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Thoughts on privacy focused smart glasses?
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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Privacy
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Smart glasses with HUD and speakers, and bluetooth, no cloud dependency - yes, please.
With camera - absolutely not. This would be just a hidden recording device, absolutely capable of intruding other's privacy, regardless if it's cloud connected or not. I realize that camera provides a lot of functionality, but I just don't see the way how it can preserve privacy of other people and fit in glasses form factor.
Oh, and all that applies not just to camera, but also to microphone. Damn, such a good topic to talk about.
Actually, there is a way to use a camera, but I'm not sure if it's possible from technical or usability perspectives.
Imagine a device that has a camera, but no data connectivity. No WiFi. Only USB for charging and firmware updates. Maybe BT for firmware or control from app. No memory card slot either. Internal storage reserved for system only, camera software cannot store videos or images persistently.
This will probably have to be not open source, especially if bluetooth is present - otherwise someone will figure out how to capture camera feed with a custom firmware.
But if possible, such device can use camera for smart navigation, object recognition, some basic tasks on-device, depending on how much compute (and battery) can be placed into such a small package.
Encrypt the traffic and follow proper key management procedures? It wouldn't exactly be the first open source thing that transmits sensitive data over a network.
No, you got me wrong. My position is that I don't want anything that is capable of recording and that looks like an object that normally can't do that. So I tried to imagine how something may have camera to capture what user sees, but not be able to store the recordings - only process it in like real-time, or close to it.
I may not understand the hardware design good enough, but I think if you make an open source device, it should allow custom firmware. If you allow custom firmware, someone will write a version of it that will work around the restriction on recording somehow. To be clear, I'm not concerned about communication protocol interception, but about someone changing how such device handles the data it captures.
The problem there is nobody else will know if yours are the privacy friendly glasses with a camera or not. They'll just see smart glasses w/ camera. I certainly wouldn't associate with someone wearing those fucking things, and I'm not going to bother to research which models are which.
What if the glasses come with a little flag stuck in the frame that says "I'm born blind, this thing helps me be less disabled. It's not filming you."? I mean, there are genuinely helpful use cases for such things out there.
If its a camera it's filming. I've never heard of any smart glasses that help blind people, I'd need to know what it was doing with the video. If it's being sent to a cloud service I'm still going to avoid them. Sorry but I'm trying to minimize the amount of my image that's going to these fucking data companies.