I would be so uncomfortable having lunch with someone wearing these. Am I alone in that?
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I mean, the light makes it VERY apparent when it's recording or taking a picture.
Would you be just as uncomfortable eating lunch with someone who had their phone in their hand? It'd be much easier to surreptitiously record/photograph someone with a phone because they have no status indicator when they're recording and people inadvertently point phone lenses at each other all the time.
I've never had lunch with someone who was sitting there pointing their phone camera at me.
With modern wide angle lenses, it doesn't even need to be pointed directly at you to get you completely in the frame.
I don't know. Its weird. Kind of like how people have the "someone's staring at you" sense.
> The biological phenomenon is known as “gaze detection” or “gaze perception.” Neurological studies have found that the brain cells that initiate this response are very precise. If someone turns their gaze off of you by turning just a few degrees to their left or right, that eerie feeling quickly fades.
I 100% beleive we also do this with smartphones. You can 100% detect when a smartphone is looking at you or just being held in your direction. It might not be proven scientifically yet but I know this in my soul.
Similar to our ability to determine what someone else is looking at. We can watch someone's purpils move, and then immediately look at the exact area they looked at.
Also, gaze detection extends beyond humans [1]. Citation mentions dogs, birds, and reptiles having some degree of it. In general, attention detection via gaze or body language would be an evolutionary advantage for any prey animal, and even a predator that is low in the overall food chain. Anecdotally, I’ve seen similar behavior in spiders, though the literature [2] tells me it’s not specifically gaze that a spider is detecting. I have hunted (to trap) spiders around my house who seem to change behavior (eg play dead) based on my attention, leading me to think that they know they are being hunted on some level well below cognition. Which, coming full circle, lines up with the literature on how crazy accurate human gaze detection is, seems like a very old, low-level function.
[1] https://doi.org/10.3758/s13420-015-0204-z
[2] https://www.physoc.org/magazine-articles/some-recent-advance...
Nonsense. If someone is sitting in front of you and they are texting, the camera is pointing at you.
They don't sit there and point the camera at you for the entire lunch. I don't know what kind of people you have lunch with, but nobody holds their phone vertically and in your face when texting unless they have a serious social skills deficit. They tend to hold it a few inches above the table at a 45 degree angle, or even under the table.
> Would you be just as uncomfortable eating lunch with someone who had their phone in their hand?
the entire time?
of course - and I'd question my decision to invite them
unless they're sharing their screen with everyone (showing pics, etc) or taking a group pic, having their phone out and pointed at you for more than a few moments would be both uncomfortable and rude
if you place a phone face-down and have the macro lens recording, you could pretty easily see both people at a table.
What? No you can’t at all. Unless you got some mythical alien phone which doesn’t exist.
I am not aware of a commonly used phone with a 180 degree FOV macro lens, but regardless of how a phone on the table makes me feel, someone holding a phone up, pointing at me for all of lunch, would be rude and discomforting.
They could be pointing it mostly at the table (<45° angle) and you'd still be in frame without realizing.
I don't see how I could fail to notice that my fellow diner was rudely and discomfortingly holding or using their phone for the entire meal, or that they carefully balanced one end of their phone on top of stuff on the table at a 45 degree angle pointing towards me for no apparent reason
> I mean, the light makes it VERY apparent when it's recording or taking a picture.
Surely no one will figure out how to disable that light, right?
The page says it detects if the light is obscured and notifies the user in thatacse. That's doesn't sound quite the same as disabling camera in that case, but I imagine this is also one bit of metadata they collect and that could change in future versions..
I vote for a flip-cover that visibly shows that the camera lens is covered. Like clip-ons, taken to the next level of dork.
In some techno clubs they put a sticker to your camera lens, so you know that you aren't recorded
> someone who had their phone in their hand?
I feel like I have a good idea when someone is recording or not. Phone orientation and behavior is different.
With the macro lens mode on iPhones now, you can take a video of what’s directly in front of you while pointing the camera at a downward angle. There’s no way to tell a person doing that apart from a person who’s texting, other than looking at their screen.
