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509 points nullpxl | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

Hi! Recently smart-glasses with cameras like the Meta Ray-bans seem to be getting more popular. As does some people's desire to remove/cover up the recording indicator LED. I wanted to see if there's a way to detect when people are recording with these types of glasses, so a little bit ago I started working this project. I've hit a little bit of a wall though so I'm very much open to ideas!

I've written a bunch more on the link (+photos are there), but essentially this uses 2 fingerprinting approaches: - retro-reflectivity of the camera sensor by looking at IR reflections. mixed results here. - wireless traffic (primarily BLE, also looking into BTC and wifi)

For the latter, I'm currently just using an ESP32, and I can consistently detect when the Meta Raybans are 1) pairing, 2) first powered on, 3) (less consistently) when they're taken out of the charging case. When they do detect something, it plays a little jingle next to your ear.

Ideally I want to be able to detect them when they're in use, and not just at boot. I've come across the nRF52840, which seems like it can follow directed BLE traffic beyond the initial broadcast, but from my understanding it would still need to catch the first CONNECT_REQ event regardless. On the bluetooth classic side of things, all the hardware looks really expensive! Any ideas are appreciated. Thanks!

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dotancohen ◴[] No.46076398[source]
Interesting idea. It seems to me that most things which would need to be protected from hidden cameras would be stationary and not require the operator to mount the detectors on his body, but starting with mobile constraints is often helpful.

I would like to draw attention to this gem of wit, easily the best I've seen in a long time:

> I think the idea behind this approach is sound (actually it's light)

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october8140 ◴[] No.46077052[source]
It's me. I want to be protected from hidden cameras from other peoples glasses.
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LocalH ◴[] No.46080085[source]
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?

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moritzwarhier ◴[] No.46080174[source]
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.

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1. godelski ◴[] No.46083453[source]

  > 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?

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2. ◴[] No.46084565[source]
3. LocalH ◴[] No.46097466[source]
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.

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4. godelski ◴[] No.46099645[source]
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.