To no one’s surprise, women and girls are disproportionately targeted, making image-based abuse not just a technology issue but a gendered form of violence rooted in misogyny and power. In fact, in Laura Bates’ book “The New Age of Sexism”, she cites research that says that of the 96% of deepfakes that are non-consensual sexually explicit images, 99% of those depict women. In fact, most of the apps, bots and websites that will create deepfake explicit images don’t even work on pictures of men.
Deepfakes can be used to humiliate, silence, intimidate, or punish women for speaking publicly, participating online, or simply existing in digital spaces.
In the UK, women have reported being filmed by men wearing smart glasses while being approached in public spaces, with recordings subsequently uploaded to social media attracting sexualised and other gross comments. Similar “pickup” content has emerged in the US, where men have used smart glasses to record interactions with women in airports, gyms, and other public spaces, often turning those encounters into viral online content.
Last year, an Auckland man used the Ray-Ban Smart Glasses to covertly record a sex worker without her consent while she was naked. The recording was detected only because the woman noticed him activating the device (by touching the side of the glasses). He pleaded guilty to attempting to make an intimate visual recording, but was discharged without conviction - to the dismay of the brothel owner.
This is particularly concerning because wearable devices are designed to blend into everyday life. A child may not recognise that a pair of ordinary-looking sunglasses contains a camera. They may not realise they are being recorded, and will have little ability to control what happens to that image/footage afterwards.
Consent becomes much harder to meaningfully give or refuse when recording devices are hidden inside objects that look completely ordinary.
Too often, we’re told that women and girls should simply be more careful, more alert, and more aware of their surroundings, remain vigilant, and constantly assess whether they are being recorded, instead of placing responsibility on those who design, deploy, and profit from technologies with foreseeable risks of misuse. The same is true for children and young people, who should not need levels of technological awareness beyond their developmental capacity simply to protect themselves from covert recording.
I will never think ray bans in general are cool ever again.
I never did
You’re fashion sense was ahead of the times
Do they work when driving? Maybe a sunglass version? That would be handier than window mounted cameras and the like. Fuck 'em if all they’re for is privacy invasion. Enough of that shit is enough.
Do they work when driving?
Yes
Maybe a sunglass version?
You can get them in sunglasses yes, and prescription lenses. Basically any lens you want.
That I could see as a plus - maybe even base their entire ad campaign around it. Using these as creep show, or worse, should not be allowed. In order to "film"in public an apparent camera of some sort should be used so as to notify those being filmed.
That’s fair, isn’t it?
The issue is that regardless of how Meta markets this product, making it sleek and inconspicuous was the whole point. Meta glasses succeeded because they latched on the Wayfarer design which was already widespread and accepted.
Unfortunately being inconspicuous and fashionable also lends itself as means to use these to record covertly. Whatever Meta does to fix this, folks will find a way to work around and disable. The glass already has a flashing light to indicate that it’s recording; it’s not enough. Creeps are going to creep.
Maybe society just isn’t ready for “affordable” recording-capable wearables.
We’re ready to break them, as a last resort.
For the time being and for quite a while, they’ll have thick frames. Computers, batteries, speakers, and cameras aren’t going to be affordably microscopic anytime soon.
If we start calling out anyone with thick frame glasses, soon people will stop wearing them, unless they’re pervert glasses. In a year or two virtually all thick frame glasses will be pervert glasses. They won’t be able to hide.
Uhh, designer here. My thick-framed glasses are part of the uniform… ☹️
🤔 Sounds like something a the glasshole would say
I see you have volunteered to demonstrate the problem with the public shaming approach already
As someone who wanted to buy thick frames, i guess i will need to avoid them…
Also, your reasoning has a flaw: they are thick for now, it won’t take much for a company to make normal-looking ones
“For the time being”… that phrase does a lot of heavy lifting and doesn’t address to core of rhe issue. What happens when it’s small enough it can’t be obviously seen. Maybe it becomes a contact lens, maybe it can fit on a thin bridge on the nose. The problem still remains to be addressed.
So anyone who wears thick framed glasses in general gets attacked by the mob…great fucking solution.
Back in 2016 I bought several ‘dumb’ camera sunglasses. Why? I was going to a spy themed nerd convention and I thought having those would fit the theme. I did use some myself when I went on vacation and used them a POV camera and hands free recording of the places and things I wanted recorded.
