Facebook makes some Ray-Bans

A milestone in smart glasses — and in the future of privacy?

Sep 10, 2021

A woman wearing Ray-Ban Stories. (Facebook) — (Facebook)

Over the weekend, I had a few friends over to my backyard for brunch. As usual when leaving the house, I threw on a pay of Ray-Ban’s Wayfarer sunglasses. But these weren’t the ordinary Wayfarers I pick up every six months or so when, like clockwork, I lose the previous pair. These were Ray-Ban Stories, the $300 smart glasses built by EssilorLuxottica in collaboration with Facebook.

They can take pictures, shoot video, and play music. They can also hide in plain sight.

Over the couple hours we spent eating and drinking, none of my dozen or so friends commented on my sunglasses or seemed to notice them at all — even when I tapped the button on the top of the right arm, triggering a white light intended to draw attention to the photos and videos I was taking of them.

I wasn’t the only one who had this experience during the review period. The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern surreptitiously recorded her mother, her aunt, her barista, strangers at a coffee shop, and “an aggressive squirrel in Central Park.” Wired’s Peter Rubin captured his friends without their knowledge at dinner, and Lauren Goode took secret video of her editor. At BuzzFeed, the industry’s leading hardware review troll, Katie Notopoulos, put black tape around the light on her Ray-Bans to hide the camera light entirely.

Based on my own experience, though, and the experiences of the others reviewers, she needn’t have bothered.

I’m of two minds about Facebook’s first foray into smart glasses. On one hand, they are impressive in their design, capabilities, and price. On the other, they represent another brick in the wall of surveillance technology that is springing up around us. Social norms, laws and regulations, and the technology itself all have a ways to go in creating a world we can live with.

Let’s look at those two sides of the product in turn.

The thing that impresses me most about Ray-Ban Stories is the way they look: just like any other pair of Wayfarers you’ve ever seen. The glasses come in three different styles and various colors; mine look like this:

Even if you picked them up, you might not realize you were holding smart glasses: they weigh only about five grams more than a regular pair. From more than a few inches away, the cameras could be mistaken for screws, if you can see them at all. (This effect is particularly pronounced on the black models I was sent for review.)

The giveaway is the thicker-than-normal arms, which house most of the electronic components: microphones, speakers, and a touchpad for controlling audio. If the audio is on, and you’re standing close enough to the wearer, that could be another giveaway: most sunglasses don’t play podcasts or music. (Both sound great, by the way.)

But the normcore design of Ray-Ban Stories represents a significant break with the smart glasses market to date. The category was created in 2013 by Google with Glass, a futuristic head-mounted display that inspired a significant privacy backlash. The design was aggressively sci-fi and made for easy mockery; the most iconic image of them remains Silicon Valley gadfly Robert Scoble wearing them in the shower.

When Snapchat Spectacles arrived three years later, the core product had cleverly been inserted into sunglasses — designed for outdoor use, where privacy concerns are typically less acute. The design was bold, with cameras framed by banana-yellow circles that gave them a youthful, toy-like appearance. Despite weak initial sales, Snap continues to iterate on the product; in keeping with company tradition, Facebook has lifted many of the core ideas for Ray-Ban Stories directly from its rival.

But the idea of essentially smuggling a smart camera into a well-known design — that feels new. (Amazon tried to make its technology similarly invisible for its audio-focused Echo Frames; those don’t include cameras, though, and I would describe the design as generic and utilitarian compared to the Wayfarers.)

Then there’s the price: starting at $299, or a bit more for versions with prescription or polarized lenses. Given how many people regularly pay that much or more for designer sunglasses, it’s plausible that a pair of Ray-Bans with decent cameras and speakers could sell for that price. Regular Wayfarers go for around $195; as Luxottica’s chief wearable officer, Rocco Basilico, told me in an interview: “For a hundred dollars more, you get Wayfarers with superpowers.”

(Basilico proposed the collaboration with Facebook in a cold email to CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019. How’d you get his email, I asked. Basilico just Googled it, he told me.)

As to those superpowers: I found the the quality of the photos and the videos taken from the twin 5-megapixel cameras just fine: perhaps a bit worse than what a current-generation smartphone can do, but well worth the compromise for moments when digging your phone out of your pocket would take too long or spoil the moment. One of my big sticking points with past smart glasses has been how long it takes to transmit files from the device to your phone; Facebook’s system, which uses a standalone companion app for Android and iOS called View, seems moderately faster. (The ideal state — photos and videos downloading to your phone’s camera roll automatically as you take them — remains a ways off, due to a variety of technical limitations.)

