Lawmakers are once again turning up the legal heat on smart glasses. Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Ciresi (D-Montgomery) has introduced a bill that would require every pair of smart glasses “manufactured, sold, and used” in the state to have a “visual indicator” that tells others when they’re recording.
Again, if they are “smart”, they can be hacked. That light can be disabled, and even covered.
Not if the power to the recording mechanism must run through the light. There is an electrically engineered way to make sure the light must be powered on before the recording mechanism if it is wired between the power supply and the electronics.
Nothing to hack. Just a wire/circuit and an LED.
That’s how the iSight camera in all MacBooks work. That camera cannot be powered on without first powering on the notification LED. It’s integrated into the circuit. Powering on the camera must first power on the LED, and there is no way around that. It’s physically impossible.
and there is no way around that. It’s physically impossible.
As fun as both of those things can be, both together or separately, I wasn’t talking about blocking the camera, but, rather, accessing it illicitly
Thanks for the 90s flashback, though ;)
They mean you can block the recording light
You block the LED. Sharpie also works.
Black nail polish is still a thing in 2026.
If this is law they need to make meta develop technology that doesn’t allow record If the light is blocked. They can make it happen.
The current iteration of the glasses already does this. It was bypassed days after release.
Ah fuck me they’re fast
You can still cover the LED. I don’t trust these things or the creeps that buy them. They should be illegal.
Not every WebCam circuitry is designed with your safety and privacy in mind.
If it makes you feel better, cover it up.
I get to choose my web cam and if I cover it. I have no control over what the owner of these glasses does with them - or whatever they capture. These are practically custom made for upskirt creeps and god knows what else.
I was just using WebCams as a contemporaneous technological example. Not to equate the two, as they are, as you have illustrated, extraordinarily different in their contextual applications.
These glasses creep me the absolute fuck out, and have for over a decade, ever since Google glasses first came out. I think they should just be outright outlawed, but that’s not the world we live in.
I agree with everything else you’ve said in this thread, but if someone is getting upskirt recordings of you with their glasses … Hopefully you’d notice.
Just cut the wire and run a new one past the light directly to the camera.
The user owns this device and can make physical alterations.
If this is a nearly microscopic, integrated circuit, you understand that’s a difficult thing to master, especially if you’re trying to attack merely with software, remotely
If this is, say, the integrated WebCam in your laptop, a piece of malware can’t exactly do what you’re proposing
And, unless the physical owner of the device is, themselves, trying to undermine their own security, I don’t see the logic in what you’re proposing. However, it is technically possible. But that’s not exactly the point of what I’m saying.
So, yes, as the owner of my laptop, I could undermine the security of that simple circuitry, but I have no motivation to do so. And any remote attacker would only have the resource of software to do so, and would be limited by what software could do— which would be limited by the, presumably, uncorrupted physical circuitry.
the thing with the macbook is, that the user does not want to be recorded secretly. with meta glasses, the wearer is the recorder.
You can hack it by rewiring it.
How can you do that with malware?
I don’t think malware is the concern (although it is a concern).
The main concern spying on people in public. The light is not to inform you that it’s recording — it’s to inform others. But if it you can just rewire it or paint over it, then it doesn’t really help the technology protect other’s privacy.
Right, but rewiring the microcircuitry in your sunglasses isn’t some afternoon affair, and, no matter your painting skills, painting over the light will be noticeable to some degree. Not only are the technical skills for both extraordinarily rare (especially to do properly), for someone to actually try is equally rare. Perhaps moreso.
Whi, you and I can argue back-and-forth about theoretical possibilities, the practical reality is that it’s so profoundly unlikely to ever happen, that it isn’t a reasonable thing to be concerned about. At least not right now.
It could still be ‘hacked’ in the truest sense of the term. Just on a hardware level instead of pure software. How hard some people will work to be surreptitious creeps should never be underestimated.
You know, I’m sure we’re both very intelligent people who have thought about this problem for a long time.
Instead of arguing, I think we should both focus on energies on working towards a collective solution.
(it sounds like a fun game of “darts“ when we both try to infiltrate each other’s systems, but played over a few drinks at a bar, some other time)
Hah, fooled them again! I am among the dumbest people this side of the Tordesillas line.
That said, I’d be happy to work with you.
Tordesillas line
OK, you got me with this one. I consider myself reasonably well educated, but even I had to go look this one up and do a little reading. And even though I think I got the gist a bit, I don’t think I quite understand what you meant in the context of this conversation, lol.
I guess that, not being a European, the cultural impact of the statement is a bit lost on me— but if you were in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, and we were navigating some beef between the Tompkins Projects, Clinton Hill, and the south side of the Willy B, I’d fill you in.
That said, I’d be happy to work with you too!
Sure it can. Murder is illegal, but i can still buy a gun and shoot someone. If you hack your glasses to not comply with this law, you will get whatever punishment the law prescribes.
There have been a lot of unsolved murders over the years. Just sayin’.
a little nail polish.
The “visual indicator” will tell you when the human wearing them has actively pressed “record”.
If Meta wants to “accidentally capture ambient video data” there will be no indication.
That’s usually not how these indicators work (but yes, this would have to be made explicit in the law). Usually the way they are wired the camera can only turn on when the light is also on.
The light will be under the aluminum or electrical tape.
What?
They can cover the LED with tape.
Have the perv light on all the time it’s recording. Done.
Don’t care: light or not, I don’t want somebody pointing a camera at me at all times in a civilized society. If anything, this legislation could normalize creeps with cameras that are constantly pointed at you.
We haven’t even gotten to phase two of enshittification, and these things still haven’t exhibited value.
The problem I see with this is that this bill pretty much requires proprietary software to run on those glasses (which right now is the case anyways), which in turn means everything else gets shittier. Making laws like this is stupid, they should make a law that bans those glasses if people do not want to be secretly recorded.
It would be neat if someone designed Anti-Meta Glasses. Instead of a camera, it emits a scattered 180 degree IR mesh to make whatever Meta wearing persons video completely useless.
Back in the day there were various bits of legislation to make apparent that then-novel camera phones were taking pictures. I remember phones with shutter sounds that could not be disabled by design.
Of course, they could be disabled by methods not in the design.
even my own idea here still doesn’t go far enough, but there need to be criminal penalties for disabling such a feature that are at least as severe as illegally concealing a firearm
frankly I don’t think these should even be legal to manufacture, sell, or possess, but I have zero hopes that that level of regulation will ever happen
Finally a decent law that actually helps people keep their privacy. Estonia should adopt this too.
The ones everyone keeps talking about already do. It even won’t record if you try to cover the light.
