Meta said the contracting "did not meet (meta's) standards". I am sure that is true. meta's "standard" is not to reveal the illegal, immoral, unethical things meta does. No matter what the harm.
Maybe a company with those standards should not get our business. Oops, no wait, maybe they mean the Friedman Doctrine standards? In that case they are entitled to do any and every thing to make a profit. No matter what the harm.
Meta cancels the contract with the outsourcing company they contracted to classify smart glasses content after employees at the company whistleblow about serious privacy issues with the content they were paid to classify.
Isn't it more that tech companies are just more high profile and integral to political and social landscape than older companies; but reviewing the current political zeitgeist, they're in lockstep to what some, if not all, would just call fascism?
Sounds about right. If you know someone who uses these smart glasses, it's important not to tolerate them whatsoever. Don't speak with them, interact with them. I wouldn't even recommend being in their presence.
Smartglasses have reasonable and legitimate uses. It is not up to you to deprive anyone their right to use them. People also use bodycams that record continuously, such as for legal reasons. People have a right to record in public, such as if they feel at risk. You will not understand until you've been assaulted in public.
Are you going to go after car cameras next? If none of this makes sense to you, wait till standalone cameras become much smaller to where they become a smartbutton -- what will you do then? If someone is being stalked in public, then this can be reported to the authorities for persistent stalking, but it's going to be a negligible minority who use a camera this way.
Any American who has any opposition to public recording is fighting the First Amendment and doesn't even deserve to be an American.
> It is not up to you to deprive anyone their right to use them.
I don't see anyone saying that people don't have the right to use them. I see people saying that they have the right to avoid being anywhere near the people who use them and to disapprove of those people. Which is just as much of a right as the right to wear spy glasses.
I'm glad to see opinion seems to be swaying back in this direction. It was only a few months ago that the general sentiment seemed to be "times are different than the glasshole days, it's fine now."
>I don't think that's fair. Smartglasses have legitimate purposes.
I think that's true in principle, but in practice there are going to be two kinds of smart glasses users; extraordinarily annoying kids or you adults acting annoying in public so they can post videos to social media, and then normal people who have no clear sense for how much they're violating the privacy of those around them, and just like cool tech.
Very, very few users are going to be an interesting or valid use case -- eg: someone who is using them to assist with a disability, or for research, or something.
Even most dash cams don't stream to Meta -- they just record the last _n_ hours and you need to know to save off the video if you're in an crash / incident. In other words, most of the time no privacy is violated, and the only potential privacy violation occurs during an incident.
Even policy body cams, which I wholeheartedly support, have some pretty strong downsides: currently, if you're at the end of your rope, having the worst day of your life, and in your dishevelment turn a speeding ticket into a BATLEO, you're famous forever for being a lunatic. Maybe the rest of the time you're a good person, and you can learn from this and move on. Except now you have a permanent albatross around your neck. This is a secondary penalty that the justice system did not intend, and has no answer for.
I saw there is at least one company working on offline smart glasses for disabled users. I don’t have such a problem with this, and I wonder if the industry as a whole could be nudged in this direction. Offline glasses seem more ok to me.
It makes a lot of sense for actual accessibility devices to be offline-capable. You don’t want to lose your “sight” when you step into a metal building or elevator.
> Very, very few users are going to be an interesting or valid use case
You then list a mere two categories.
Would your argument have been similar in 2008 if told that in ten years, everyone in the economic first world would be carrying multiple cameras including a dedicated "selfie" camera at all times?
I'm not sure I understand the point about a dedicate "selfie" camera, however I think we're conflating "percentage of users" with "varieties of use cases." I think there could be quite a cornucopia of potential use cases, but I think per capita most people will not actually be making use of these. As other commenters have pointed out, I'd be a lot more tolerant if the data were not constantly piped to Meta.
I can't deprive someone of their right to use them, but I can refuse to interact with someone who's wearing them. This seems like a fair natural consequence. Feel free to wear them, but I won't speak to you when you do.
dash cams are local and pointing at the road, not everywhere.
body cams are local and mostly used by law enforcement to guarantee they are not abusing their power.
glassholes are connected to the cloud. you may have the right to record on public space, i have the right to remain anonymous in the crowd and not be constatly targeted by an advertisement company.
