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Either Mark Zuckerberg is playing an elaborate practical joke on everyone, or this is further proof that the West Coast tech scene has become such a bubble people have lost all sense of how ordinary people think.
There is just no way this was going to fly in 2026 given high and increasing negative sentiment globally towards tech, and I'm not sure what made them think otherwise
Meanwhile, Tesla drivers are driving around with a dozen cameras mounted on their vehicle pointing in every direction.
Who would have thought that would be socially acceptable in 2026.
Very different. Lots of cars other than Tesla have cameras. Cars record the surroundings on streets (and if Tesla, there’s no audio). Meta glasses are in your face and in very private social settings recording people in vulnerable situations, and as seen on TikTok vids, often used to get embarrassing reactions from people who don’t realize they are being recorded. Cameras on cars have a real purpose, self driving and to record accidents/vandalism
You can’t wear a Tesla into a bathroom or other private space.
Dash cams have been a thing for decades
and they are banned in Austria and prepare to pay hefty fine if police notice them
https://www.oeamtc.at/thema/vorschriften-strafen/zulaessigke...
That article doesn't say they are blanket banned in general.
Indiscriminate, permanent saving of recordings and distributing the footage is banned.
Using the dashcam to document incidents or accidents with saving a limited time span of video triggered by a sensor/timer is allowed.
This isn’t specific to Tesla, both Rivian and Waymo have similar numbers of cameras. This seems essential for self-driving. Thankfully people find it socially acceptable outside of the tech bubble. I’d prefer to have self-driving rather than less cameras roving the roads.
I mean, there isn't even a practical use for this that isn't just non-consensual surveillance. Everyone carries a high-quality camera for making content and image searching already, and Siri and Alexa have already cornered the market (whatever that still exists) on voice assistants. There's a reason why we're not all wearing Google Glasses on our faces...
In the US, Meta sold 7 million glasses units last year and is projected to sell 25+ million next year. Waymos already record everything happening in most of the area of many cities, and use much more than just cameras. 6g standard has sensing built in. Perhaps it is not the West Coast that is in the bubble.
Waymos don’t precisely harass women and upload the footage to their instagram feed
As other people said, the difference is dashcams and Waymos need the cameras for practical purposes, as do Ring doorbells etc, so while the privacy implications aren't great people will continue to do that stuff.
Wearing a camera on your face during normal social interactions is a deeply weird thing to do, it's not the same thing at all
They're not going to sell 25+ million more units when there's a very real threat of being assaulted while wearing them.
FWIW, I was one of the original 8,000 individuals who got Google Glass when they were first released in 2013.
I wore them for years whenever I was outside my home; only once did someone come up to me and say "Stop looking at me with those on."
Good. These glasses are intended for anti-social and predatory uses, with a paper-thin pretence over the top that Meta doesn't understand their market.
A healthy society should push back against things like this.
Our idea of a public/private privacy division where private recording is discouraged and public is a free for all really feels dated.
I know personally I'd love to see a private/local/wide distribution division or something like that where simply going outside to get groceries or whatever doesn't count as consent to be plastered across the net. There are real harms to being a public figure and the net rarely understands context.
I do have one note on all this though. I think there are some real benefits to being able to record people in public re corruption, criminality etc so I don't think any changes should be about public recording but about distribution instead.
I wish regulators who failed to ban these things got even half of the backlash. It's not an individual issue.
I think a small speaker should announce, in the local language, "recording in progress" when these are used.
Better,
"I am John Smith 415-123-4567 abc@123.com 456 Main Street Anytiwn USA and I am Recording everything I can see right now, including your full bodies and children, and storing it online, and training AI with it, without your permission, to be profited on by the Meta Corporation, a publicly traded company. I am John Smith 415-123-4567 ...."
I think the location of everyone wearing the pedo glasses nearby should be available in a separate app. If wearers of the pedo glasses are concerned for their own privacy they might consider leaving the pedo glasses at home.
Apparently they already have a blinking white light to indicate that recording is in progress. https://about.fb.com/news/2026/07/metas-ai-glasses-your-ques...
right, like that ever stopped anyone... all you need is a drill
On that same page:
> we’re updating the glasses to disable the camera if they detect the LED was physically tampered with or destroyed
I'd be really interested to know how they wanna achieve this. I can think of another camera monitoring infrared LED light, but then you can destroy the other camera again, thinking they can avoid disabling/covering the LED is extremely naive, software way maybe, hardware way impossible to avoid.
The shutter sound on cameras (including those built in to a phone) can't be muted in Japan
of course they can, all you need is unlock bootloader or maybe not even that, just use alternative camera app which allows this or change region or zillion other ways
it's like thinking if we start reading people's whatsapp messages we will find out pedophiles and they won't just move to app which ignores gov requirements
I'd love to have glasses that are interface for AI. Mics pointed down towards mouth from the bottom of the front glasses rim. Speakers near the ears. Cameras optional. Display optional, possibly as a simple projector that reflect the image from the concave glass surface of prescription glasses. Long term power and communication through thin cable to battery pack in a holster somewhere on the body to make the frames light and wearable all day.
