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Great name
Yes, the name is absolutely a genius move.
I would bet my money that there's a dozen lawyers at work, right now, in Meta's HQ, to get a sense of what options they have to harass, shut down, or do something else to the creator of this app. And I would also bet that Zuck is furious about it.
At least one lawyer looking at it? Sure, maybe. But this is probably not even registering on Zuck's radar
You'd be surprised. They banned Christopher Wylie from Facebook. People routinely report their entire team (building some product for Facebook) getting their accounts banned
Zuckerberg takes things personally. It's his entire history
I can't claim to know more than you; but I think I know enough about corporate america and Meta and Zuck that the idea of multiple lawyers, instead of just one, is at least plausible.
He's extremely petty and fhin skinned. Remember the seat booster?
Somewhere deep in the central European woods, a lonely dev fights for his life, against a dead man switch. Accidentally, a NATO drone flattened his house into glass a week ago. Now, he evades drones, rabid lawyers, train accidents, Starlink honey traps, sudden internet blackouts of unknown origin, regular honey traps, poisoned whiskey, social media bans and dowvotes ...
... if you can find him, you can hire him, and restore privacy and sanity to your apps. he is ... the ZuckOff dev.-
I'm guessing it's not even aware of it. The billionaires all live in their own reality.
*knows when a pair of camera glasses are in the room
This is fantastic.
Does it beep louder as the BT signal strength changes and the camera comes closer?
Bring along a small Bluetooth speaker and call out pervs in public!
Wait, doesn't it beep for smartphone cameras too?
It says:
How is this guaranteed to be not spoofed?
Where does it say that is guaranteed? Nobody can guarantee that.
Anyone can get a $5 bluetooth-capable ESP32 and set its bluetooth mac to one in the range used by smart glasses. Not sure why you'd do that though.
The other direction is trickier. You'd have to modify the firmware of the smart glasses to set a different mac, or at least gain arbitrary code execution with hardware access on the glasses. That's well beyond what the average smart glass user will do
And at that point, it'd be mostly about the heads-up display anyways. Somebody who is determined to record you without your knowledge has far easier paths available to them. Just get one of those lighters or ear-rings or car key fobs with built-in camera
Are you really worried you might be filmed by an off-brand pair of glasses, instead of a genuine Meta pair?
Reading this inspired me that it would be nice if there were a do-not-film-me standard: your mobile phone sends out a do-not-film-me request with a (rotating) hash of your facial biometrics via Bluetooth. All cameras (glasses, phones, etc.) then blur your face in recordings.
Similarly, a venue could request a do-not-film-this-venue setting and make sure no photos are taken at a party.
These are social problems not technology problems.
We want a society that does not need these workarounds.
We also want a society that is less greedy but that will never happen.
Which won't happen as criminals will never want themselves filmed and they are the ones you want to film to make society better and protect yourself.
Haven't you got that the wrong way around?
If we have to come up with a technological solution to grant anonymity when people are filming, criminals can use it.
If we as a society don't go around filming everyone all the time, we don't need that technical solution available, so we can film the criminals when they are doing something criminal.
You can't trust humans to follow the rules. They break rules all the time. Look at the HN community.
Humans adapt and will always break the rules, but that’s not something that can be solved with tech. Think: prohibition vs public anti smoking campaigns/healthcare support/and then increasing prices
Indeed.
The tricky part is that social peer pressure requires a lack of anonymity - not just in terms of detecting whether people are recording without consent at the time - but also the posting of content online.
Naming and shaming requires names.
The lines blur between actively taking photos and passively recording for augmented reality, AI assistance, etc. People might not be aware that they record. This standard would also be useful to extend to robots. For example if you visit friends who have a roomba [1].
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1065306/roomba-i...
that requires too much goodwill and effort from the makers of such devices. They know their audience wouldn't want that. They don't give a shit about what people being filmed think.
Culture/social pressures work better than purely technical solutions
Nor should they.
Think about it some more. It's all fun and games, until same technology is used against you. There was literally a Black Mirror episode about this very thing.
Some people are far too eager to build the Torment Nexus.
Why do we need a standard for something that should socially be the norm?
Wasn't there a "standard" that phones in south kora had to make a shutter noise when you took a picture because they had such a huge problem with men doing up the skirt photos of strangers?
Not sure why you think social norms are positive. Negative amoral behaviors can become norms. I'd argue the west has tons of amoral behavior that is normalized.
