Why Meta is removing the camera

0:00Flowing ad-bunch it on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's Bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the Bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign Terms the conditions apply. College football is back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwicker call it $55.55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day.

1:00This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen, snacks, a stapler, the new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. So meta is preparing to release a new line of smart glasses, completely entirely devoid of cameras, specifically to address these mounting fears over privacy and the internal code name for this device is Luna. There is a really specific irony in that hardware choice. You are looking at a company that spent billions of dollars and years of research developing visual artificial intelligence. I mean, they built these incredibly complex systems to recognize objects in real time, to map three dimensional spaces and track human eye movement.

2:01And after all of that capital expenditure and engineering effort, their next move is to just intentionally rip the lens right out of the hardware. Yeah, and the volume we are talking about here makes this a highly significant decision. meta is entirely dominating the smart glasses market right now. They sold over seven million pairs of their S allure Laxodica collaboration previously. Seven millions, a massive footprint. It is. And when you look at the displayless segment of the market, they currently hold 94% of it. So they essentially have a monopoly on putting connected technology on the human face, which means whatever hardware standard they choose just naturally becomes the default standard for the industry. So that brings us to the real question here. If a tech company removes the screen and they remove the camera from a wearable device, what exactly are you actually wearing on your face and what is it taking from you? Well, to understand why the camera is being removed, we have to look closely at what is happening with the current models that still have them. Because the camera equipped glasses actually earn the nickname pervert glasses in various circles.

3:02Right, mostly because the hardware looks nearly identical to standard analog sunglasses. So the social friction of recording in public is entirely gone. Exactly. People use them for surreptitious recording and shared spaces. It completely bypasses the usual social cues if you know holding up a phone or pointing a lens at someone. Which means we are witnessing the total loss of ambient privacy. We think about the environment just a generation ago. People could leave their house for work or run an errand. And they were completely disconnected from the network. You were just a physical body moving through a physical space. If you're not subscribed yet, take a second and hit follow on whatever podcast app you're using. It helps us keep making this. We appreciate you being here. But now, like if you are sitting on the train right now, look at the people around you. Someone wearing normal looking sunglasses might be broadcasting your face to a data center. We are training artificial intelligence models while simply trying to exist in public.

4:03Every shared space is a potential recording vector. Whether it is an overhead drone, a security camera, or just the glasses on the person sitting across from you at a cafe. And the reality of how that data gets processed is where the privacy issue becomes severe. There were workers at a meta subcontractor in Kenya who recently spoke to Swedish journalists about their specific role in the artificial intelligence training pipeline. Right, the labeling. Yeah. These workers were tasked with reviewing raw footage captured by these smart glasses to help train the models. And the footage they were reviewing included recordings of people undressing and recordings of people using the bathroom. Just because the users forgot they were wearing a recording device. Exactly. The hardware is so lightweight and looks so ordinary that the physical reminder of wearing a camera disappears. So they walk into their bathroom. And the feed just keeps running, capturing their most intimate moments. And the human element in that training loop is the part that rarely makes it into the marketing material. The public assumption is that the artificial intelligence

5:05just absorbs the data mathematically, like a machine reading code. Right. People think it's entirely automated. But early models require human verification. They require someone to actually look at the video and label the context. They have to draw bounding boxes around objects and confirm what the machine is seeing. So the mundane, highly private moments of a user's life are being shipped across the world to be watched by human moderators on the screen. You think you are interacting with an automated system, but you are actually sending a point of view feed of your bedroom to a worker in Nairobi. That completely shatters the implicit contract we think we have with our personal devices. When you buy a piece of consumer electronics, you do not expect human eyes to be reviewing the raw sensor data. It collects in your home. The company did attempt a hardware countermeasure to try and stop the covert recording problem. The current glasses have a visible LED on the frame that lights up when the camera is active. To give bystanders a warning. Right. The engineering idea was to give people a clear visual cue.

6:05But users immediately started bypassing it. They would put black tape over the light or physically destroy the LED so they could record secretly. For your ad campaigns, lighting up the dashboard, but not the pipeline. That's bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bullspend. See revenue? Not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign for insane conditions apply. Call us footballers back. So Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it $555 and $55 seconds. Hit it!

7:06When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. Com slash protection terms. So meta-responded with a strict physical kill switch system. Wait, how does that work mechanically? The internal system constantly monitors the electrical resistance of the LED circuit. If it detects that the light has been physically tampered with, covered or destroyed by the user, the camera is immediately disabled at the firmware level and simply refuses to record. That mechanism, it introduces a really strange philosophical

8:06problem regarding device ownership. Traditionally, when you purchase a physical object, you own it. You have the right to modify it. And it's physically like buying a car, but if Ford catches you putting a bumper sticker over their logo on the grill, they remotely turn off your engine. If a company can algorithmically disable a piece of hardware you purchased because of how you choose to physically modify it, who really controls the technology resting on your body? You bought the glasses, but you are effectively just leasing the capability, subject to the manufacturer's ongoing approval of your physical behavior. Which naturally leads into the strategy behind Luna. Rather than fighting an endless war against users hacking the recording light or dealing with the public relations fall out of human moderators watching private footage, they are exploring the removal of the problematic hardware entirely. Taking the camera out of the equation completely. Yeah, the leaked specifications for the Luna model indicate absolutely no camera and no visual display.

