Meta said in a statement that privacy was top of mind when designing the glasses. “We know if we’re going to normalize smart glasses in everyday life, privacy has to come first and be integrated into everything we do,” the company said.

Ha.

I don't think Meta has the same idea of privacy than the people do. I mean, Meta having all the data hidden in their servers, being fed to AI and given to advertisement algorithms is privacy when the data is "anonymized" and held onto securely. Right?

These things should be illegal

That's an easy fix. You see someone wearing them, you smash them. If it happens enough, people won't want them.

But the main problem is that the glasses don’t do much we can’t already do with phones.

This is enough to tell me they're not going to catch on. But even if they did somehow, i think it would be a short fad. I mean that meta et al would not be able to stop themselves from turning the glasses away from useful things and towards just being another ad serving platform.

Just make your own that have an insane number of IR LEDs on them.

I don't think that this catches on. However, the second this is included with lenses that act as transparent screens for AR stuff, it'll be flying off the shelves. No, not the very first model, not the second probably, but the one made by a large corporation that actually does it well.

Though tbh just the lenses / screens would do it, camera is just extra. So I actually think first they will get the lenses done and camera stuff ia added later when the rest is already commonly used.

A lot of stupid techno wannabes will think that this is cool and ruin it for everyone else. We need that laughing man tech from Ghost in a Shell.

I’m going to start out with the obvious- that most of these arguments are copypasta from a decade and a half ago when smartphones got cameras. Distracting. What about the gym? Easy for bad actors to abuse (OMGWTFBBQ!)

The glare from headlights comment was weird. Do the lenses not include an AR coating, or perhaps the author doesn’t normally wear glasses? I decided to check on that last one and was surprised that there was no by line, just a generic nyt link - not even to the article. Of course Brian X Chen appears to be a real NYT journalist, but in no other online pictures does he wear glasses, so I presume he doesn’t wear corrective lenses or he wears contacts. Not too surprising then that the glasses - and a big, black, fat-rimmed resin model at that - would be distracting, even outside of the decisions to record or not.

Which brings up the last bit - to record you have to initiate it. I presume this is for battery life, as powering the sensor, processing, and transmission to a storage device all take non-trivial amounts of power for a device that small. For the panicky fear of constant surveillance the article has I expected it was an always-on live-stream to the Meta servers that was occurring. Color me unimpressed.

Where's the legally required recording light?

When the idiotic masses and paid influencers hop on board like they always do it will spur a bunch of companies to make similar and maybe one of them will be worth buying.