Not sure about the noise, but Japan did something likr it with a constant light when the device was recording. I believe it was combatting the same kind of issues though.
This. Absolutely this.
Explains a lot about why people vote for racist and right wing parties.
Now I get the racists, but you, quite literally, just boiled down all politics to: left wing parties = good; right wind parties = bad;
And, honestly, that’s gotta be the single most childish and naive take anyone could ever make about politics.
It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad that you think you’re “fighting big tech” when this is probably the most “I’m a social media junkie” take ever.
Trump is a massive disaster and you come out and say this ?
Haaaaaa.
What in the… what? Who said anything about Trump?
Dude. Seriously. I mean this in the least snarky and rude way possible: try to get off social media.
No.
Because some people would still smoke in restaurants and airplanes if left to their own devices.
Why do we need laws against stealing bikes?
(Yes, example chosen for its reputation for indifferent enforcement.)
Technical and legal norms are implementation of social norms. “obviously everybody knows that you are supposed to do it that way” doesnt hold up well at court, or during an argument about any decision that costs big bucks.
Police unions would love for cameras to standardize on that.
There was an article on HN that one city's police force, when there were protests going on, took to playing Disney songs from loudspeakers; so that any recording of their interactions would be impossible to publish on any significant internet platform (or at least, the audio would be muted, by IP protection filters).
That’s an admission of guilt by the police, right there. If you have nothing to hide… etc.
“We’ve got ‘em now!”. This’ll be police brutality’s great undoing.
Wouldn't that constitute a public performance of copyrighted material? The police themselves could be DMCAed. Haha
Not DMCA, but yes, that would definitely open them to a lawsuit for unlicensed performance.
its basically equivalent of them punching you in the face and running away. Yeah you're right and they're wrong, but what would you do about that and your nose is bleeding. Nasty tactics.
It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong or illegal if they know nothing will happen to them. The rule of law is dying because it’s becoming only selectively enforced.
Did the police have the appropriate license to play those disney songs in a public space?
I bet Disney's lawyers can squeeze a lot more money out of municipalities for playing the music publicly in the first place than they can out of random citizens who are uploading to Youtube.
Im guessing the intention wasn’t that Disney would actually sue them in court but just getting it blocked automatically in YouTube, etc
Of course that was the point. But malicious broadcast of copyrighted material to trigger automated enforcement systems sounds pretty far from "fair use" to me. Say nothing of the bad publicity when some video is just so bad it hits the news and now your IP is the soundtrack to a cop beatdown.
When you look at it from a legal "use it or lose it" and corporate risk perspective it's quite surprising that Disney didn't even sent cease and desists.
Wouldn't that be covered by fair use?
Nobody who loves Disney songs would listen to them while also hearing police officers shouting, etc.
You’re right. Tech companies will surprise us all and suddenly start obeying the DMCA to the letter instead of just taking the shortcut of “rights holders upload content, it’s fingerprinted, user content that matches fingerprint is taken down”. Then, we’ll link arms and sing kumbaya.
Just to note, you can keep the data on French servers as they are a Offshore/DMCA Ignore country.
You can. YouTube doesn't. Instagram doesn't. Facebook doesn't.
There's no human to appeal to in social media platforms. It's automated, algorithmic enforcement; and when it's wrong (or someone exploits it to be wrong, like this), you're powerless to do anything. It means nothing if you're technically in the legal right: the platforms are risk-averse and don't care about your false positive.
Ahem...
In the UK/EU Let me introduce you to article 22 of the GDPR
The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
i.e. If subjected to an algorithm making decisions, you have an automatic right of appeal to a _human_.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-22-gdpr/
You need to adopt a sensible data protection law if you don't want to be exploited.
Theoretically, yes, absolutely. Practically, no, they would be taken down by automatic filters and you'd have to be willing to face Disney's lawyers to try to get them reinstated.
This has never once prevented a DMCA notice from being issued, and I'm sure you can guess how easy it is to get a person at YouTube to review your appeal
Sounds like a swift way to be included in "Need constant observation" list. Or we can even build a special surveillance for such folks along with plausible Parallel construction scenario constantly refreshed.
Why not make filming opt-in rather than opt-out?
How do you opt out when someone rocks up to the restaurant you are in or the publoc restroom wearing these?
That's the point: filming should be opt-in.
What does that even mean? You have to opt in to film?
If you meant to say "to being filmed", how do you implement that? People have been filming crowds since the 1950s; "Candid Camera" famously made covert filming mainstream.
