Show HN: Glasses to detect smart-glasses that have cameras

It's me. I want to be protected from hidden cameras from other peoples glasses.

Project Codename: Allen Funt

Project Description: Glasses that have a speaker and appropriately say “You’re on Candid Camera!” when it detects others being recorded.

... by using your own glasses with a hidden camera? Sounds like a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun.

”I would feel pretty silly if my solution uses its own camera. So I'll be avoiding that.”

From the GitHub link.

The solution to this (smart glass privacy debate) is Apple releasing smart glasses that automatically anonymize anyone in your photos/videos who isn’t a friend or family member with you at the time (it could be done automatically as Apple knows your friends/family members' faces already). All else appear as random faces, completely removed, a blurred out crowd to whatever privacy config options they offer and you choose.

Not a creep here and use my Meta glasses to record my normal non-creepy life and life experiences. They are really convenient and useful (just suck cause they break easily either from software updates to water splashes)!

This isn't a solution, they would still have the data. Companies can't be trusted, they'll do what is more convenient for them, we need to remove the problem at the root by not allowing people to take pictures/videos if not permitted.

Yeah but that approach using "sweeps" doesn't seem to be working. It's possible it actually requires a camera to do it reliably well.

As noted Apple already knows your friends' and familys' faces... why are people not up in arms about this fact already? It's been close to a decade or more they have done this.

Also the debate is around a lot of people not wanting to be recorded without permission in public via glasses (yet they are complacent about all the video cameras recording us now.. i dont get it) so with Apple marketing smart glasses with a solution to this debate and millions buying their smart privacy glasses the market forces all others to follow suit (offer smart privacy glass features too).

Going by data, most likely a path with prior success.

Indeed, this solution is in some way even worse.

It teaches people to trust "Currently NonEvil Company™" to do the good thing.

First, and obvious problem is that this "trains" us to rely on brands to protect us. And to keep doing this. Companies may have different interests than their consumers. Ideally and sometimes these interests are aligned. But nothing guarantees this remains so. Companies will "Become evil", if only because they are sometimes legally forced to by governments or shareholders.

Second, is that this teaches people not to be responsible but to leave that to companies or technology. Which works if e.g. Apple and Meta are the only providers. But falls apart the moment Focebook glasses, Apelle Gear or Rang Doorbell is available on temu. And becomes worse when HP, Dell, Samsung, IBM and other legitimate producers start competing in the space. We've now been trained that what the first companies did was "The Good Thing", but lack the social structure, laws, or even common sense to manage a world in which this self-constraint of the companies no longer applies.

Apple is the privacy company already .. that's their brand and a brand that the public trusts.

Overall why are we not up in arms about all the video cameras that record in all cities everyday which companies like Clearview and others have our public images in their databases yet we are up in arms about smart glasses?

THis is a solution to this public debate and Apple hasnt released their glasses yet and they are a privacy company and heavily market themselves as such. As the poster notes smart glasses adoption is rising and will only continue to do so... so this debate in time will continue to fade into the background as there is no same amount of debate about all the cameras in cities that are already recording us. With that in mind the smart glass privacy debate is an odd one to me where corporations are already recording us in these same public places.

> Apple is the privacy company already .. that's their brand and a brand that the public trusts.

...for now. What happens if they end up with a future CEO who is more like Zuck?

I want to be able to use glasses with a camera, in situations which warrant it, to prevent people from gaslighting me or others about our conversations. Something like you see in dashcams, where it's always recording to a circular buffer of a few seconds to a minute, and then one can then enable "full" recording which dumps the buffer to storage and then starts saving everything until disabled.

I also live in a US state that only requires one-party consent to record a conversation, meaning it is fully legal in my state to record any conversation I am a participant in, regardless of the consent of the other participants.

How should this be reconciled?

Sounds dystopian to me, I'd want to reconcile it by not allowing "one-party consent" for people to record me.

Not sure if the state laws you're referencing are in reality limited to phone calls, but I strongly dislike unregulated public camera use.

Your vision (no pun intended) is the story of the Black Mirror episode "The entire history of you", IMO from the show's golden age.

edit; I know that surveillance cameras pass this line already, but here they have to be announced with signs. And even when they aren't, to me state or police surveillance is different from potentially everyone stealthily recording me in private or public spaces.

