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The story
Germany’s Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur) has decided that Meta’s new smart glasses don’t need to be banned, ruling that a recording-indicator LED is ‘sufficient’ — and the German-speaking Lemmy community has been buzzing about it. While some pointed out that a court case is still pending, the thread quickly turned to whether that tiny LED actually signals anything to bystanders at all, with people piling on weaknesses like how hard it is to see in bright sunlight or how easily it can be blacked out with a marker. The discussion spiraled into comparisons with doorbell cameras and Ring cameras, and even a DIY sensor nicknamed the ‘glasshole detector.’
No Ban for Meta’s Smart Glasses: Regulator Rules ‘LED Indicator Is Sufficient’
Source: heise.de / Original article here
What people said
True. If 'it has an LED' is all it takes to be fine, then literally any surveillance camera could be waved through the same way. The courts should sort this out properly — as a layman, my gut says this ends in a ban.
Sure, as long as you stick an LED on the door too.
As an experiment, try taping a pair of cheap sunglasses to the outside of an apartment building's front door.
Then time how many minutes it takes before someone destroys them.
And once Flock's license-plate-recognition cameras make their way to Europe too, the picture will be complete.
That's a motion-sensor stairwell light that also triggers a camera at the same time.
The idea is: once the light turns on, you know you're being recorded. If you don't like it, just don't use the stairs.
And don't forget you can just black out the LED dot with a permanent marker.
In broad daylight you can barely see the LED at all anyway, unless you're staring at it up close.
Beef up the detection range a bit and this could actually work as a countermeasure. I might actually pay money for a device like that.
As far as I know there's also an app version of this (here).
You could probably even rig it with a blue LED and build it into an acrylic sword.
https://github.com/sh4d0wm45k/glass-detect/blob/main/gd-pcb/gd-pcb.png?raw=true)
Though honestly, the device itself isn't anything special. It's just an ESP32 (about 5 euros) wired up to a few LEDs.
So this is what you mean by 'acrylic sword.'
https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/a5ffc27c-9e44-492e-93ce-56495a4a1cd0.png
I mean, plenty of people willingly install Ring cameras on their own front doors and record half the neighborhood 24/7 anyway.
Background and Key Points
The Bundesnetzagentur is Germany’s federal agency responsible for telecommunications and spectrum regulation, and it’s the body that reviews whether recording devices are legal. Meta’s camera glasses light up an LED while recording, but this is really just a ‘looks like transparency’ measure that manufacturers have voluntarily adopted since the Google Glass ‘glasshole’ controversy around 2013 — and this ruling effectively gives that approach official sign-off. That said, the matter isn’t fully settled: as reply 2 points out, a separate court case is still pending, and that ruling could end up being the one that’s legally binding. What split opinion in the thread was the actual effectiveness of the LED as a signal. Some pointed to technical weaknesses — it can be covered up, it’s hard to see in bright sunlight — while others argued it’s inconsistent to suddenly make an issue of this when doorbell cameras and Ring cameras, already widespread, record the surroundings just the same way. Both camps shared the same underlying worry about a creeping surveillance society, they just landed in different places on where to draw the line. One thing the article itself doesn’t mention: the DIY ‘glasshole detector’ is a personal project built around the ESP32, a cheap general-purpose microcontroller — not a commercial product you can buy to counter it.
*This article is excerpted and freely translated by our editorial team from a thread on the overseas forum Lemmy c/dach, ‘Kein Verbot für Meta-Brillen: Behörde sieht LED-Signal als ausreichend‘ (‘No Ban for Meta Glasses: Agency Sees LED Signal as Sufficient’). This site takes responsibility for the translation.
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