Himel told BuzzFeed News that the LED light was a feature they ADDED after consulting with a handful of privacy groups. The Future of Privacy Forum, which is partially funded by Facebook, was one of those groups, and its legal counsel, Jeremy Greenberg, suggested adding some sort of light as a visual cue. He also suggested some sort of second cue (like touching the frames or using the voice assistant) because he anticipated that someone could disable the light.
But, Greenberg said, there is a real privacy risk to bystanders, and there hasn’t been a product exactly like this before. “These glasses look and feel like typical glasses,” Greenberg told BuzzFeed News. “They look like a cool pair of Ray-Bans, which is definitely a design choice.”
Remember when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said “the future is private“? LOL.
Camera glasses aren’t new. In addition to Google Glass and Spectacles, you can buy a pair of fake glasses with a hidden camera for about $50 on Amazon. Someone really motivated to do some sort of sneaky surveillance already has an easy (and much cheaper) way to do this. Facebook isn’t inventing the wheel here — they’re just adding a sleeker chassis and leather interior.
Mark Zuckerberg recently posted a memo about his ambitions for a metaverse — a digital experience fully immersed in augmented reality and virtual reality. He enthused that this was the future of both social experience and Facebook. Last month, Facebook announced its first step into the metaverse: a way to do work meetings in VR, where you and your coworkers are in avatar form in a conference room.
Ray-Ban Stories in their current form aren’t exactly metaverse-y; there’s no Minority Report AR/VR component. But it seems likely that Facebook views these glasses as a way to test the market on smart glasses, both to see how people react and to warm up customers to the idea of having people walk around wearing camera glasses.
So, who exactly are Facebook glasses for? I’m not sure exactly, to be honest. They were a fun gadget, but I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable wearing them every day in public. I wore them to walk my son to school and pulled them up onto my head when I got near the school so that no one would notice that my glasses have cameras.
