Hacker News Reader

Comment by randallsquared | Hacker News Reader

The vibe around smart glasses is so weird: Governments and businesses can record in public, which is right and proper, but if an individual person records what they see, that's wrong and creepy.

View on HN

The original assumption behind CCTV was that it's recorded but realistically never seen, or maybe seen by one person staring at a bunch of screens at once. That's what made it acceptable.

Of course this has changed drastically, but CCTV basically got grandfathered in in most people's minds.

CCTV also writes over itself over time.

For $650, I just purchased a consumer-level CCTV (writes locally, on a loop) which can auto-detect all humans, vehicles, and pets — creating montages of visitors (for later review). This is entirely offline, eight camera, just over two weeks retention at 12MP (configurable to months with dual SATA slots and video setting changes).

What cloud recording is capable of determining... is absolutely limitless. I think this is what makes Flock so scary / "different."

The reasonable suspicion around random people wearing secret face cameras is consistent with the idea that both more government and more corporate surveillance are bad.

To be fair cameras on every fn corner is also creepy. But cameras on uncle Ronny are creepier because they're closer and they're usually pointed at glutes.

A fixed security camera is visible, scoped to a specific area, and (in theory) governed by policy, retention limits, audits, etc. Smart glasses are much harder to notice and can record anywhere

Yes in my country there are rules a about security cameras- not that anyone follows them but they exist and you can theoretically sue someone over them.

Glassholes are new. We can tell when someone is trying to film eleven year olds in a public swimming pool but this is the new frontier.

It's because wrong and creepy people will use what they record for wrong and creepy things. Especially when it comes to women.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/mar/18/disturbing-r...

Everything is effin' creepy, your rights end where my start and all that. And I will guard my and my family privacy with closed fist traveling at non-trivial speed to face of folks deliberately wearing such glasses and recording, pedophiles or not. Its also punishable by law to record people without prior consent where I live (Switzerland), and not just theoretically on paper.

Since fighting government is extremely hard, lets tackle lower hanging fruit above first and try for the best case scenario later. Also, government can claim its primarily for security, whether true or not depends on the case but private folks can hardly claim that.

Imagine all those video feeds and then you start to see the patterns especially with AI. Oh my god, they don't want to see those patterns emerging.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com