"Should be" is a dream of the Good Ship Lollipop. Here IRL, laws and regulations are the only thing that will discourage it.
there was a black mirror episode on something similar IIRC
Not too dissimilar to the Black Mirror episode "White Christmas" where you can block other people in real life. Except in this case it's glasses and in Black Mirror retinal implants. We're getting there.
Yes. And an app could render the same thing on your screen via the same tech currently used to robustly watermark generative AI image output, and now not only you won't be able to screenshot the app, you also won't be able to take a photo of it with another device, and on the off chance you found some pre-202X camera that still could, no other computer would display the resulting photo either.
Yes, let's keep coming with more of these great ideas.
To cut this short: the whole overall idea is just universal DRM writ large. A big, principled no fucking way, ever from me.
But what about the personal privacy / venue rights ...
That's a social problem, it should not be used as excuse to give unilateral control over other people's technology to groups or individuals with special interests.
And now you’re a walking antenna broadcasting your face/biometric ID hash to anyone in range.
Sounds a lot worse. The possible applications of this alone are infinitely more scary than perverts filming others without their consent.
This is THE nightmare scenario. Think about it for a second and you’ll see why.
Great idea, we could also have a standard in browsers that signals you don't want to be tracked. We could call it the "Do not track" header, short for DNT.
It would make sure no websites track you.
I remember there was a patent from Apple for a QR-code which would cause devices to stop filming when it's detected...
The idea was for concert venues display these on-stage to block smartphones from filming (and redirect users to iTunes purchases instead IIRC)
Amazing. But it won't work for long, they'll patch the BT beacons with some "privacy" mode :(
And even if not - could always make another device with the same company ID and flood everyone with false positives.
v2.0 ... auto-project two middle fingers at the recording camera, in place of the recorded subjects face.
Upvoted for the best lulz of the day.
cool solution to a problem that shouldnt even exist I'd say. how did it become ok to be recorded at all times without prior consent??
First they filmed the celebrities, then the politicians, then the cops, then came the ring cameras. It was a slow erosion over decades, the justification drifting from "they are a public figure" to "they are standing near me"
I never knew why the paparazzi could harass celebrities and a few decades later we are all being secretly filmed for a Meta perv database.
A major factor is that the companies pushing for this technology are spending significant resources into making sure your consent isn't relevant. From this article [1] about Meta and smart glasses:
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re... or https://archive.is/65Fze
And if there's no dynamic political environment or fitting concerns to steal focus at hand, we'll sure as hell fund their creation.
Incrementally, apathetically and often to gleeful offerings of tinfoil hats to those who pointed out previous steps and extrapolated them forth.
1838 for still photography. Shortly after 1888 for movies.
Despite the pearl-clutching in this thread, filming rando strangers without consent has always been legal and socially accepted.
It's the prospect of being filmed frequently, and especially in more intimate situations than walking down the street, that is making people uneasy. Flock cameras agitate us because of the frequency of their use. Recording glasses enable the off-the-street problem.
Cool idea, but why not spend 5 minutes to tell Claude to generate something besides the default AI UI style for your app?
I was going to say: can't wait for EU to regulate this, but they already did!
Sorry to be that guy but:
Is such claudespeak it’s not even annoying it’s just funny at this point
The great thing is that you did not have to be that guy or even spend time making this comment unless you really wanted to. It wasn't necessary.
Oh, the hypocrisy
I... don't know how I feel about this. I mean, the concept, sure, good idea. Is it reliable? Perhaps. But... I get a "buy merch" popup the moment I open the page, and there seems to be a pro option for what seems to be a very much LLM-aided app? ...IDK, rubs off a bit wrong IMO. Just my personal opinion.
I like the idea of this type of merch that normalizes anti big tech sentiment. But I personally would also opt for something more dramatic, possibly involving a guillotine...on the t shirt I mean
Except any "solution" that involves AI is actually a win for big tech.
Is that true if we move to local models?
Yes, big tech controls them. Chinese ones will be trained to say certain things about Uyghurs and Taiwan, American ones about communism and Palestine.
Doesn’t even have to involve AI. Any tech solution is a win for big tech. Simple as that. We’re way past the point of no return now.
I think that'd be a pretty weird thing to wear, personally.
Social media has tuned people to be unable to think in non-hyperbolic ways. To these constantly wound-up people, every problem, no matter how big or small, can only be solved by brutal violence and savagery.
Honestly it sounds like I’m not inviting either of you to a party.
well, the idea of democracy was to offer a viable idea for people's discontent to be heard and remediated.