I'd hate to talk to you or be looked at by you.
I'm not talking to people and barely looking at them so I don't really care.
And just like the panic over cell phones, this too shall pass.
Maybe half of HN is too young to remember (or old enough to have forgotten?) but when cell phones with cameras were becoming mainstream, there was media panic over them too - people could be discretely filming in bathrooms, locker rooms, etc. There were even a few high-profile salacious stories where people did use their phones to film inappropriately.
And then we collectively decided that having cameras with us was generally beneficial and rarely harmful, and people realized that creeps who wanted to hide hidden cameras could already do so, and we all kinda moved on with our lives.
I can't leave my house without being on a dozen Ring cameras, Flock cameras and probably a handful of satellites, along with devices tracking Bluetooth and WiFi IDs every time I enter a store or a cop car drives by or having my license plate scanned by passing tow trucks. Drawing the line at glasses seems pretty arbitrary.
This has been tried before, and Google Glass did not pass.
As others have said across multiple threads here, there is a difference between passive recordings from fixed vantage points made by a property owner (or which are required, as with autonomous vehicles, to make the thing work at all), and having people you're talking to do it. The difference is the social aspect; people who wear them still seem antisocial to the rest of the population. People with normal vision who feel the need to constantly record the world around them from their own vantage point certainly seem creepy to me.
see also: "Reefer Madness" (1936). What's old is new again.
what you put in, you get out https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/juliareinstein/facemash
Epstein Glasses is also a good name for them. Glasses for people who don't do consent.
Look...all Meta developers here down voting your comment.
So, someone that could open any browser on any device no matter when it is and where they are and type “P” and Google would probably auto correct the “orn” part and see the sexiest women imaginable, doing the exact stuff they’re into, but instead they’re gonna shell out 100’s of dollars for glasses, risk felonies and certain jail time and devise an elaborate plan to covertly film someone on the street who’s likely average or below average looking instead? People who think that they’re just so irresistible that they would embark on a task with so much effort with so many consequences are absolutely insane and completely full of themselves. Pervert glasses? No one is gonna do all that work when they can get the same benefit without even getting out of bed! There’s more people than just you out there and they may need free hands to carry their bags while they’re filming the Giza pyramid. Or whatever it is. But. No one is buying glasses to start a long and difficult road to catch a little glimse of you, that they can watch later at home. Jesus.
I wonder if something like the EURion constellation could be worn to disable recording by unwanted parties.
I wonder if Zuck and the C-levels have some sort of beacon that will disable these perv glasses around them (except perhaps a whitelist of users).
If I were a billionaire zunt, I'd do that...
Also police have been wearing body cams forever, and no one gives that any bit of thought. If it’s because they think they aren’t perverts I’d like to remind you of the Golden State Killer (former policeman). Besides, you’re not that attractive, or that interesting, and there’s only so many hours in the day and no one would care if you plastered nude pics all over porn hub right now. There’s no such thing as “pervert” glasses”, only people who have some highly important view of themselves that unfortunately the rest of the world doesn’t share. Barring some case of a psychopath stalker of course, but you don’t have to worry about regular folks because they just don’t give a sh@: about you. They have lives and problems to deal with that may have an origin in reality, and supercede your unfounded fears.
Can we maybe blame the people who use them irresponsibly instead of blaming the technology? These glasses have been a life changer for so many visually impaired people.
Sure, we can all agree that crushing puppies is a bad thing, but you should blame the people using the puppy crusher 9000 to crush puppies and not the technology itself. After all, it's made an amazing profit for shareholders!
Sometimes a thing is bad in and of itself. A thing designed specifically and explicitly to do bad things is still bad even if it helps a small number of people.
I don't think that product exists, and I think an ordinary trash compactor would be far more likely to be used instead. Should we blame the people compressing their garbage for all the people crushing puppies?
If there is a repeated, ongoing problem with a lot of people using the devices to crush puppies, the manufacturers would be expected to come up with ways to make this less likely to happen (safety measures etc).
And if that didn’t help, there might be a push to limit access to these machines because clearly a too significant part of the population is unable to use them responsibly.
> These glasses have been a life changer for so many visually impaired people.
That's not why they're making them though; that's just insincere cover. If they were intended to be assistive devices, the marketing would be totally different.
The problem is that 99% of people who have them make the rest look bad.
Metas job is to maximize those 1% because that’s where the business value is. Like every other product they’ve done. 17 strikes policy for grooming for the win.
The 1% in this case would be those with vision impairment.
Lol
Agreed, they’re cool tech that some people are using poorly. It doesn’t deserve the flippant ‘pervert glasses’ nickname.