Even if 1% of the corner cases are legit uses (blind people having the glasses describe the world around them is fantastic.) 99% of the people using them are assholes that deserve to be put in the ground and the glasses smashed.
I have 2 kids in single digit ages (1 under 5). I bought meta gen 2 last month and I cannot describe how many sweet moments I have captured. My kid loves to sing while playing with dolls and stops as soon as I flip my phone out to record.
I am blind, and I could imagine several usecases which would make my life a lot easier by using glasses like this. But because of their reputation I will most likely never use them, and especially not in public. I'm already afraid enough people will think I'm recording them when I use my phone to get info about what's around me, definitely don't need to get punched in the face for wearing meta on my face.
Edit: Not that I would want Meta to get all that data anyway. But even if glasses exist which are more privacy conscious, I think Meta and Google Glass thoroughly ruined the reputation of any kind of wearable like this.
I can imagine there are many use-cases for blind people, but I also think having some kind of visual indicator that "these glasses are recording" would be good, and I don't know what tools you use in public at the moment, but if you use, for example, a white cane, it might help people to understand "this person is using a camera for assistance". But yes, the fact that glasses manufacturers have already demonstrated they want to take every frame of data they can does sour their reputation
I seem to recall that when the snapchat glasses were a thing, they had a very bright an obvious ring of LEDs around the camera itself, that were bright enough to shine through a sticker placed over them. Sure, there are still ways to defeat that, but it makes it a bit harder.
Also I just googled for what the light actually looks like when it's recording, and it's not even really that visible...
I'm sorry you are dealing with the social repercussions of assistive technology. I really wish companies weren't so gross and that they did not endanger some of the advantages of advances like this by being gross
I already noted it in the answer. If a person feels at risk, or even if they're on vacation, they have a right to record something/everything and someone/everyone around them in public, just as they could with a phone.
Do you think you will know if someone has their phone in their pocket or in a holster, and is turned on and recording? You will never know.
There are dozens if not hundreds of cameras pointed at the street that record people every time they go out in public in any urban setting.
If someone is recording you on video with a smartphone, you are generally aware of it, because it has to be pointed at you. Sure, you have a right to record people in public, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a public place, but I would quite like to know if you are recording me. I'm also not terribly worried about people recording me having sex or being naked in public without my knowledge...
>> even if they're on vacation, they have a right to record something/everything and someone/everyone around them in public
Big assumption here that the place you're on vacation doesn't have different laws. You may have absolutely no right to record "everything and everyone" around you.
> Do you think you will know if someone has their phone in their pocket or in a holster, and is turned on and recording? You will never know.
At least this says something about the intention. Someone who films with a hidden phone implicitly shows that they intentionally hid this from the people being filmed.
Filming with glasses is hidden by design. It gives plausible deniability to the person filming, so they can film covertly but pretend they weren't hiding anything.
In most cases this doesn't make a difference but there are some cases where the premeditation can make it worse for the person doing the "abusive" filming.
If you walk up to me and shove a camera in my face I'll get very loud and very angry with you very quickly. That's kind of paradoxical, if you intended the camera to make you feel safer. I don't think I'm in the minority.
I do not want my employees recording their day job and selling it, or the creepy dude next to me in the bathroom filming my goods or the log jam flying out of my butt so meta can try to sell me pepto.
I also don't want that one time I did something minor illegal like jay walking get auto fed into palantir so they can ship me to the latest internment camp.
Or someone stealing my biometrics by just walking past me.
> Smartglasses have reasonabl eand legitimate uses. People also use bodycams that record continuously, such as for legal reasons. People have a right to record in public, such as if they feel at risk. Are you going to go after car cameras next?
None of those default to sharing your recording with anyone else, let alone with no practical way to opt out.
I know bunch of people who use smart glasses. And use RayBan meta glasses myself for two years (mostly as speakers/mic, but occasionally can use camera as well for some random shots – like cycling in a forest at a beautiful sunset). My default assumption for many years that if any photo/video goes to cloud, it potentially can be leaked/stolen/used. I keep this assumption both for smartphones and smartglasses, yet would be happy to switch to Apple glasses finally when they're out.
Calls to stop speaking or interacting with people who use smart glasses sounds like the dumbest thing I've read on HN ever.