Unfortunately in most Western countries, dysfunctionality and corporatism have taken it over, and that is why you're seeing authoritarians on the rise across the world. They paint democracy and "legacy" figures as the scapegoat and themselves (plus handing them allllllll the power) as the only solution - just look at Milei and the chainsaw.
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
-Thomas Jefferson
I personally think the tree of liberty is probably getting pretty thirsty.
The nearby glasses app linked in this thread seems to be a lovingly hand coded tool to detect Meta glasses.
Are you saying you don't want to show off a "Zuck Off" bucket cap?
so what if it is "very much LLM-aided app"?
We are going to have the organic label soon on apps with this mindset..AI assisted development is evolving by the day and at the rate most apps will be built that way..
I'd love a label like that which tells me when an app has had thought put into it
You can put a lot of thoughts while using LLMs.
You are equating manual coding with more thinking, which has proven to be not the case given that it is mostly automated.
I think this will go like this: - Resistance. People don't like being "secretly" filmed. - Most people will realise it does not affect their lives. - People will ignore it - New generation will accept as something normal to do. Everyone recording everyone.
A better solution would be a miniaturized quadrf style device that could see radio sources and overlay them.
Unlike other commenters, I do not mind the ai-ness of this app. This is a quick solution to a problem that we should not have had in the first place.
pl_PL ( ｡ ♡ ‿ ♡ ｡ )
Czas dorosnąć.
Czas umierać.
What is the difference betwen this and https://www.noglasshole.com/ ?
The live music image in their collage is hilarious: it's blurring the backs of people's heads, and presumably blurs the faces of the band, as how would it know the difference
Eta: and in their demo video there's a person walking by who's face doesn't get blurred lmao. Bang up job, Claude
wtf is this
the demo video really looks ai generated — several weird artifacts, but what bugs me the most is that at the end the alleged glasses-wearer goes through two men between whom clearly there is no space for a third person.
I have no idea, I saw it linked here and figured it would have been more or less legit. https://www.pcmag.com/news/modders-can-remove-the-recording-...
It is, however, open-source (albeit it looks dead AF) https://github.com/infinitefutureinc/nohole
Good to know, now I need to find my flipper zero and build a small app to use the information gained.
we really need to regulate fast on those pervert glasses
You can only fight the future for so long.
Dunno why I remembered "The Quantum Thief" by Hannu Rajaniemi. Basically, you had fine-grained control over what others perceived of you. Your friends can see you completely, while strangers can only see a blur.
It was an amazing book.
Thanks for the book recom.
BTW, I will also recommend 'a hero of our time' by Lermontov. In it, you will get an updated view of what the meaning of 'friends' will be. :)
EDIT: since this is getting upvotes, I will also mention that Lermontov is a descendant of the Learmonts, who were British folk.
Also, the book is small but it's jampacked with a lot of wisdom--street and abstract both-- and presented using a language that shines with poetry, it shines even through translation (Penguin Classics trans. is best).
Makes me think of a Black Mirror episode where similar technology ends up with unlucky/unwanted people becoming inaudible blurs in perception of everyone.
As digital dystopias go, this is one of the worst I've seen; the episode ending with this happening to the protagonist shook me to the core.
uhm, spoiler alert?
Don't worry, doesn't actually spoil plot of the episode, it's all spelled out for you pretty clearly at the start.
And it’s not even a good episode so, you know… nothing lost here anyways.
There was a Black Mirror episode called White Christmas with similar concept.
I know Hannu, and he tells an interesting story about getting his first book published. I should write it up sometime ... in my Copious Free Time ...
This comment box is too small to contain the story.
* The Quantum Thief
* The Fractal Prince
* The Causal Angel
Actually, most of the story is on his WikiPedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannu_Rajaniemi
The 1st 2 were great but I didnt like the 3rd one. Its like the author was in a hurry to finish the book and just started killing characters to make his wordcount.
The 1st 2 are independent, I recommened people stop after 2nd book
So google can already figure out if you're being followed by an air tag, why can't they natively scan Bluetooth for smart glasses and do what zuckoff does without a third party app?
An airtag is one device that by its nature desperately wants to be seen.
...because they also are going to be selling smart glasses and don't want to trash a market they are about to join?
So they should detect all glasses but their own.
Been around for ages for Android as "Nearby Glasses" app
Not sure why you'd use this sketchy vibecoded proprietary app over the same thing that's open source and existed for a while
https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses
Unless you're selling to grandparents over 50-70, nobody says yj_nearbyclasses or "Nearby Glasses".