9:08The entire device consists of speakers, microphones, and a voice model. So they are just side stepping the privacy nightmare of the camera and the engineering bottleneck of the visual display leaving only audio as the primary interface. You do not have to worry about recording someone in a bathroom if the device physically lacks a lens. In the shift toward audio is heavily supported by the hardware shipping data. Artificial intelligence glasses, shipments, rose over 250% in a recent six month window. 250% in six months. Right. And if you look specifically at the display less glasses, they grew over 200% in that same period. Meanwhile, traditional virtual reality headsets, you know, the devices entirely focused on dominating your visual field actually fell by 17%. Consumers are rejecting the heavy visual computing model and embracing the audio first model. The ear is really proving to be this superior interface for this kind of ambient technology. There was an immersive David Bowie exhibition recently

10:10that utilized spatial sound design to incredible effect. They used 60 different speakers strategically placed around the room, and there were zero moving pictures. Oh, really? Yeah, the photographs on the walls were entirely static. All the storytelling, all the direction of the audience's attention was handled entirely by the sound mixing. Well, generative systems have made creating visual output incredibly cheap and ubiquitous at this point. We are just flooded with visual information constantly from our phones to digital billboards. Exactly. So the true craft now is directing human attention without adding to the visual noise. And sound is the best tool for that because it processes differently in the brain. It does not require you to turn your head or focus your eyes on a fixed point. It just exists in your spatial awareness. Walking through that Bowie exhibition, you did not need a screen to tell you where to look. The audio physically guided you through the space. But removing the visual screen completely alters the traditional computing stack.

11:11Every interface we have relied on for the past 20 years has to be reimagined when the only output is a voice in your ear. Search behaves differently when you cannot scroll through a list of blue links. Navigation changes from looking at a map on a screen to having an audio cue subtly shift in your left ear to indicate a turn. Even basic notifications have to be redesigned so they do not become an overwhelming auditory intrusion. Oh, wait. How does that actually work mechanically? If I am not looking at a screen, how does the artificial intelligence tell me to turn left without talking over my conversation or distracting me from the street? That is the core difference between a visual and an audio interface. You cannot skim audio. A screen allows your eyes to dart across a grid of information and selectively ignore things you do not care about. But audio is strictly linear. If the system reads a notification to you, you have to sit through the duration of the spoken sentence. So you're trapped listening to it? Exactly. This forces the artificial intelligence

12:13to become hyper selective about what it actually interrupts you for. The model has to understand your context well enough to know if a message is worth speaking aloud into your ear while you are having a conversation with someone else. For navigation, instead of a voice saying, turn left and 100 feet, it might just play a soft chime in the left speaker that grows slightly louder as you approach the intersection. So the artificial intelligence has to act as a much more aggressive filter. It cannot just dump data on you the way a phone screen does. It has to interpret the importance of the data and decide if it warrants an auditory interruption. Now, this intense push toward putting complex artificial intelligence on our faces has triggered a direct physical counter movement in the market. Duck Duck Go recently partnered with the I wear brand knockaround to release a physical product. And they literally named it normal f-ing sunglasses. That is the actual retail name of the product you can buy. The entire marketing strategy for that product is built entirely on what is missing from it. Yes, the specification list is just a list of absences.

13:16They feature zero electronics. There are no recording capabilities. There are no microphones. There is no battery to charge. And they cost $35. It is a direct physical response to the complexity and the surveillance potential of the meta devices. Duck Duck Go is a company that sells privacy. That is their core business model. By creating this product, they basically compress their entire corporate ethos into a $35 physical joke. Because 10 years ago, the gadget with fewer features always lost in the marketplace. The consumer expectation was always more sensors, more capability, more processing power. Today, consumer psychology has shifted. People are actually craving simplicity. They are willing to pay for the verified absence of technology. Yeah. There is a real psychological relief in putting an object on your face and knowing with absolute certainty that it is just a piece of tinted plastic that does not need a software update. But while some consumers are retreating to $35 plastic,

14:17the hardware market is simultaneously expanding into a completely different pricing tier. There's another hardware leak regarding a device that's codenamed Phoenix. Now, this is described as a thin headset or a highly advanced rayband variant where the battery has been moved off the head entirely to reduce weight. And the pricing for this Phoenix tier is positioned between $1,000 and $2,000. And a $2,000 price point, these devices are no longer phone accessories. They're competing for the exact same consumer budget as a mid-rigged laptop or a full phone smartwatch bundle. Exactly. The economic shift is profound. The hardware manufacturers are not trying to sell you an addition to your current technology stack. They're trying to replace the primary computing device that you use to interact with the digital world. And the most effective strategy they are employing to achieve that replacement is not just raw computing power. It is the form factor itself. They are putting these highly advanced models into standard frames and, crucially, prescription frames.

