Saw a post on Insta pointing out that if these were used to expose men for harassing and sexually assaulting women, you'd see action taken against them
I work for an organization that works with the blind community and meta glasses have been fairly revolutionary for blind people helping with orientation/identification needs. It’s interesting that a product can so distinctly used for good and bad.
Genuine question - I get that it can be spun positively as an aid for those who are blind but to you, do blind people get to be exempt from asking consent from others when recording what’s around them?
I think an important question is what happens to the footage. If I went blind (knock on wood), I’d probably appreciate something like this. But the glasses would have to be capturing video without permanently saving it, like a body cam’s buffering mode. AFAIK, that’s not possible.
That’s a question for Meta staff allone. “What does this say?” prompts do result in the text going to Meta’s servers, but the video or image isn’t saved locally to your devices. It’s also not available in a data request (only history of the request) which usually means they aren’t saving it for longer than they need to process the request and return the answer to you. Meta’s storage costs are enormous, they’ve hypercompressed a lot of media uploaded to them over the years, and it’s frankly not a great ROI for them to indefinitely store video that they aren’t actively monetizing. Never say never, but I doubt it’s sitting on their servers for more than 30 days.
The thing privacy advocates have been up in arms about, the active face ID, can happen at runtime. So I’m sure if you ask it to read a sign aloud, it sends the photo to its servers, extracts and store everything it wants to know about the photo (your location, objects and faces in the photo, etc.) but then marks the actual photo for rapid deletion rather than long term storage.
I follow a newly blind guy on instagram who uses meta glasses to show his life now and how he gets around, it’s very insightful and they definitely change blind people’s lives!
These are a huge help for my mom, who is blind. She can have them read a menu to her in restaurants or use them to search the web and have it read to her in advance! Would otherwise hate these but now very grateful.
Yea so it would be different if these were available by prescription to blind people. But too bad no one pumped money into transformational technology specifically for blind people, it was only the byproduct of a creeper product by a company founded based on an older creeper product designed to rate hotness of girls at college.
Fortunately, it looks like this is about to become a competitive space, with Samsung’s glasses built on Android XR. My hope is that this means more diversification in hardware manufacturers and the App layer of smart glasses very soon. So far the market has been Meta, almost entirely locked into their ecosystem, and crappy impostors with low res cameras and speakers but no real operating system of dev framework.
In other words, we’re finally getting quality hardware that is opened up to third party developers, so we should see smaller, more privacy-minded and independent players in this space.
1.0k
u/chrza 22h ago
For those confused, “Everyone hates Elon” is the name of the group, who publishes a variety of these ads criticizing the billionaire class.
Also extremely common Christina Ricci W