Meta Creep-O-Rama Glasses
Oh marvellous. As if being a photographer isn't hard enough these days, here's Meta and their latest range of spy glasses to speed up the race to the bottom. Your girlfriends bottom, possibly.
I was just reading on the BBC News ('Smart glasses are 'an invasion of privacy' - Meta's are selling better than ever') about another innovative way to be a dick with a camera.
Streep photography is hard enough, especially for men who are quickly seen as creeps, or 'dirty old men' as soon as you get the camera out. Not that I go around taking photos of women or kids, but many photographers do, and while a lot of it is very good, some of it borders on the voyeuristic, and intrusive.
The difference here though, it that while you have a camera in your hand you're not hiding it; a camera in your hand is a very visible thing, it's obvious that it's there (unless you're in the bushes with a 400mm lens), but these glasses throw all of that out of the window.
The women only find out about the videos of them after they gain traction, and often abuse, online
I read somewhere that these glasses can use the recording function to feed video footage directly to a phone via an Instagram livestream. An algorithm then detects faces and prompts face search engines to scour the internet for matching images, pulling out anything from phone numbers to home addresses.
The implications are frightening - a bad actor could just find a home address and just follow them home.
For (street) photography specifically, this is poisonous. The entire social contract of street photography - that a candid photograph in public is a fleeting moment, not a permanent dossier on a person - falls apart when the act of looking at someone can instantly produce their home address. People will reasonably become far more hostile to any camera in the street, whether it's a phone, your precious Leica M6, or a pair of Joe 90 glasses. The impact on a legitimate, centuries-old art form could be severe.
For street photographers, I think the real threat isn't just someone using these glasses to photograph people. Rather, it's also the generalised public anxiety they produce. When people can't tell the difference between a photographer making a considered image and someone building a stalking profile, trust in all cameras in public breaks down.
That's a real loss.
Respecting dignity, not weaponising images are exactly what distinguishes serious street photography from these glasses and this kind of, well, let's call it surveillance.
But unfortunately, I fear we'll increasingly all be tarred with the same brush.
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