They were air-gapped. No Bluetooth or WiFi capability. You had to plug them in to get your stuff out. No cloud storage either. You put in a microSD card.
So I do believe they can have utility… But not in the way these people are using it. Not in the ‘always on always listening and always on the cloud’ bullshit.
If you didn’t speak out this much about government and corporate mass surveillance, then why care anymore about personal surveillance? This seems like a weird hill to finally give a shit about the surveillance state you already accepted all around you. If it’s legal and acceptable for government and corporations, it should be accepted for individuals who want to benefit from those technology, too. As someone whose railed against the encroachment of surveillance for two decades to deaf ears, hearing those same ppl whining now garners zero sympathy from me.
You enables a surveillance state when it didn’t bother you personally, worsening the world we live in for everyone but now expect support when you finally feel your privacy violated? You helped make this bed, you can sleep in it.
I don’t completely agree with all of your sentiment but I agree that individuals filming is far less of an issue than government and corporate surveillance. If we want to stop surveillance we don’t like, let’s remove all government and corporate surveillance first.
Dude. Anyone recording with a big tech device - from scamazon’s ring cameras or w.e to glasshole glasses - all that data’s going straight to the corporate cloud. Who knows what happens afterwards, from adtech to data breaches of your biometric data to surveillance. You should be concerned about threats way beyond those from the actual person filming you. This aspect of society, where all privacy-naive people are freely spying and collecting data on all of us through the above devices for corporations and states, like a ‘self-checkout of surveillance,’ creeps and bums me out
personal surveillance includes state and corporate surveillance
nah I have a custom rom
I don’t think folks are upset about these for the “surveillance”, it’s more about how it enables creeps. In terms of privacy these aren’t any less worse than iPhones in that anyone can record you without permission — in privacy terms, overt or covert recording are both wrong; but folks are taking issue with covert recording because of course douchebags are going to leverage it on women.
We already know cops stalk ppl with flock and Epstein’s associates traffic girls and boys and we keep giving them more cameras and microphones in more places. But no, folks aren’t upset about that, you’re right.
The Epstein class literally eat children and we do nothing. But cameras in glasses? That’s the line!!!
Yes, good - your new allies aren’t good enough for you. Cast them out and go it alone. Alone you will do it. Only you.
You’re not an ally if you only show up when you want something. Once you get it, you’re gone again, right back to tapping ‘YES’ to every term and condition they put in front of you.
I only want your help if you share EXACTLY my views otherwise you’re EVIL
So we’re supposed to develop hypervigilance? As someone with cptsd I’ve been doing that since I was in diapers. It’s incredibly taxing for your brain and takes years off your life. Terrible advice. Best thing we can do is publicly shame these people every time we see one. Call them pervert glasses, get mad, if it happens enough times they will get rid of them.
That’s what took them off the market last time. We can do it again.
I wish I could get these glasses without the camera. Playing music, scrolling stuff on my glasses on the train every morning etc. Sounds amazing.
Playing music, scrolling stuff on my glasses on the train every morning
Both of those things can be done with a phone or mp3 player and some headphones. These glasses don’t allow you view a social media feed, for example; you’re describing a different technology https://www.techlearning.com/news/what-you-need-to-know-about-meta-glasses
It was fun while these were just used for sports and actually interesting outdoor activities, it serves me really well while cycling and snowboarding. I gave away the original wayfarer version so my family can experiment with it for accessibility and now I have just the sports version, which hopefully it’s too dorky for these pick-up-artist idiots to start popularizing.
Guess I’ll have to go back to a go pro in my helmets like a Teletubby… and find a decent combination of open ear headphones and a microphone that works against the wind. sigh maybe if they made a camera-less version that would solve most of it
I used stuff like that for hands free tourist recordings. I never did anything inappropriate with them. Unless you count the time a cop glared at me for looking at them with a suspect cuffed to a bench…
Yeah that’s a good use case too — though I do remember seeing folks use it to take pictures of things you weren’t supposed to (like temples interiors).
The “covert recording” aspect of it is a big problem, but from the privacy standpoint I honestly think this is less worse than walking around with an Insta360 that is literally recording everything. At least for now the Insta360 is less problematic because it’s so bulky that it’s not as useful for perverts; but in terms of filming a bunch of people out and about without consent it’s worse.
I don’t get how Google glass got laughed out of existence, but people are out there champing at the bit to buy Meta spyware glasses… It’s fucking insane.