You're aware of the privacy implications but think people talking about avoiding people who use them are proposing dumb arguments? I don't follow your logic.
There's also nothing stopping us from stigmatizing the use of smartphones in public. Even a slight discouragement of it would be progress. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Because person wearing glasses usually can move and video surveillance cameras usually can't?
If that's not it then spell it out for me, please.
Also, why would i be deceptive in this discussion? I feel like I missed some ideological conflict.
Most people don't run around holding out their smartphone directly in front of them. It has to be pointed at the subject, and tends to be obvious.
Smart glasses, however, are always aimed at whatever the wearer is looking at. They may or may not be recording (note the reports of people hiding the LED indicators), and at a fair distance could easily be mistaken for a normal pair.
The general populace is much more likely to notice the former recording rather than the latter.
At everything on the opposite side of the screen, typically. There is a recording light for Meta glasses, but not one for iPhones, for example: the "recording" indicators are all user-side there.
When I'm on public transport, people generally face their phones in such a way that they'd only be filming your feet or the floor... They don't hold them up at head height in such a way that other people would be recorded. Maybe it's just a cultural thing
A Kenyan workers' organisation alleges Meta's decision was caused by the staff speaking out.
Meta says it's because Sama did not meet its standards, a criticism Sama rejects ...
Well, yeah. If I went straight to the press to trash the reputation of my client's product, rather than communicating internally first to help them proactively address the issues, I would expect to get fired.
Not that I am remotely interested in defending Meta, or optimistic that they would proactively address privacy issues. But I don't feel that sympathetic to the outsourcing company here either.
I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I'm just going off what is said and not said in the article. If I were whistleblowing about something like this, I would take pains to describe what measures I took internally before going public. I didn't see any of that here.
EDIT: Look, to be clear, I think it's bad that naive or uninformed people are buying video recorders from Meta and unintentionally having their private lives intruded on by a company that, based on its history, clearly can't be trusted to be a helpful, transparent partner to customers on privacy. I think it's good that the media is giving people a reminder of this. I think it's good that the sources said something, even though the consequences they suffered seem inevitable. But to me, there is nothing essentially new to be learned here, and I don't know what can or should be done to improve the situation. I think for now, the best thing for people to do is not buy Meta hardware if they have any desire for privacy. Maybe there are laws that could help, but what should be in the laws exactly? It's not obvious to me what would work.
What makes you think the outsourcing firm didn't raise these concerns in email or meetings? You think these people wanted to lose jobs and income? That's irrational.
Why reflexively defend a massive tech corporation caught repeatedly violating the law?
There are transgressions severe enough that your duty to stop them is heavier than your responsibility to "the reputation of your client's product." Amazing this needs to be stated, frankly.
What specifically do you mean? It is by design that smart glasses see the things happening in front of their users? Yes, it is. That is why people buy them.
Huh. There you go again, thinking everyone else is an idiot. Capture of video data of users by Meta is never acceptable. It would not be acceptable for any phone, and it is not acceptable for any glass, ever.
Saving the data for any purpose other than allowing users to access it is bad enough; allowing Meta employees or contractors to view personal videos is on a whole new level.
I don't know why people buy smart glasses. Maybe they buy them for video capture. If so, the videos go to Meta's servers and Meta might do things with them. They might be criticized for not reviewing them in certain cases. That's one reason why I wouldn't buy Meta smart glasses.
Even if we did have this mythical technology, someone might criticize facebook for not sending them to facebook and storing them for later and forcing employees to non-consentually view users' nudes.
So obviously that means all videos must be sent to facebook, to avoid that 1 random dude (out of billions) maybe criticizing them.
The main issue here is Facebook employees viewing users' private video streams (including of user nudity) without the users' knowledge.
The secondary issue is that it's generally frowned upon to make your employees view nudity in the workplace. Are there extenuating circumstances here? No, we have no evidence there are any extenuating circumstances here.
> > Meta said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.
> Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.
It's total fantasy. I've worked in big tech. Casually uploading and providing company/contractor access to non-redacted intimate photos or pictures of the insides of people's homes vaguely "for the purpose of improving the customer experience" would not pass even a surface-level privacy or data-protection review anywhere I've ever worked. Do Meta even read what they are saying?
