First time seeing a “NO META GLASSES” sign in the door of a shop! I’m not surprised… and I expect we might see more of these kind of things in the years ahead.
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@danyork do they have security cameras inside?
@dd0ul I don’t know, because I didn’t go in the store (I was just walking by).
I think the difference, though, is that if there are security cameras (and again I don’t know) in-store video surveillance is probably not* sent off to a ginormous company like Meta. That seems to be the concern I see coming through in comments.
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* I don’t know the state of in-store security cameras. The streams COULD be being sent off to equally questionable companies!
Seeing various comments, I will add a couple of points:
- I don’t own any Meta glasses.
- I didn’t go into the store as it had no interest for me. I was just walking by and noticed the sign.
- While the sign focuses on Meta, a quick search shows that many other companies either have or are developing “smart glasses”, including Google, Amazon, Apple, Snap
- There ARE very real accessibility use cases:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/07/the-life-changing-magic-of-wearing-smartglasses
With privacy concerns… a *lot* for us as a society to sort out!
My own concerns are really around:
- how much recognition / activity is being processed locally (glasses and local smartphone) vs sent off to some system for processing?
- who has access to the data being streamed from the smartglasses?
- what is being done with it?
- is it being fed into a massive facial recognition database?
- is it being used to train AI LLMs?
- how many additional companies have access to the images and videos? (Ex. moderators)
Many more questions like that…
So totally on point Dan.
These glasses are the data funnel for a whole new universe of data abuse (intellectual property theft, privacy violations, tracking and surveillance without warrant or due process)
Once in the hands of authoritarian states or companies alike this data is easy to leverage for good or bad (for example dropping bombs or stopping a virus outbreak)
