[verandaguy]

It can be simultaneously true that smart glasses are a technological marvel and a privacy nightmare.

It's also important to consider that while many places have some legal framework along the lines of "no reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces," there's a social-psychological gap between that and the presumption of being constantly recorded, be it by other private individuals or governments.

Because of this, my view on this technology is that it's a net negative in society, and generally unhealthy.

[theshrike79]

As a full-time glasses-wearer and sci-fi nerd, I want smart glasses SO BAD. Just running the equivalent of YOLOv8 on your glasses identifying objects in your view real time would be very very cool.

But as a privacy-conscious developer, I want exactly zero connection to any FAANG cloud service in my smart classes.

So until someone releases a pair of smart glasses I can get with my prescription and, for example, use my phone for "local" compute with no forced cloud access, I'm going to skip the whole category.

[whiplash451]

It’s worse than this. A company offering “private” smart glasses could slip into FB mode on its own or get acquired. So it’s a hard no from any company really.

[theshrike79]

I'm thinking of it more like the Raspberry Pi of smart glasses.

Something with open-ish hardware running Linux without any specific blocks on installing your own software on it.

[stavros]

A company offering private smart glasses would have to offer them with an unlocked bootloader.

[Terr_]

IMO much of the "no reasonable expectation" stuff is simply wrong, or treats things as an unreasonable binary.

For example, there's no reasonable expectation that singing to myself in public won't be recorded.

But almost everyone in public does reasonably-assume that their every step isn't being permanently logged by a stalking drone swarm.

[verandaguy]

Right, that's actually a fair framing. I get to enjoy a walking commute in my city, and or the most part, I feel very anonymous on my walk into the office.

Blending into rush hour foot traffic is easy, and I never feel like I stand out enough to attract attention... though in the back of my head, I know that most commercial and government properties have some form of video surveillance, probably backed by some kind of (hopefully coarse) AI subject tagging.

[j-bos]

That genie's out of the bottle, couple cheap cameras with cheap AI recognition and tracking, and every network getting pwned by somebody the result is, public spaces become obscenely public. The worst is private spaces, like when a technician or tradesman comes to one's house to do work wearing smart glasses. If they're Rx, what do you do? Refuse service? live with the broken pipe/modem?

No opinion on the decision from OP's post, just noting that, privacy is getting 86'd six ways to Sunday. All that's left are truly owned homes and natural spaces, and Orwell laid the pattern for both.

[Terr_]

> That genie's out of the bottle [...] public spaces become obscenely public

A bit "meta" here, but this was never about surrendering to advancing capability, humans have been capable of eavesdropping ever since eaves were invented, people could bring hidden microphones and cameras in "private" spaces for decades, etc.

The "reasonable expectation" doesn't come from our fears of the worst, or else it would be meaninglessly permissive. Rather, it's an attempt to judge individual situations based on some kind of collective agreement about normality. Just because we can't preemptively block something doesn't mean it cannot be a crime.

In other words, we (should) have a lot more power to decide what they become than that. Supposing--and I'm not endorsing this--anyone caught recording in public typically gets their stuff smashed by an angry mob, then the "reasonable expectation" is that you're not being recorded.

[j-bos]

Thanks for the nuance. I guess my issue is that pervasive recording has already been normalized, db hacks are effectively normalized (if illegal) so the public spaces are super public, as of yesterday not tomorrow.

[discordance]

I also feel for the unfortunate Kenyan annotators drawing and tagging rectangles of people using the toilet -

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/workers-report-watch...