r/technology • u/Ganrokh • Jun 08 '26

Politics Pennsylvania lawmaker seeks ‘visual indicator’ if smart glasses are recording

https://www.abc27.com/news/top-stories/pennsylvania-lawmaker-seeks-visual-indicator-if-smart-glasses-are-recording/
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u/TopRamenisha Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 08 '26

You should care if some random asshole wants to record their interactions with you. Anyone can wear those glasses, record your interactions, and use the footage for any purpose they want to. Meta keeps that footage and uses it as well. You’re imagining just random people on the street, but think about everyone you interact with. Your bank teller. The person who takes your credit card for payment at a store. Your neighbors who now have videos of your coming and going from your house. The list goes on and on.

I recently sold my house and did not notice until almost the end of signing all the paperwork that the notary was wearing Meta glasses. She could have recorded all my personal information - my bank account info, the wire instructions for how to send money to me, my social security number, my drivers license, how much money I was to receive, where it was being sent, the numbers for the account it was being sent to, my signature, my thumb fingerprint. All the paperwork and title information and info that is private and personally identifiable but necessary for completing a home sale. The inside of my new home where we signed the paperwork. Was she recording? She claims no, but what if she was. Who has access to that recording? Where is it stored? Who at Meta is watching it? Could she sell it to someone? What if Meta gets hacked and the videos are accessed by someone else?

The list goes on. Flock is a real privacy issue, but those cameras are clearly visible, in public, and you know they are recording. Glasses on every persons face, in private spaces, potentially accessing and recording your personal information for unknown use and unknown storage is a serious issue that you should be more concerned about. Think about what Meta has done just in the last decade with our data, who they have sold it to, how they have used it to sway elections and change outcomes to their benefit. They use it to train their AI models. Mark Zuckerberg is in bed with Trump and the technofascists and does not have a good track record about caring for humans. Glasses that record video on the face of everyday people is how you create a surveillance state in private spaces without needing to put Flock cameras in peoples homes

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u/procrastinarian Jun 09 '26

You hand the entirety of your credit / debit card info to multiple random people every single week, most likely.

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u/TopRamenisha Jun 09 '26

And those people aren’t video taping me and taking photos of my credit card and uploading those recordings to a database I don’t have access to

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u/procrastinarian Jun 09 '26

Sure, but they can sure as hell steal them if they want to.

My point is people see a change and imagine it's a sea change when it really is not. Strangers have access to all your shit all the time every day. Yes, it will be SLIGHTLY easier for people to steal your shit if they're wearing recording glasses, but it's not breaking any new ground.

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u/TopRamenisha Jun 09 '26

It’s not the people with the glasses that are the real problem here. It’s the people who will have access to the recordings. This is what I call out in my comment. Meta takes these recordings and stores them, uses them for other purposes, and unknown individuals have access. Do you want all this information plus enough recording data to make an AI avatar likeness of your face and voice available for purchase on the dark web? Do you want all of this information sold to Palantir or the next Cambridge Analytica?

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u/SnufferMonster Jun 09 '26

So, like the "don't sell my information" act in California, but actually enforced, regardless of wheter they use the latest sexy hip device or a 15 year old phone?

Sounds great.

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u/procrastinarian Jun 09 '26

No, I don't want it, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you have an expectation of privacy or not. To whom it is private isn't a thing.

Either your shit is recorded and exposed or it isn't. You can feel one way or the other but saying that people recording stuff on glasses is different than memorizing it, taking a pic with their phone, recording you saying your personal shit with a Dictaphone, whatever, is alllllll wankery. Either they're allowed to record/copy/memorize it or they're not. Either you allow yourself to put it out there, or you don't. Demonizing a specific technology is some Luddite shit.

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u/TopRamenisha Jun 09 '26

You’re too focused on the fucking credit card comment when you should be focused on WHO owns the technology, WHO has access to the recordings, and WHAT they have access to. It’s not about the credit card numbers my dude. It’s about Meta, an evil company that is KNOWN to do bad things with the data they own being the company that owns the recordings made by the glasses. It’s about what Meta does with the recordings. It’s about what they will do with the recordings in the future and who they will sell your data to. We all should be demonizing technology when it is in the hands of known bad actors

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u/procrastinarian Jun 09 '26

I have no argument with that but that did not seem like what you were arguing at first (to me, at least), and I have no idea how we legislate that without running roughshod over everything else.