I once read the manual of one of those small floor cleaning robots (Ecovacs Deebot U2 pro), and it basically said that by using it you were giving them a right to take pictures and send them to a remote server (to analyze issues or something like that)
So already, this person wearing these glasses are already agree with that Meta can monitor them. They also probably trust Meta when they say "When the glasses are off, nothing is recording", for better or worse. So with that perspective in mind, it's not far fetched to assume these same people will willingly be naked into front of these recording devices they believe to be off.
Of course, anyone who opened a newspaper in the last 10 years or so would know better, but I can definitively see some people not giving a fuck about it.
One of the bigger commercial niches for smart glasses is filming POV porn, so it is hardly surprising that sort of content ended up in the moderation queue. The project should have planned to account for that use case.
I believe the tricky privacy and security issues around smart glasses (and other "personal" tech) can be navigated successfully enough by a thoughtful, diligent, responsive company.
Which is why I'd never touch a person tech device from Meta.
Their entire DNA is written to exploit their users for profit. In my judgement, they literally cannot and will never consider those issues as anything other than something to obscure to keep people unaware of the depth of the exploitation.
Yeah, I think it's more of a British English thing. It can also mean things like "in a fight". Like: "those two guys had a big row outside the pub the other night"
Why do they even need workers to classify naked content? They could filter some content prior to passing it to workers. They already have models to moderate explicit content.
If you want to read more about how unsavory aspects of AI-training are off-loaded onto poor workers in third-world countries, would recommend Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". These workers are paid pennies an hour for unstable jobs that expose them to some horrific material.
So I've never had a smart speaker in my house (Alexa, Apple, Google). I've just never been comfortable with the idea of having an always-on cloud-connected microphone in my house. Not because I thought these companies would deliberately start listening and recording in my house but because they will likely be careless with that data and it'll open the door for law enforcement to request it. Consider the Google Wi-fi scraping case from STreetView.
Or they might start scanning for "problematic" behavior, a bit like the Apple CSAM fingerprinting initiative.
So not one part of me would ever buy Meta glasses (or the Snap glasses before that). You simply don't have sufficient control over the recordings and big tech companies can't be trusted, as we've witnessed from outsourced workers sharing explicit images. And I bet that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would get these and trust Meta to manage the risks.
The owner of the private space generally has authority to deny this already, there's no need for an additional law.
In the US at least, any private homeowner/renter can deny entry to their property, barring legal warrants and exceptional circumstances. A business can have a policy, and is generally legally protected as long as the policy is 1) equally applied, and 2) does not violate ADA... A court would have to weigh in if glasses are allowed or not for ADA... but I suspect there's already a case where a movie theater banned such glasses and they would probably(?) win, since such individuals could be expected to have non-recording glasses.
Why? What's the difference between that and one of the many, many concealed camera options that you don't even notice? Just that it's noticeable? I don't think that's a good enough reason for yet-more-regulation. You're already being recorded everywhere you go in public by the authorities, and often by people standing right next to you unnoticed, so just act accordingly.
Because they will be popular and lots of people will buy them and use them all the time, leading to much more generalized surveillance than the concealed options that only a tiny tiny fraction of people would buy or use (and that we should also regulate)
Maybe a company with those standards should not get our business. Oops, no wait, maybe they mean the Friedman Doctrine standards? In that case they are entitled to do any and every thing to make a profit. No matter what the harm.
[edit: add last two sentences]
OpenAI had them classify CSAM, so Sama fired them as a client back in 2022. https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
We're 4 years on, 3 years since that report broke. Not a single thing has improved about how tech companies operate.
Are you going to go after car cameras next? If none of this makes sense to you, wait till standalone cameras become much smaller to where they become a smartbutton -- what will you do then? If someone is being stalked in public, then this can be reported to the authorities for persistent stalking, but it's going to be a negligible minority who use a camera this way.
Any American who has any opposition to public recording is fighting the First Amendment and doesn't even deserve to be an American.
I don't see anyone saying that people don't have the right to use them. I see people saying that they have the right to avoid being anywhere near the people who use them and to disapprove of those people. Which is just as much of a right as the right to wear spy glasses.
I think that's true in principle, but in practice there are going to be two kinds of smart glasses users; extraordinarily annoying kids or you adults acting annoying in public so they can post videos to social media, and then normal people who have no clear sense for how much they're violating the privacy of those around them, and just like cool tech.