15:19The prescription strategy is honestly the quietest and most effective method for frictionless tech adoption. If you require prescription lenses to see the world clearly, putting on your glasses is the very first thing you do when you wake up. You literally can't function without them. Right. It is not an active choice to engage with technology. It is a biological necessity for navigating your house. By embedding the artificial intelligence into the prescription frame, wearing the device stops being an active choice you make every morning, the device simply becomes the default state of your face. The friction of adoption completely dissolves. You do not have to remember to put them on. The way you might forget a smart watch on a charger, you cannot leave them behind because you need them to drive or to read a menu. They are permanently fixed to your sensory input point. But there is a valid pushback regarding the actual utility of this product category. Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bullspin. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

16:21My boss asks for results. So I open my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I add. Impressions. Cut the bullspin. See revenue? Not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign. Turnstitching supply. College football is back. So Hilton called to me the superstition of the concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it $555 and $55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen, snacks, a stapler.

17:23The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manager account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See PayPal.com slash protection terms. Hurry, based on real user behavior. You can look at how early adopters are actually utilizing the current generation of smart glasses. When pressed, many users admit their primary use cases simply listening to music while walking the dog. Yeah, and there are a few secondary uses that come up frequently in the user data too. People use them to search for simple facts, hands-free while cooking or carrying groceries. Parents use them to snap a quick point of view picture of a kid playing sports without having to dig a phone out of their pocket and miss the moment. It's sure, but those are conveniences. They're not necessities. This highlights a massive gap in the market. A standard pair of wired headphones solves the dog walking music problem perfectly.

18:23And they do not cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. Pulling a phone out of a pocket to take a photo takes perhaps three seconds. The industry is selling highly advanced, billion dollar artificial intelligence hardware. But consumers are primarily using them for incredibly basic mundane tasks. There is a huge disparity between the capability of the hardware and the actual utility that consumer extracts from it. Well, that disparity fuels a central theory about the economics of these devices. The subsidized hardware theory suggests that these highly advanced wearables are intentionally priced low relative to their research and development costs. Because the physical hardware is not the actual product being sold, the hardware is just the collection mechanism. We have adapted to the physical presence of smartphones in shared spaces. Like if someone holds a phone up at eye level, social norms dictate they might be recording a video or taking a photo. We have built policies in schools, hospitals, and businesses around that obvious physical queue. Yeah.

19:23Smart glasses destroy that visual queue entirely. They introduce total ambiguity into shared physical spaces. You cannot tell if someone is recording video, if they are listening to a translated conversation, or where that data stream is being sent. And that ambiguity creates real friction in spaces that require strict information control. Mark Zuckerberg was actually admonished by a judge recently for wearing his own company's smart glasses in a courtroom. Oh, really? Yeah. The judicial system relies on controlling the record of events. A device that looks exactly like standard eyewear, but possesses the capability to secretly broadcast or record the proceedings, violates the foundational rules of that room. Because the true value for the company's manufacturing of these devices is ambient capture. The camera taking a photo of a child playing a soccer is just the user facing feature. The real utility for the company is the continuous passive data stream. Every time you use a wake word prompt, every voice interaction you have, every physical task you record is captured.

20:26Individually, me asking the glasses to translate a menu or calculated tip seems completely insignificant. But when you aggregate that data at scale, across millions of users, it becomes the ultimate training material for artificial intelligence. The technology is mapping the minutia of human behavior. It is recording how humans communicate with each other in unscripted environments. It captures how we physically navigate complex spaces, how our eyes track obstacles, and how we solve physical problems in real time. We are allowing companies to map human epistemology, and we are paying them for the privilege of wearing the sensors. Hold on, epistemology is a heavy concept for a casual conversation. You just mean they are tracking how we figure things out in real time, right? Exactly. How we know what we know, how your eyes dart around a room when you are confused, how you physically navigate an unfamiliar space when you were lost, how long you hesitate before making a decision. The real cost of this technology

21:26is not the retail price at the electronics store. Right. The real Trojan horse here is not the camera lens hidden in the frame. It is the gradual, completely invisible normalization of turning everyday, mundane human experiences into raw training data. So for decades, the glowing screen was the fundamental assumption of personal technology. We interacted with the digital world by staring into a rectangle of light. But once that screen disappears into an invisible earpiece or a clear piece of glass, our entire physical and psychological relationship with computing is up for a complete renegotiation. If a model sitting permanently on your face can see exactly what you see, here exactly what you hear, and answer directly into your ear all day without anyone else knowing, what is the very first place you would refuse to wear them? If you're not subscribed yet, take a second and hit follow on whatever app you're using. It helps us keep making this. We appreciate you being here. Also check out our YouTube channel for more business and tech updates. There's a link in the description.