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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
San Diego ComiCon banned them, and Dragoncon is going to ban them.
PervSpecs®
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.
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…
Nah. See the specific phrasing allows for you to record them and them to record you in two party consent states
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.
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.
I prefer the term 'pedofocals'
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.
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.
Shit, I’d be scared to go anywhere near defcon with any device.
I'd go in with an abacus and a notepad.
Suddenly your abacus explodes after 65,535 beads suddenly appear.
“Hey, where’d all my beads go?!”
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:
I've heard they can be also quite useful for blind/vision-impaired users to describe surroundings and read signs, etc.
Even then I could see people not wanting picture, video, or audio recorded of them even if it is just kept locally for private use. And that's the problem of these glasses with trying to be discrete so people who would have avoided you or asked you to stop recording before having a conversation are left unaware.