Very, very few users are going to be an interesting or valid use case -- eg: someone who is using them to assist with a disability, or for research, or something.
Even most dash cams don't stream to Meta -- they just record the last _n_ hours and you need to know to save off the video if you're in an crash / incident. In other words, most of the time no privacy is violated, and the only potential privacy violation occurs during an incident.
Even policy body cams, which I wholeheartedly support, have some pretty strong downsides: currently, if you're at the end of your rope, having the worst day of your life, and in your dishevelment turn a speeding ticket into a BATLEO, you're famous forever for being a lunatic. Maybe the rest of the time you're a good person, and you can learn from this and move on. Except now you have a permanent albatross around your neck. This is a secondary penalty that the justice system did not intend, and has no answer for.
It makes a lot of sense for actual accessibility devices to be offline-capable. You don’t want to lose your “sight” when you step into a metal building or elevator.
You then list a mere two categories.
Would your argument have been similar in 2008 if told that in ten years, everyone in the economic first world would be carrying multiple cameras including a dedicated "selfie" camera at all times?
body cams are local and mostly used by law enforcement to guarantee they are not abusing their power.
glassholes are connected to the cloud. you may have the right to record on public space, i have the right to remain anonymous in the crowd and not be constatly targeted by an advertisement company.
Even if 1% of the corner cases are legit uses (blind people having the glasses describe the world around them is fantastic.) 99% of the people using them are assholes that deserve to be put in the ground and the glasses smashed.
Edit: Not that I would want Meta to get all that data anyway. But even if glasses exist which are more privacy conscious, I think Meta and Google Glass thoroughly ruined the reputation of any kind of wearable like this.
Of course you have to be able to spot that. And trust that it really doesn't record when it's off (note that it simply may be covered by the user)
Also I just googled for what the light actually looks like when it's recording, and it's not even really that visible...
This alone doesn't outweigh all of the negative uses, but I would argue that it's reasonable and legitimate.
Do you think you will know if someone has their phone in their pocket or in a holster, and is turned on and recording? You will never know.
There are dozens if not hundreds of cameras pointed at the street that record people every time they go out in public in any urban setting.
Subject to local law. It's an offence to make indecent images of children, for example.
However, it is absolutely not the case that Meta has a right to that data, as a data controller under GDPR.
> feels at risk
This is a red flag phrase: it's a justification that people whip out for all sorts of unjustified things up to and including murder.
Big assumption here that the place you're on vacation doesn't have different laws. You may have absolutely no right to record "everything and everyone" around you.
At least this says something about the intention. Someone who films with a hidden phone implicitly shows that they intentionally hid this from the people being filmed.
Filming with glasses is hidden by design. It gives plausible deniability to the person filming, so they can film covertly but pretend they weren't hiding anything.
In most cases this doesn't make a difference but there are some cases where the premeditation can make it worse for the person doing the "abusive" filming.
Ease off the gas
Oh blind people too. That one makes sense.
But smart glasses that send everything to The Cloud? Burn them all. Especially if they're from fricken' Meta.
Why is it a right?
>Are you going to go after car cameras next?
No. A car cannot follow me into a building very easily. It cannot turn as quickly as a human head.
>Any American who has any opposition to public recording is violating the First Amendment and doesn't even deserve to be an American.
lmao
I do not want my employees recording their day job and selling it, or the creepy dude next to me in the bathroom filming my goods or the log jam flying out of my butt so meta can try to sell me pepto.
I also don't want that one time I did something minor illegal like jay walking get auto fed into palantir so they can ship me to the latest internment camp.
Or someone stealing my biometrics by just walking past me.
I do not want to live in such a dystopian country. No this right shouldn't exist and I'm glad it doesn't in my country.
> If none of this makes sense to you, wait till standalone cameras become much smaller to where they become a smartbutton -- what will you do then?
Why are you against killing? Wait till you don't need to hit them but can accelerate metal pieces at them -- what will you do then?
> Any American who has any opposition to public recording is fighting the First Amendment and doesn't even deserve to be an American.
Anyone who is against X deserves not to be protected by law. "First they came for the communists..."
Smartphones are illegal in your country? I am skeptical.