I posted elsewhere in this thread but I think we can still detect this. There is a framing/tracking motion people do when recording that's not present when just texting or using the phone.
> Brain imaging has shown that the brain cells which are activated when a test subject can see that they are being stared at are distinct from the cells activated when the starer's eyes are averted away from the subject by just a few degrees
From Wikipedia[1], but I admit the claim is needing a citation but I feel strongly for the gaze detection argument at least.
Well in this hypothetical scenario, you are stationary (sitting across from each other) so there would be no tracking to notice.
Facebook doesn't have to record the data to process it does it?
Honestly, if someone is using their phone when I'm having lunch (or any social activity) with them, I'd be unlikely to have lunch with them again. They are clearly not interested in being social with me in the first place.
I'm sure this will be the first unhackable product in tech history. /s
People used to feel all kinds of ways about what is now normal smartphone use. There are probably a lot of remnants of those attitudes in ‘00s media that can still be found.
Everyone either got over it or shut up about it because they (ahem, we) had clearly lost.
I expect actually-useful smart glasses will eventually overcome the same stigma. Actually-useful being the key part of that.
Strong disagree. I think there is still a fairly large cohort of people who feel that e.g. looking at your phone at dinner, or responding to every random ding from your phone during a conversation, is rude and unacceptable behavior.
As someone in that cohort, the number of people that feel the same way as me is nearly non-existent. The only people that seem to share the sentiment are my parents and my older colleagues. I have an Apple Watch primarily to avoid having to take my phone out while still being able to see important notifications (I love the focus mode stuff) so I'm not some kind of anti-tech ideologue either. Most other people are not only used to phones being out and around but the vast majority have no qualms about it.
I got an Apple Watch for this reason when they first came out and found out that people constantly thought I was bored or had to leave because I kept glancing at my watch. Looking at the phone never got a negative response.
As field anthropology, this is an interesting observation.
The vast majority of people I know, of all ages, consider this rude and unacceptable behavior.
If meta had their own mobile OS, taking into account how they have little to zero care for European privacy laws or any privacy really, I highly doubt most people would feel comfortable having conversations with the device nearby.
Maybe I haven't gotten far enough in the thread, but it seems like most people have forgotten that when Google came out with these, the people who were wearing them were called "glassholes".
Let's see how it runs with a decade's worth of water under the bridge. A lot of norms have changed since then. Still gives me the creeps.
As long as the activation is overt I don't think it's a big issue. Overt as in taking a picture or recording requires the user to do something that is noticeable to the people around them. The wake word is quite obvious; the button on the stem is a bit less, but together with the light I think it's fairly clear something is happening.
Activation via Pegasus spyware will not be overt
You're far from alone in that.
Not at all. In fact, I would ask someone wearing this to not only remove them from their face but also place them in a backpack/bag.
Just take them off when you have lunch? That’s what I do with my sunglasses
People don't do that with their prescription glasses. They also don't take off their sunglasses if they are having lunch outside in a bright place.
My sunglasses are prescription glasses and I do that.
It would be a rare thing that someone would actually be streaming or recording on them, unless you agreed to make a video. Technically someone could record your every conversation with their phone in their pocket or on the table, but no one worries about that, because it goes against the social contract. If one of your friends did that regularly, everyone understands it would likely be the end of that friendship, and others they shared that with would shun them. I think it's the same with these glasses.
Another similar example is reading your SOs text messages. In the past this would be impossible because normal people didn't have a "paper trail", but now most everyone does. But it's not a huge concern for most people, because we know it's socially unacceptable to look at someone's messages without a very good reason.
> It would be a rare thing that someone would actually be streaming or recording on them, unless you agreed to make a video.
I'm not sure how you believe this.
> Technically someone could record your every conversation with their phone in their pocket or on the table, but no one worries about that, because it goes against the social contract.
Even if the social contract prevented this (I don't believe it does), there's little to no risk of someone being caught recording your conversations with them. No risk means no worry about the social contract.
> But it's not a huge concern for most people, because we know it's socially unacceptable to look at someone's messages without a very good reason.
I'm assuming you truly believe this, but to me, this is really starting to feel like parody.