Another issue I often have with gadgets like this is the way they represent one more thing to charge: one more battery to anxiously monitor; one more carrying case not to lose; one more electrical outlet to free up; one more charging cable to throw in my travel bag. All of that is still true with Ray-Ban Stories, but the nice thing is that even when the battery dies forever and you lose all the relevant accessories, they will still function as sunglasses. They will still look like Ray-Bans.

You can’t say that about, for example, an Apple Watch.

II.

OK, so: as smart sunglasses go, these are pretty good smart sunglasses. They are not the mixed-reality heads-up display of our sci-fi dreams, but they aren’t nothing, either.

They are cameras on our faces, though. Cameras that, if early reviews are any indication, few people seem to notice when they are recording. How should we think about that?

Here’s one way: no matter how much privacy advocates warn of the possible abuses of ubiquitous surveillance technology, these technologies are still proliferating at a rapid clip. And consumers … seem to like them? Look at Amazon’s Ring network of surveillance cameras for the home, which are allowing police to build a kind of volunteer neighborhood panopticon across the country. Look at Citizen — formerly known as Vigilante — the fast-growing “Waze for crime” app that encourages you to report the most minor of neighborhood disturbances so they can be repackaged as push notifications sent out to build a fear-based marketing funnel for subscription 911 services.

Or, less dramatically, look at the first three generations of Snap’s Spectacles, which raised most of the same issues that Facebook’s new glasses do. Spectacles had a more prominent visual indicator for video recordings — a swirling animated light, as opposed to Facebook’s static one — but I’m sure plenty of people were recorded without their knowledge anyway. Just as, every day, people are recorded without their knowledge using smartphones, CCTVs, aerial drones, and who knows what else.

When Ray-Ban Stories were announced on Thursday morning, Twitter users staged an immediate and predictable pile-on. (Techmeme offers a representative sample.) Perhaps inspired by the success of Google Glass protests eight years ago, there was a lot of talk about confronting anyone found to be wearing the Facebook glasses, and possibly punching them in the face. The most unexpected Stories review of the day came from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who quote-tweeted a video that Facebook hardware chief Andrew Bosworth had taken while hanging out with Zuckerberg, adding the caption: “Throwing pillows of various sizes at Mark Zuckerberg looks fun.”

The gist of this criticism is: Facebook is a company that is forever pushing the limits when it comes to our privacy, and now here it is with a camera you might never see recording you.

“We are trying to have this dialogue with society through product launches and conversations,” Bosworth told me when I asked him about the glasses’ privacy implications. “Like, hey, here’s a product. It does these things. Can we agree this OK? Can we agree this is normal, and this is something we’re excited about? And then instead of just blitzing society with a huge package of new functionality that they have to integrate all at once, can we layer it in so we add each piece as it’s ready?”

He continued: “I’m really enthusiastic about some of the things that will be possible with smart glasses that would be impossible otherwise: augmented hearing, augmented vision. You can even go beyond what corrective lenses are capable of doing.”

In practice, I suspect most of us are being recorded way more than we understand. And there are benefits to this technology: let’s not forget that a citizen recording triggered last summer’s protests for racial justice. Up until recently, though, it has been rare for a friend or family member to record us in this way. Ray-Ban Stories feel like a step toward making this practice universal.

Perhaps it isn’t: there’s no guarantee Ray-Ban Stories will be a blockbuster hit, any more than Spectacles were before it. Small-scale use of the product among family and friends seems unlikely to cause any drama more intense than social networks cause within those groups already. A lot of people will use this product in the ways in which it was intended, and I imagine they’ll enjoy it and maybe even buy a pair for someone else.

Still: I wish we had a national privacy law. I wish people could opt out of being recorded like this, and I wish that could be enforced at the level of hardware. I wish we saw more tech companies investing in anti-surveillance technology — tools to thwart the state-level actors, the Palantirs, and the Citizen AIs, on behalf of protesters and dissidents and journalists and victims of domestic abuse.

That’s a lot to hang on a review of a pair of sunglasses, I know. But you don’t have to work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation to worry just how quickly internet-connected cameras are being woven into the fabric of the world. One pair of smart glasses might not change our current reality all that much. But the best time to think seriously about privacy is while we still have some left to protect.

