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Facebook and Ray-Ban selling sunglasses able to take pictures also

Your privacy belongs to us! Facebook and Ray-Ban have teamed up to create sunglasses that the wearer can use to discreetly to take pictures of their surroundings.

The Ray-Ban Stories eyewear features two 5-MP front-facing cameras for 2,592 x 1,944-pixel photos or 1,184 x 1,184-pixel videos at 30 frames per second.

A capture button is pushed to snap photo memories of what you see on your stroll through the city on a hot and sunny day, or record 30-second video clips to post online to such platforms as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok via a new Facebook View app for iOS and Android. The app also allows content to be edited or enhanced before upload, and saved to the phone’s memory, though the smart glasses do have enough built-in storage for more than 500 photos or 30 video clips. Or users can opt to for hands-free operation via Facebook Assistant voice commands.

The article describes several features that supposedly address the questions of privacy, such as led lights that glow when a picture is taken, but in the end these glasses are essentially a voyeur’s dream.

Without question such products have their legitimate uses, such as by undercover journalists or criminal investigators. To market them to the general public however means that both Facebook and Ray-Ban are willing to ignore concerns of right and wrong and the likelihood that their product will be badly misused for entire immoral reasons. All they care about is profit.

Or maybe the two companies are really developing this product to sell a more secretive version to their allies in the government. One does wonder.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

8 comments

  • Ian C.

    Just another item that needs to be checked for and taken off by visitors and staff before entering any restricted facility.
    On the positive side, it (and more capable successors) will be used to document a lot of police abuse, crime, and hilarious situations.

    We knew that tech like that will become cheap and potentially widespread. And it’ll improve soon. More storage, higher resolution, connected to a knowledge base to identify objects, sensors with a range beyond the visible spectrum. Wait until that stuff is integrated into one’s retina and brain-machine interface — do you have control over the footage or are you embedded into a network and remotely monitored/controlled? What if you look at licensed content, will the fee automatically be subtracted from your digital wallet? Or the inbuilt AI identifies that you engage in forbidden pleasures. But then, we can hack this to do what we want, implement our own pattern matchers to detect enemies of liberties, connect with our allies, identify harmful substances, and combine it with other sensors to have a more complete picture of our surroundings. Oh the possibilities… amazing.

  • Jeff Wright

    William Burroughs was right-we are a nation of finks.

  • Andrew_W

    Taking photos in public spaces is unrestricted, the cameras are obvious enough that they should be noticed in close proximity private settings, someone wearing sunglasses in bed with you should cause a little suspicion.

    These sorts of technological innovations are inevitable and have been going on for over a century, so, as with all technological innovations, society and people will learn to adapt.

  • Questioner

    Ian C.:

    Our future: is presented in the film THX 1138 (including electrical cars)!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hLXOVCZr-8

  • wayne

    Jeff-
    here you go….

    William S. Burroughs prediction….
    “Drugstore Cowboy” (1989)
    https://youtu.be/kZszbqdOq7g
    1:25

  • wayne

    Red Dawn (1984) –
    The death of Daryl Bates’
    https://youtu.be/Kt7zsac1q_0
    5:32

  • Alton

    My pair of sunglasses ? only does 1k pics
    But records at the old 720p for movies but does give two hours of run-time.

    Six years odle they are….yoda

    Ah!!! now [deleted] can capture it even more data in Real-time !!!

  • Going William Gibson one better: his captures required replacing an eyeball. It seems reality tends to better fiction.

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