Other people don’t have to agree to be around you if you insist on using a camera all the time. I wouldn’t.

Same way as the police body cameras do it: disclose what you’re doing. Which really is all OP is asking of the Ray-Ban spy cam wearers, too. A blinking red light is the conventional method.

In the police’s case, there’s rarely a choice, but at least you’re reminded you’re speaking For The Record instead of with a person. In your case, that way I know not to talk to you.

I wonder why stealth is so foundational to these devices’ success…

I’ve heard of approaches using pulsed IR along with a Mk.1 Human Eyeball to detect the incident reflections, sometimes with the assistance of a filter. Glasses seem like a good form factor for that kind of thing.

Of course, the detecting person’s anti-camera glasses may well light up on the surveiller’s recording, too…

"Secret" camera recorder on a phone. Runs in the background, so you just need to keep the gaslighting person in view.

I think your ‘freedom’ infringes on other people's ‘rights’. I think rights should trumps freedoms, that is, your liberty ends where someone else's right to privacy begins.

  > Sounds dystopian to me

1984? It's not the only surveillance state story. Everyone loves when you can dig up something from decades ago that is no longer representative.

Cameras everywhere just keeps everyone honest, right? Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, right? What's acceptable now will always be acceptable in the future, right? My mind never changes, whose does?

lol overall this argument is silly the genie is out the bottle and in five to ten years smart glasses are the norm. All you laggards will be wearing them too and or many close to you will be wearing them. Go ahead and downvote me but in five to ten years you know i am right ;)

Reminds me of my 24 year old niece in which her and her friends hate chatGPT/AI. Hippies fighting technological progress futilely. Like the iPhone haters of 2007 to 2010!

I've struggled with this in many public spaces even without having a camera on my glasses. Should I feel guilty that some kids are incidentally in my photos when my kids are on the playground when I take a photo of them? Should I never take photos in public because other unwilling people might be included unless I've explicitly asked them?

It's possible the state laws in question (Tennessee) only apply to audio recordings, which would suit my desire. I also don't believe that the idea of a rolling buffer that normally discards its contents to be morally against the idea of notification of recording, or of seeking someone's consent.

I'd be fine with glasses that only record audio in such a way, that illuminate an LED once the "record" button has been pressed. If audio is being recorded into a buffer at all times, but then discarded unless triggered to start "recording", then maybe that should not count as "recording" under the law.

As a practical matter, if one is in a situation where such recording is warranted, by the time you press the record button, you've already missed important information that's relevant to the context of the recording. Allowing a 60-second rolling buffer that then gets dumped to storage when "actual" recording starts should be allowed.

The point of this idea is that it would be under control of the individual wearing the glasses. I would most definitely not want it to be syncing to the cloud or some stupid shit like that. The buffer, and the storage, would need to be entirely contained within the glasses (or other device, if it turns out audio is a legally safer way to implement something like this).

As I mentioned in a sibling comment, I'm not against a visual notification of such recording once the "start saving to storage" button has been pressed. At the same time, I realize that the 60 seconds or so leading up to pressing that button is also often vital (otherwise dashcams wouldn't use a rolling buffer). And in such a situation where audio (or video, in applicable jurisdictions) is being recorded only in volatile memory and overwritten when the buffer is exhausted, I don't think a recording notification should be necessary unless the user has actively engaged non-volatile recording. In that sense, it's similar to the difference between streaming and downloading media. Both are technically the same, but the intention of "streaming" is to download the media and decode it without storing it in a non-volatile fashion.

I think you're thinking about this a bit naively, concentrating on the utility without considering the detriments.

Look at social media. WE are the ones who surveil ourselves. Yes, the big social media companies process all that data and use it against us, but we are the ones who give the pictures, videos, and words to them. There's really no good way around this either. I put those same things on my blog and they still get scrapped.

So what ends up being the difference? It's not synced to the cloud, but we put it there anyways. Do you really think most people are just going to take the videos and not share them? Do you think most people are just going to run a NAS at home? In an ideal world, yes. But I don't think we're anywhere near that happening. So a good portion of those videos just get put online somewhere and bad actors have access.

Non-volatile recording doesn't really exist. We're on HN and I'd expect most people here to be familiar with how easy it is to download a streamed video. yt-dlp will do that for a lot more than youtube.