Is It Possible to Make Smart Glasses That Aren’t Creepy?
Is It Possible to Make Smart Glasses That Aren’t Creepy?
有可能制造出不让人感到“毛骨悚然”的智能眼镜吗？
Face computers are on the upswing, as companies, massive and tiny, are all vying for nuggets in the smart-glasses gold rush. 面部计算机正处于上升期，大大小小的公司都在争相涌入智能眼镜的淘金热中，试图分一杯羹。
That also means the industry is garnering its fair share of criticism, mostly focusing on the fact that creeps can abuse camera-equipped smart glasses to capture photos and videos of people without their knowledge or consent. 这也意味着该行业正招致不少批评，焦点主要集中在：不怀好意的人可能会滥用配备摄像头的智能眼镜，在他人不知情或未同意的情况下拍摄照片和视频。
The prime target for such criticism is the biggest company in the space, Meta. The company’s smart glasses can capture images, audio, and video of whatever and whoever the wearer is looking at. That alone is enough to alarm anyone concerned about protecting their privacy. 此类批评的主要目标是该领域最大的公司——Meta。该公司的智能眼镜可以捕捉佩戴者所注视的任何事物和任何人的图像、音频和视频。单凭这一点，就足以让任何关心隐私保护的人感到担忧。
Meta’s smart glasses do have an indicator light to warn bystanders when they’re being recorded, though some Meta users have figured out how to bypass those safety features and disable the lights. More recently, the company has added anti-tamper features that disable the glasses if a user has meddled with them. Meta 的智能眼镜确实配有指示灯，用以提醒旁人他们正在被录制，但一些用户已经找到了绕过这些安全功能并禁用指示灯的方法。最近，该公司增加了防篡改功能，如果用户对设备进行干扰，眼镜就会自动禁用。
Other concerns about the glasses have continued to mount. Earlier this year, Meta programmed a feature that, if enabled, would add face-recognition technology to its smart glasses. After a WIRED report exposed this feature, Meta then deleted the code from its app. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth verified the existence of the feature, called Name Tag, on The Atlantic’s podcast The Most Interesting Thing in AI. (At an event in June, Meta also said it’s considering adding camera-free smart glasses to its lineup.) 关于这款眼镜的其他担忧也在不断增加。今年早些时候，Meta 编写了一项功能，如果启用，将为其智能眼镜增加面部识别技术。在《连线》（WIRED）杂志报道曝光该功能后，Meta 从其应用程序中删除了相关代码。Meta 首席技术官安德鲁·博斯沃思（Andrew Bosworth）在《大西洋月刊》的播客《人工智能中最有趣的事》（The Most Interesting Thing in AI）中证实了该功能（名为“Name Tag”）的存在。（在六月份的一次活动中，Meta 还表示正在考虑在其产品线中增加无摄像头版本的智能眼镜。）
This conversation around privacy and smart glasses is only going to grow as other big tech companies—notably Google and Samsung—enter the space later this year. Apple is also reportedly working on smart glasses that could arrive in 2027, though it has reportedly delayed production to address the privacy issues. 随着其他大型科技公司（特别是谷歌和三星）在今年晚些时候进入该领域，围绕隐私和智能眼镜的讨论只会愈演愈烈。据报道，苹果公司也在研发智能眼镜，可能会在 2027 年推出，尽管据称该公司已推迟生产以解决隐私问题。
As invasive as the technology can feel, lots of people really do want and like their smart glasses. Meta has sold tens of millions of units, and despite impassioned debates about privacy among tech watchdogs and the general public, the company’s glasses are selling better than ever. 尽管这项技术让人感到侵犯隐私，但确实有很多人想要并喜欢他们的智能眼镜。Meta 已经售出了数千万台设备，尽管科技监管机构和公众之间关于隐私的争论十分激烈，但该公司的眼镜销量却比以往任何时候都要好。
People have found genuinely useful reasons to wear the glasses, whether it’s quickly snapping a picture or a GoPro-style video of a sick mountain bike run. There are also accessibility use cases that artificial intelligence can help with, like real-time captioning of spoken conversations and Meta’s partnership with Be My Eyes, which helps visually impaired people interact with the world around them by activating the glasses’ camera. 人们已经发现了佩戴这些眼镜的真正实用理由，无论是快速抓拍照片，还是拍摄一段酷炫的山地自行车骑行视频（类似 GoPro 的视角）。人工智能还可以辅助一些无障碍应用场景，例如对口头对话进行实时字幕显示，以及 Meta 与“Be My Eyes”的合作——通过激活眼镜摄像头，帮助视障人士与周围的世界进行互动。
Smaller brands have tried to appeal to the anti-Meta crowd with privacy-focused smart glasses. Even Realities, for example, makes smart glasses without cameras in a deliberate attempt to differentiate from Meta’s offerings. Other glasses, like the new Solos frames, come with a privacy shield users can pop over the camera lenses in sensitive environments. 一些较小的品牌试图通过主打隐私的智能眼镜来吸引那些抵制 Meta 的群体。例如，Even Realities 制造了不带摄像头的智能眼镜，刻意与 Meta 的产品区分开来。其他眼镜，如新款 Solos 镜框，则配有隐私遮罩，用户可以在敏感环境下将其盖在摄像头镜头上。
