The terminology you chose is tasteless, loaded, and detracts from your point.
It’s also not controversial to paint the harmful, profit-seeking actions of companies upon minors as “abusive” (e.g. tobacco firms).
If anything, your knee-jerk response at their rhetoric raises eyebrows: why would you go to bat for a company who by nearly all public measures is fundamentally evil in aim and structure?
Evoking what the comment in question evokes over uploading pictures of your kid to the internet is not the way to convince people. It takes the thing you want people to care about and exaggerates it in a way that makes your view point trivial to dismiss.
I say this from the place of someone who deactivated their social media accounts over similar concerns. This is not the way to convince people.
Idk, agree to disagree in this case. Sometimes people do need to hear the stark words of those they disagree with to reconsider their weakly, or even deeply, held positions. Especially in this forum, where so many people of what I would figure is “higher intelligence” continue to turn a blind eye to the clearly unethical actions of their employers because $$$. Some of them even convince themselves that what they’re doing is somehow not unethical!
They simply are not of sound mind to understand the consequences of such a transaction.
Facebook us currently being sued for targeting children with "sexual exploitation, solicitation, sextortion and human trafficking."
However, you have chosen to directly attack the above commenter based on your own views. This is tasteless, loaded, and detracts from your point.
Look, you do your kids, literally nobody in the world cares how great or messed up individuals they will become, the result always match the process so its pretty obvious.
But your freedom to do whatever stops when you start infringing rights of me and my family. Right to privacy is, where I live and most sane places, enforceable by law. Also, its called not being an asshole or similar rougher terms.
Is it because younger people don't care about privacy anymore?
Not to mention, hidden miniature cameras have existed for decades.
- filming people without their consent is wrong
- the vast majority of people are not creeps and are not discreetly filming random people
- the vast majority of people are not interesting, and nobody is filming them
- today, in a public space, everybody already has lots or cameras pointing to them (e.g. anyone with a phone), without a way to know if they're being filmed. So this is not a new 'problem'.
- banning smart glasses doesn't make sense if you're not also banning all devices that can film discreetly (so, smartphones)
- 'creeps' use hidden miniature cameras, not glasses with an obvious camera right there on their very face
Try taking a photo of somebody with your phone. Usage will definitely look like you are snapping a picture, nobody walks around with phones straight up. The result is, when you take pics with phone, most often its obvious. When you insult people by not asking, they see it and react negatively.
When you point to people with smart glasses, nobody knows do they and that seems to be the point. Or is it beeping and blinking some led to make everybody aware? I don't think so.
Also, we live in society where smart doorbell for which it shouldn't be technically possible to upload any pics to cloud due to not having subscription still did that, and from major manufacturer. Security is a moot point, quadruple that for facebook / meta who are consistent assholes regarding breaking security and privacy to scoop any possible data points for further advertising. The slaps on wrist they receive is just cost of doing business.
I urge you to visit any big city and see for yourself how wrong you are. I see it at least every time every day just during my barely 20-25min subway commute to work.
And that's the most unremarkable the most uninteresting place and scenario here. Any big park, any even remotely touristy location, any public square, any concert/sports venue, and even an overwhelmingly large proportion of restaurants are like that.
Didn't it come out that the pushback against google glasses was in part made by PR companies on behalf of their competition? I remember reading something along those lines.
Larry Page on Robert Scoble’s Google Glass stunt: ‘I really didn’t appreciate the shower photo’:
https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases...
Perhaps his PR company business venture he tastelessly plugged in his sexual harassment non-apology-apology?
Scoble: an utterly tone deaf response to harassment allegations:
https://onemanandhisblog.com/2017/10/scoble-utterly-tone-dea...
>The Verge‘s Adi Robertson sums it us thus:
>>But his latest defense puts forward an absurd definition of sexual harassment and effectively accuses women of reporting it to fit in with the cool crowd, while claiming he’s writing in “a spirit of healing.” There’s even a tasteless plug for his latest business venture. It’s one of the most disappointing responses we’ve seen to a sexual harassment complaint, which, after the past few weeks, is a fairly remarkable achievement.
He's scrubbed it from his blog and even Internet Archive, but it was well covered and widely quoted all over:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16547332/robert-scoble-s...
https://www.theregister.com/2017/10/25/robert_scoble_latest/
https://www.resetera.com/threads/uploadvr-has-a-big-sexual-h...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/robert-scoble-i-...
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/10/178458/sexual-haras...
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/10/25/robert-sc...
https://slate.com/technology/2017/10/robert-scobles-blog-pos...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/robert-scoble-define...
I think you're on to something! Maybe Meta paid Scoble to embarrass Google Glass, and now Google is paying him to embarrass Meta AI Smart Glasses too! Great work if you can get somebody to finance your serial sexual harassment scandals.
How many people under 25 do you interact with on a day to day basis?
I think this is a huge point of constant bickering here. Makes it impossible to take most privacy centric discussion seriously.
Us HN weirdos are some of the last who care, and even we disagree on which tech is creepy. Hard to blame the average Joe for giving up.
HN is an echo chamber who can't imagine not using some tech. Normal people can...
The first iPhone was 2007. Google Glass came out in 2013
[OFF] "Share data about your Meta devices to help improve Meta products." doesn't preclude sharing data for other purposes.
[OFF] "Allow your photos and videos to be sent to Meta's cloud for processing and temporary storage." doesn't preclude sending them to Meta's cloud for permanent storage.
I turned the AI off and used them as headphones and taking videos while biking. After a couple rides, I couldn’t bring myself to put them on because people started to recognize them and I realized I didn’t want to be associated with them (people are right to assume Meta has access to what they see).
Meta Ray Bans, if kept simple, could have been a great product. They ruined them.
Wearing these glasses is just as obnoxious as walking around putting your phone in people's faces while recording.
Just continues to prove that if you solve a bit of inconvenience for them, people will let you exploit them and their families.
It's certainly possible that it's something much more surprising / sinister, but there is a fairly logical combination of settings that I could see a company could argue lets them use the data for training.
I'm also very certain that few users with these settings would expect the images to be shown to actual people, so I'm not defending Meta.
I know some of the criticism of Meta: many people don't like the way their products are optimized for engagement. I've heard about their weird AI bots interacting on their platform as if they were people. And I know people of all political stripes have had complaints about content moderation and their algorithm.
But all of that is within the bounds of the law and their terms of service.
None of it would remotely approach something like: bypassing the well-advertised features in the glasses that show when the camera is in use and secretly recording things to train AI. It's hard to imagine any company's lawyers approving something like that. (this sounds like what many commenters believe is happening)
FWIW, I suspect this is the relevant section of the Privacy policy:
> "When you use the Meta AI service on your AI Glasses (if available for your device), we use your information, like Media and audio recordings of your voice to provide the service."
from: https://www.meta.com/legal/privacy-policy/
if so, "to provide the service" is doing a lot of work
Two examples that are top of mind…
They exploited browser vulnerabilities not unlike malware to track users’ behavior across the web: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/06/protect-yourself-metas...
They bought a “privacy” VPN app and used it to harvest data, then abused Apple’s enterprise app deployments to continue to ship the app after it was banned from the app store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/jury-finds-meta-...
I think it's anything but logical, if users (like yourself) have no idea what those settings are, as evident from your previous post.
They are creepy as fuck.
I’m embarrassed to wear my non-Meta Raybans now. That logo is a liability.