The Ratio

Today in news that could change public perception of the big tech companies

⬆️ Trending up: Amazon said it would begin covering 100 percent of college tuition for its US hourly employees next year. Still cheaper than letting them unionize! (Annie Palmer / CNBC)

⬆️ Trending up: Twitter is testing a way to let bots identify themselves as automated, in an effort to promote better bot behavior and user awareness. Love it, ship it. (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)

⬇️ Trending down: Curators of popular playlists on Spotify says the company has allowed its reporting system to be abused by bad actors for years. People report more popular playlists to get them removed and make room for their own; the system is easily gamed and Spotify has provided almost no customer support. (Sarah Perez / TechCrunch)

Governing

⭐ The president of Brazil issued new internet rules that are designed to prevent social networks from removing some posts, including those in which he predicts that the next election will be stolen from him. A dark new chapter is unfolding in the history of internet speech. Here’s Jack Nicas in the New York Times:

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is temporarily banning social media companies from removing certain content, including his claims that the only way he’ll lose next year’s elections is if the vote is rigged — one of the most significant steps by a democratically elected leader to control what can be said on the internet.
The new social media rules, issued this week and effective immediately, appear to be the first time a national government has stopped internet companies from taking down content that violates their rules, according to internet law experts and officials at tech companies. And they come at a precarious moment for Brazil.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill that attempts to ban social media companies with more than 50 million users from removing posts based on their content. It argues that social networks are “common carriers,” a legal strategy suggested earlier this year in an opinion by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. (Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post)

House Democrats’ budget proposal includes $1 billion for the Federal Trade Commission to establish “a new digital-focused division that would police privacy violations, cybersecurity incidents and other online abuses.” That would represent roughly a 30 percent increase in spending on the FTC over the next decade. (Tony Romm and Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post)

“After Google decided to quit working on Project Maven in 2018 thanks to staff protests, rivals Amazon and Microsoft quietly took on Department of Defense contracts worth $50 million to help the military identify objects from drone and other aerial footage, according to a new analysis of federal government contract records.” Will their employees have anything to say about it? (Thomas Brewster / Forbes)

A look at some of the artificial intelligence projects that tech giants have rejected taking on amid concerns from in-house ethicists. “Google has also blocked new AI features analyzing emotions, fearing cultural insensitivity, while Microsoft restricted software mimicking voices and IBM rejected a client request for an advanced facial-recognition system.” (Paresh Dave and Jeffrey Dastin / Reuters)

Amid a controversy over its decision to hand over an IP address to the Swiss authorities, the makers of privacy-focused email tool ProtonMail said they would add Sir Tim Berners-Lee to their board. The company had previously claimed it did not log IP addresses. (Gareth Halfacree / The Register)

Surveillance tools adopted by the New York Police Department after 9/11 are increasingly used to investigate minor crimes. They identified one protester “using facial recognition tools they applied to his Instagram profile, intercepted his phone calls and used drones to peer inside his apartment.” (Ali Watkins / New York Times)

China has slowed approvals for new online video games as part of its crackdown on tech. It’s a new headache for companies like Tencent. (Josh Ye / South China Morning Post)

Industry

Amazon unveiled its first branded television sets. They start at $370 and include hands-free navigations with Alexa. (Todd Spangler / Variety)

Related: The company also released an upgraded version of its flagship Fire streaming stick for $54.99. (Chris Welch / The Verge)

Amazon’s cloud gaming service, Luna, aded support for Chromebooks. It also added a “couch mode” for cooperative play. (Ben Schoon / 9to5Google)

Kevin Lynch, who led software efforts on the Apple Watch, will take over the company’s car project. This job has real Defense Against the Dark Arts vibes, in terms of expected longevity in the role. But Lynch has navigated Apple uncommonly well. (Mark Gurman / Bloomberg)

Facebook is reportedly building custom chips to more efficiently perform machine-learning tasks including content recommendations. Another chip in development “aims to improve the quality of watching recorded and livestreamed videos for users of its apps through a process known as video transcoding.” (Wayne Ma / The Information)

Twitter is testing emoji reactions in Turkey. An excellent move — the heart is way too limited. And maybe it’s time to bring back the star as an option? I’d use it! (Amanda Silberling / TechCrunch)

Tinder added an “explore” section of the app for when you have totally exhausted all the singles in your area and have run out of Instagram thirst traps to peruse. “The new Explore section includes more than 15 types of interests, such as ‘foodies,’ ‘gamers,’ and ‘animal parents.’” (Ann-Marie Alcántara / Wall Street Journal)

Epic Games said it would shut down live video chat app Houseparty next month. Houseparty’s early success inspired Facebook to clone it with a since-shuttered project called Bonfire; it has a minor resurgence in popularity during the first year of the pandemic. (Gene Park / Washington Post)

A bug in crypto trading platform OpenSea bug appears to have destroyed nearly $100K in NFTs. The company says the bug is fixed; it’s unclear if the NFTs can be recovered. (Arijit Sarkar / CoinTelegraph)

La Liga became the first soccer league to mint NFTs of all of its players. “A partnership with French digital soccer collectibles platform Sorare will allow fans to trade and play fantasy tournaments with NFTs representing players from the 20 biggest clubs in Spain, including Barcelona, Real Madrid and Atlético Madrid.” (Jamie Crawley / Coinbase)