“The fact that it’s even a discussion point is really great for the industry,” says Matt Margolis, vice president of business development at Vuzix, an enterprise optics manufacturer. “If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t be a point of focus, which means we’re really close to having critical mass of products into the market.” “它能成为一个讨论点，对整个行业来说其实是件好事，”企业光学制造商 Vuzix 的业务发展副总裁马特·马戈利斯（Matt Margolis）表示。“如果它不重要，就不会成为关注焦点，这意味着我们离产品进入市场并形成规模效应已经非常近了。”
Smart glasses are not even close to the first product to cause such widespread concern. Privacy advocates bemoaned the addition of cameras to smartphones, just as they argued against cameras going into laptops and other personal tech. The thing about cameras and phones, though, is that the phone still needs to be pulled out, held up, and have its camera activated to capture a photo or film a video. Smart glasses, with small built-in cameras and the user’s ability to obfuscate the recording notification, are much sneakier. 智能眼镜远非第一个引起如此广泛担忧的产品。隐私倡导者曾对智能手机增加摄像头表示哀叹，就像他们曾反对在笔记本电脑和其他个人科技产品中加入摄像头一样。然而，摄像头和手机的问题在于，手机仍需要被掏出、举起并激活摄像头才能拍照或录像。而智能眼镜内置了微型摄像头，且用户有能力掩盖录制提示，因此要隐蔽得多。
“The fact that they are designed to be innocuous is the biggest difference,” says Thorin Klosowski, a senior security and privacy activist at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Someone pointing their phone or a camera is going to be pretty obvious. Even with a phone, you can’t totally disguise what you’re doing.” “它们被设计得看起来人畜无害，这是最大的区别，”非营利组织电子前沿基金会（Electronic Frontier Foundation）的高级安全与隐私活动家索林·克洛索夫斯基（Thorin Klosowski）说。“有人举着手机或相机是非常明显的。即使是用手机，你也不可能完全掩盖你的行为。”
Is it even possible to make smart glasses that are truly private for wearers and people around them? One way to start might be to make the indicator light more vibrant or the visual look of the glasses more glaringly obvious that there’s a camera attached to them. (See Snapchat’s early big, bold camera glasses.) But people don’t seem to want to wear obvious camera glasses; that is partly why people wearing the goofy Google Glass headsets from 2013 were ridiculed and called “Glassholes.” 制造出对佩戴者和周围人来说真正保护隐私的智能眼镜，这可能吗？一个切入点可能是让指示灯更醒目，或者让眼镜的外观更明显地显示出上面装有摄像头。（参考 Snapchat 早期那种又大又显眼的摄像眼镜。）但人们似乎并不想佩戴外观明显的摄像眼镜；这也是为什么 2013 年佩戴笨拙的谷歌眼镜（Google Glass）的人会被嘲笑并被称为“Glassholes”（眼镜混蛋）的部分原因。
“I don’t think it’s really possible to create such a pair of smart glasses,” says Jitesh Ubrani, director of research on consumer devices at International Data Corporation. “There is certainly a market incentive, right? People want this kind of thing, but at the same time, they also want glasses that look normal and look like regular glasses.” “我不认为真的能制造出这样的智能眼镜，”国际数据公司（IDC）消费设备研究总监吉特什·乌布拉尼（Jitesh Ubrani）说。“市场激励机制确实存在，对吧？人们想要这种东西，但同时，他们也希望眼镜看起来正常，就像普通的眼镜一样。”
Stacey Higginbotham, a policy fellow at Consumer Reports, says there’s no reason these devices have to be a privacy nightmare, but social and economic incentives encourage them to be. Higginbotham and her colleague Justin Brookman, director of technology policy at Consumer Reports, are advocating for legislation in the California senate that would not only require companies to include visible indicators on devices that can record audio and video but would also prohibit people from disabling those indicators. 《消费者报告》（Consumer Reports）的政策研究员斯泰西·希金博瑟姆（Stacey Higginbotham）表示，这些设备没有理由非得成为隐私噩梦，但社会和经济激励机制却在推波助澜。希金博瑟姆和她的同事、该机构的技术政策总监贾斯汀·布鲁克曼（Justin Brookman）正在加州参议院推动立法，不仅要求公司在可录制音视频的设备上包含可见指示器，还要禁止用户禁用这些指示器。
“As technology develops and has the capacity to increasingly collect everything about all of us all the time, then that’s where policy needs to come in,” Brookman says. “随着技术的发展，它越来越有能力随时随地收集关于我们所有人的所有信息，这就是政策需要介入的地方，”布鲁克曼说。
The pushback against smart glasses comes at the same time that other surveillance tech is coming under fire. Cameras are everywhere, whether it is Flock cameras filming in the streets or a draconian surveillance network in Madison Square Garden. People know they’re being constantly watched, recorded, and logged, and they don’t like it. 对智能眼镜的抵制，正值其他监控技术受到抨击之际。摄像头无处不在，无论是街头拍摄的 Flock 摄像头，还是麦迪逊广场花园严苛的监控网络。人们知道自己正不断地被监视、记录和存档，而他们对此感到不满。