"ZuckOff" is a better quality marketing name for an app like this, vibecoded or not.
The media and already consumers have talked more about "ZuckOff" than "Nearby Glasses" so a winner has already been chosen.
It's not about a winner. This isn't CNN, there's no reason, (if you know better) to use the vibe coded sketchy software like he said. We're better than this. Do you really think popular = automatically better?
And it is not about being first here. ZuckOff is just a better packaged app, that's why it took off.
If it gets the point effectively across better than the original.
Yes.
It is more supported than something that is OSS that will die in under a year.
There are features that ZuckOff has that are more useful than the suggested one IMO.
For a vibecoded app, it is well packaged with a great name.
That is how you get people to use your app.
I'd rather use software which was made to solve a problem than software that exists to "get" people to use it.
It's a better marketing indeed, but that doesn't answers the op's question.
Between something opensource and trusted, and a proprietary potential backdoor that can send the data back to the Zuck himself you'd probably want to choose the former (cause you never know with closed sources).
I'm glad that he has shared the link as for me it's definitely useful. It's not a competition and I don't care what media talk, that's not about money.
There isn't any hope for something called "yj_nearbyglasses" if nobody outside of technical people know about it so OSS is kind of a moot point here.
Outside of that, this project giving scary warnings is something I cannot recommend to others.
Only HN veterans care about this, not people in the real world.
You can expect exactly HN people to read a comment saying "why would you use smth instead of" on HN.
I mean I'm going to install neither of these because going about my day obsessively focusing on something like this seems weird.
^^ this is actually a great lesson in the power of marketing. In this case, something as simple as a product name.
Forgive me using your comment as a madlib, but one potential ending:
(something as simple as a product name)... is enough to make someone ignore the actual point about software trust and instead argue that good marketing is what's important :)
Decided by whom?
This feels like astroturfing. The amount of new users recommending and hyping this proprietary product seems odd.
Because I read about it in a place I trust that isn't github, and only care about the perverts, not the code?
Where?
Vibecoders don't even bother to use google. They don't have a clue that there might be already better solution.
LOL, in another generation or less it couold be:
____coders don't even bother to vibe-code, they don't have a clue that there might be a better solution /s
According to the android app store, Nearby Glasses doesn't collect any data, while ZuckOff collects app activity.
Why would I want a bluetooth scanner to phone home? Seems untrustworthy. Nearby Glasses wins from a data safety perspective.
I love how even all the copy on the site is clearly AI generated. We're starting to completely lose even our ability to write a single paragraph of descriptive text.
I hope the Microsoft marketing dept is paying attention, because ZuckOff is amazing branding.
Instead of Copilot for Counter Spying, or Anti-Creeper.NET.
Good. Now what about fscking smartphones? There's 1000 times more of those, most with dual cameras and microphones.
I have "Hey Siri!" enthousiasts visiting soon. They can leave their iPhones in a nice Faraday cage at the entrance.
He says, deeply immersed in big tech without even realising it.
Loved your scenes in "Call Saul".
love this. We need more anti-privacy gizmos like this!
Surely this is anti-anti-privacy?
Oh yes my bad. That's what I had meant but I was distracted and didn't notice. Thanks.
As much as I despise Meta and concerned about privacy, I’ve not found anything better for recording snippets of my glider flights than the Meta glasses.
I don’t post them anywhere (except occasionally to friends or family in direct messages).
I fly club gliders and can’t really attach a camera easily. And in any case the PoV is a useful learning tool. I can check I was doing lookout properly, I can see the instruments clearly and so forth.
I have a second pair of normal glasses that I always swap to when I’m back on the ground.
The principal is a very cool bit of technology. There are authoritative blindness and eyesight medical institutions that are claiming this technology is great for people suffering from eye issues.
The shouting match is being loudly won by people decrying the technology however, people can receive physical and verbal abuse on the streets for wearing them which is pretty scary.
I wonder the battery impact of discovering BT all the time..
So, you might sometimes know that someone might be recording?
I don't want to dismiss that as useless, but that is a difficult signal to incorporate into behavior.
How much AGI is required before LLMs stop putting totally irrelevant technical details into marketing copy?
I feel as though it’s inherent in the models, as part of “alignment” or whatever. I’ve noticed whenever having an LLM help with data analysis, especially Claude, it just can’t help itself from putting caveats and guides and documentation inline or in footers.