alt Hacker NewsIt can be simultaneously true that smart glasses are a technological marvel and a privacy nightmare.
It's also important to consider that while many places have some legal framework along the lines of "no reasonable expectation of privacy in public spaces," there's a social-psychological gap between that and the presumption of being constantly recorded, be it by other private individuals or governments.
Because of this, my view on this technology is that it's a net negative in society, and generally unhealthy.
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As a full-time glasses-wearer and sci-fi nerd, I want smart glasses SO BAD. Just running the equivalent of YOLOv8 on your glasses identifying objects in your view real time would be very very cool.
But as a privacy-conscious developer, I want exactly zero connection to any FAANG cloud service in my smart classes.
So until someone releases a pair of smart glasses I can get with my prescription and, for example, use my phone for "local" compute with no forced cloud access, I'm going to skip the whole category.
I also feel for the unfortunate Kenyan annotators drawing and tagging rectangles of people using the toilet -
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/workers-report-watch...
IMO much of the "no reasonable expectation" stuff is simply wrong, or treats things as an unreasonable binary.
For example, there's no reasonable expectation that singing to myself in public won't be recorded.
But almost everyone in public does reasonably-assume that their every step isn't being permanently logged by a stalking drone swarm.