I think the corporations have done a great job at normalizing surveillance and anti-privacy in the intervening years. In that time there’s also been a huge trend in marketing of getting celebs to do advertisements, which I’m guessing has some effectiveness seeing as it’s spread like wildfire in the last several years, and meta’s pervertware glasses have a dumbass-spokesperson in someone apparently famous named Kylie Jenner or something like that. I think your question is a good one; I think the answer has is how effective corporate manufacturing of consent has become (and the death of [mainstream] journalism; these days news outlets are just loudspeakers for corporations and politicians, especially in the tech space - critical thought need not apply)
We need to make tech moree difficult any way we can to drive the normies back out. Let them have their slop lol
The people excited to buy them aren’t the same people who were laughing before. These are the people who sit in a bus and wish they could just whip their dick out and start jerking off on someone, but who have the social awareness to know that would be frowned upon. Now they can record their day so they can revisit that train ride or few minutes on an elevator with a child, or kids gymnastics practice later on and pull their dick out for real this time.
Watch these creeps wearing garbage glasses make life so much harder for the folks with low vision.
We’re normalizing the courageous, and morally righteous, act of destroying Flock cameras.
Normalizing the destruction of pervert glasses seems like the next reasonable escalation in that fight.
Don’t forget ring cameras!
But yeah, I won’t be upset if we start seeing pervert glasses getting slapped off pervert faces.
Forget the glasses.
Can’t wear glasses if you don’t have ears.
There’s a video going around on here where they tell you got to saw them off quietly
Your going to need something closer to a pruning blade to saw pervert glasses off quietly.
Oakley is far ahead of you.
Yeah, but perverts and sex criminals have been wearing Oakley’s for 30 years, so everyone already knows to be weary.
I don’t see how being tired is going to help. Maybe they should try being wary instead.
You’re not tired of sex offenders? You do you I guess…
It was a spelling thing.
Yes, you were spelling a word I wasn’t using for some reason…
As somebody who has been falsely arrested, I would have loved these to prove it. But I get it’s a privacy issue…
More negatives than positives.
Getting arrested sucked. Being in jail sucked. Having the cops belittle me sucked. Having no charge actually sucked too because I couldn’t fight or do anything about it.
But the worst part is that many people don’t believe me.
Why should we give perverts the power to control what we can do? Are we really going to avoid things that can help protect ourselves from corrupt cops because perverts?
That’s not a good excuse. We need to defund law enforcement. Especially with fascism on the rise.
I agree, saying cameras are bad because creeps use them is not a good excuse to dislike an entire category of tool.
And I doubly agree, especially when fascism is on the rise. Now more than ever it’s critical that we document the crimes of those fascist pigs.
You can document without violating everyone else.
I’m not going to make things easier for fascists
Okay but let’s use air gapped cameras and not pervert glasses that are inconsiderate towards our neighbors.
I’m willing to be inconsiderate if it helps stop fascists from terrorizing people. Aren’t you?
Problem with offline cameras is the fascists can just take them from you. You need a connection archiving it. Do not use big tech, obviously. Run your own. Flash the rom, again obviously.
But that’s all technical manusha.
Point is, I’m not going to make it easier for the fascists, and you shouldn’t either.
How about assholes stop recording people without thwir consent.
I think a good way to combat this, and it should be done now, would be to convince pretty young girls to pull out their phones and record any glasshole they see, while belittling them. Post that shit on TikTok, and laugh. They’ll be in public areas, wherever crowds of young people gather.
If we wait too long, and let these become more commonplace the initiative will be lost.
Unfortunately that may just lead to more young girls getting attacked. The perverts who buy pervert glasses have the emotional intelligence of an angry warthog
So encourage ppl to commit crimes and harass people whenever they think someone is wearing them? That’s certainly not a recipe for disaster. Systemic public shaming and harassment at the sole discretion of the average idiot on the street? Because that always goes well…
You realize you’d be doing exactly to them what you’re criticizing them for doing to you?
they think someone is wearing them?
If you can’t distinguish between pervert glasses and normal glasses, you may really need a pair of prescription glasses
What crime is being suggested?
You realize you’d be doing exactly to them what you’re criticizing them for doing to you?
Yes, that’s the point. What would you hope to gain by removing the opportunity for proportional response?
The opportunity was already removed when it was defined as a criminal offense.