The right to record is the right to remember.
None of those default to sharing your recording with anyone else, let alone with no practical way to opt out.
Great! Now do people with smart TVs and people with smart phones
Calls to stop speaking or interacting with people who use smart glasses sounds like the dumbest thing I've read on HN ever.
There's also nothing stopping us from stigmatizing the use of smartphones in public. Even a slight discouragement of it would be progress. It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Smart glasses, however, are always aimed at whatever the wearer is looking at. They may or may not be recording (note the reports of people hiding the LED indicators), and at a fair distance could easily be mistaken for a normal pair.
The general populace is much more likely to notice the former recording rather than the latter.
Just because you don’t notice it doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
However, this is still a different thing than smart glasses which can further be segmented into who designed the smart glasses.
It's the camera of their smartphone.
Not sure if it's ON though.
I do not care which country the outsourcing company is in. When criminals go global, protection whistleblowers should go global too.
Name a more iconic duo.
Not that I am remotely interested in defending Meta, or optimistic that they would proactively address privacy issues. But I don't feel that sympathetic to the outsourcing company here either.
I don't know what happened behind the scenes. I'm just going off what is said and not said in the article. If I were whistleblowing about something like this, I would take pains to describe what measures I took internally before going public. I didn't see any of that here.
EDIT: Look, to be clear, I think it's bad that naive or uninformed people are buying video recorders from Meta and unintentionally having their private lives intruded on by a company that, based on its history, clearly can't be trusted to be a helpful, transparent partner to customers on privacy. I think it's good that the media is giving people a reminder of this. I think it's good that the sources said something, even though the consequences they suffered seem inevitable. But to me, there is nothing essentially new to be learned here, and I don't know what can or should be done to improve the situation. I think for now, the best thing for people to do is not buy Meta hardware if they have any desire for privacy. Maybe there are laws that could help, but what should be in the laws exactly? It's not obvious to me what would work.
Why reflexively defend a massive tech corporation caught repeatedly violating the law?
Congratulations, you have a bright future in politics and/or tech CEOing.
So obviously that means all videos must be sent to facebook, to avoid that 1 random dude (out of billions) maybe criticizing them.
The secondary issue is that it's generally frowned upon to make your employees view nudity in the workplace. Are there extenuating circumstances here? No, we have no evidence there are any extenuating circumstances here.
> Meta said this was for the purpose of improving the customer experience, and was a common practice among other companies.
Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.
> Am I reading this correctly?! This is probably the weirdest statement I've read on the internet in twenty years.
It's total fantasy. I've worked in big tech. Casually uploading and providing company/contractor access to non-redacted intimate photos or pictures of the insides of people's homes vaguely "for the purpose of improving the customer experience" would not pass even a surface-level privacy or data-protection review anywhere I've ever worked. Do Meta even read what they are saying?
… although I really extend that to why are you wearing an internet connected camera that is obviously going to be monitored by Meta.
Of course, anyone who opened a newspaper in the last 10 years or so would know better, but I can definitively see some people not giving a fuck about it.
Probably this is people asking the glasses something about what they see and the glasses uploading video for classification to generate an answer.
People think it is "just AI" so are not very concerned about privacy.
Which is why I'd never touch a person tech device from Meta.
Their entire DNA is written to exploit their users for profit. In my judgement, they literally cannot and will never consider those issues as anything other than something to obscure to keep people unaware of the depth of the exploitation.
Or they might start scanning for "problematic" behavior, a bit like the Apple CSAM fingerprinting initiative.
So not one part of me would ever buy Meta glasses (or the Snap glasses before that). You simply don't have sufficient control over the recordings and big tech companies can't be trusted, as we've witnessed from outsourced workers sharing explicit images. And I bet that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I honestly don't understand why anyone would get these and trust Meta to manage the risks.
There is no expectation of privacy in public.
In the US at least, any private homeowner/renter can deny entry to their property, barring legal warrants and exceptional circumstances. A business can have a policy, and is generally legally protected as long as the policy is 1) equally applied, and 2) does not violate ADA... A court would have to weigh in if glasses are allowed or not for ADA... but I suspect there's already a case where a movie theater banned such glasses and they would probably(?) win, since such individuals could be expected to have non-recording glasses.
You are the frog being boiled.