally recording on their phone wouldn’t have such a trail. Is there any reliable way to detect a camera lens reading exposed light?
Yeah: they’d be pointing the phone at you.
Yeah, but the issue is intent and actual usage. I don’t want to fuck up my neck by always looking down at a 30deg angle, so I do try to view things on my phone more level with my face. I avoid pointing it directly at people, but I can’t change how others would interpret that.
Presumably the sensor’s data lines would be detectable, but probably more like laboratory conditions.
Perhaps a physical shutter would be a good happy medium. Put 'em on the damn cell phones, too.
Shoot, I should 3d print one for mine. I don’t use my camera for much anyway, and better protection from impacts would be nice.
I wonder if you could run it on a dedicated piece of gear like FlockYou…
Now you need a powerful laser pointer to ruin the glasses camera. Careful not to blind the wearer.
https://xkcd.com/1251/ (there is always an xkcd about it)
That was way more on point than I expected.
Apparently the lidar in some cars can damage cameras and are safe for eyes.
Removed by mod
why did mods remove this
how is mentioning that cars are dangerous a “call for violence”
The removed post is implying people with these cameras should be run over by cars. Whether that breaks any ToS or not idk but it’s pretty clear what the post is saying
Lemmy mods
It sucks that it seems like as time goes on the best thing my phone will be good for is alerting me to other nearby tech to avoid.
Would love to know when the iOS app is coming out.
