Ray-Ban and the privacy on social networks

The product differs radically from previous smart glasses such as Google’s or Snap’s in one fundamental way: they were designed to be easily recognizable as “special” glasses, equipped with a camera that showed when it was in use; but Ray-Ban Stories look like perfectly normal glasses — in three standard Ray-Ban models: the iconic Wayfarer, the Round and the Meteor — in which the camera is impossible to detect, and while there is a LED that lights up when the camera is in use, it can easily be overlooked outside in daylight.

In short: a well-developed product thanks to the increasing miniaturization and lower battery consumption of the sensors and components involved, which make the glasses, as Wired noted, “dangerously easy to use”. Wearers of the easily recognizable Google Glasses were dubbed ‘glassholes’ because they refused to remove them, while Snap Spectacles were almost jokey, with a large LED that indicated whether they were in use; but Facebook has opted for the opposite with Ray-Ban Stories. In fact, aware of the widespread antipathy toward Facebook, the launch focuses on the Ray-Ban brand, the epitome of cool. Now, Facebook can sell its glasses anywhere by tapping into Luxottica’s vast network of stores, and present them as a fashionable product at a reasonable price of $299.

But all those attributes, which would generally be perceived as very positive in any product, become a problem once you know Facebook, a company that believes the rules don’t apply to it, and that when it oversteps the mark, simply apologizes and moves on. Now, every time we see someone wearing Ray-Bans — I have worn the black Wayfarer all my life — we will first check if they are the smart version, in which case we’ll check to see if they are in use and we are being filmed. As if there weren’t already enough privacy problems in the world, we now have what are to all intents and purposes, spy glasses.

All the restrictions other companies have placed on such products have been ignored by Facebook. Do you want a Facebook camera on your nose? No problem. Facial recognition? Of course, what could possibly go wrong? What if something does go wrong? What if we break the law? What if someone dies as a result? Nothing, we apologize and that’s it. The true Facebook’s culture in a nutshell.

The idea of sunglasses being used to secretly record everything going on around us deserves some debate, some consensus. Now, we are all just a few seconds away from being posted on social networks. Sure, this has been possible since we all started carrying a camera in our pockets, but that at least required the gesture of raising the smartphone and pointing it in our direction. How many cases will there be where someone is able to identify the small LED and doesn’t want to be recorded? But Facebook doesn’t care about that. What’s more, it benefits from creating controversy this way, as if it were simply another well-meaning company trying to launch a fun product.

When global company with billions of users and that is able to impact society behaves in an utterly irresponsible way, like a latter-day sorcerer’s apprentice, maybe it’s time to ask ourselves if there isn’t something wrong with it, and if we shouldn’t take some kind of measures to regulate its activities before it does more damage. And I mean MORE damage…