Honestly, they should not ban them, and then just low-key encourage enterprising attendees to pwn the devices and any attached accounts. That would be delightful.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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Defcon is not the place I’d want to wear something like that and make myself a target. Of course, I’d be embarrassed to wear them anywhere, but afraid at Defcon.
Shit, I’d be scared to go anywhere near defcon with any device.
I'd go in with an abacus and a notepad.
“Hey, where’d all my beads go?!”
Suddenly your abacus explodes after 65,535 beads suddenly appear.
Eh, it's not that bad
Random files appearing in the downloads folder on my phone has only happened once
¯\(ツ)/¯
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I was afraid walking into the room with the wall of sheeple just bc I was wearing a button down in spite of being the sole sponsor of the hackathon. I (as instructed) left my watch, phone, laptop etc at hotel and only brought locked down Chromebook and lived in sweaty terror every keystroke. All while they were stoked and loving the sponsor not just buying a logo, and sent me back with like 500 bucks in swag easily to share back home at the office. Still.... Terror.
Fortunately most of the attendees are genuinely good folks, so generally what really happens is just that some data gets scraped and everybody has a bit of a laugh at one of the talks.
I know worse happens, I just think it’s worth mentioning it is actually a group of mostly awesome people.
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All hidden cameras should be illegal, I don’t care about your “hands free convenience”
This is like anti pervert laws 101
Yep. If you want to record everything going on from your POV, strap a GoPro to your head and see if people's moods change about it. If they clearly don't want that, they don't want the "convenient" hidden cameras either. Simple as that.
They don't want people knowing they are being recorded.
A gopro or a phone held up is basically an indicator of recording happening, which people can choose to avoid if they want to.
But pervert glasses don't hold up that signal, and the pathetic attempt to make a signal (the LED) is easily covered or otherwise bypassed so you can creep on people without them ever knowing.
conference organizers said they have imposed a ban on “Meta-style glasses with recording capabilities.”
Dammit. I was hoping they explicitly called them "pervert glasses" like the headline suggested.
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I like how these only became a problem because Meta made them which meant a bunch of morons bought it.
Hidden and pinhole cameras have been a commercially available thing for decades, even on glasses.
Hell they even made one as a kids toy you could buy.
Well, morons bought it and the device is directly connected to a data harvesting company. I think that has more to do with it. One lone weirdo with a hidden camera and a home server isn't the same kind of boogeyman
only became a problem because Meta made them
Anyone who remember "glassholes" knows this isn't new. Wearing a camera on your literal eyes is still a step too far in this otherwise compromised world.
But yes, I think the big issue here, as others pointed out, has to do with the nature of the company producing them. That'd be especially important for a place like DEFCON, which is all about securing your data.
It's not the cameras that are the problem, however, it's the companies behind them that I take issue with. It's one thing to be spied on by a camera, it's another thing when data collected from that camera feed is then sold to anyone who is buying. That's what I have a problem with. The cameras themselves aren't the issue.
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Like, I guess I don’t understand why these damn things have a camera in the first place. At most they should be roughly equivalent to a smart watch - a display and some controls. Maybe bone-conducting headphones or something for audio. It’d be neat to have navigation prompts in glasses, for instance. Buy why a fucking camera?!
Were it not for the fact that it's the fucking privacy-invading big tech companies doing it, I would admit that there are good use-cases for the camera:
- Reminding you of the name and possibly previous interactions with the person you're talking to, for instance (if it only did local lookup based on consensual photos you had previously added to your address book). I'm not face-blind or anything, but my memory is bad enough that that would be helpful to me.
- Scanning, OCR-ing and making searchable any papers you're looking at (hooking to your selfhosted Paperless-NGX).
- Displaying augmented-reality translations of street signs (which is one of the few reasonable things Google Glass actually did).
I've heard they can be also quite useful for blind/vision-impaired users to describe surroundings and read signs, etc.
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Yes this is the exact thing I'm interested in. Camera is definitely not something needed here. There are some like this on the market like the MemoMind. I'm waiting for one with progressive lens support like the Even Realities G2 but with audio added.
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I love the fact lately meta glasses are called pervert glasses constantly.
I prefer the term 'pedofocals'
- Go to Def Con
- Wear internet connected camera in bathroom and while typing all passwords
- ???
- Profit
- Have said glasses hacked and the video stream played on large screens around the venue for the duration of the convention
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So have shirt that says, "If you can read this, you may be recorded for your safety and for quality assurance purposes." That's what corporations do, right? Should solve the concerns?
That would make an awesome shirt, actually. Reminds me of the protest shirts on policy affecting RSA encryption, “this shirt is a WMD” or something to that effect…
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San Diego ComiCon banned them, and Dragoncon is going to ban them.
I personally hate the fact that capatilists have fucked our trust so much we can't have augmented reality glasses. I was really looking forward to that.
If they were only just that, AR.
Instead they’re “record everyone around you without their consent and post the footage online without their consent to be commented on and shared by others” glasses.
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As usual we advertise the Meta Glasses detecting app:
Glasses Nearby
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.pocketpc.nearbyglasses
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