Show HN: Real-time privacy protection for smart glasses

How it works: You can replace a raw camera feed with the filtered stream in your app. The filter processes a live video stream, applies privacy protections, and outputs a privacy-compliant stream in real time. You can use this processed stream for AI apps, social apps, or anything else.

Features: Currently, the filter blurs all faces except those who have given consent. Consent can be granted verbally by saying something like "I consent to be captured" to the camera. I'll be adding more features, such as detecting and redacting other private information, speech anonymization, and automatic video shut-off in certain locations or situations.

Why I built it: While developing an always-on AI assistant/memory for glasses, I realized privacy concerns would be a critical problem, for both bystanders and the wearer. Addressing this involves complex issues like GDPR, CCPA, data deletion requests, and consent management, so I built this privacy layer first for myself and other developers.

Reference app: There's a sample app (./examples/rewind/) that uses the filter. The demo video is in the README, please check it out! The app shows the current camera stream and past recordings, both privacy-protected, and will include AI features using the recordings.

Tech: Runs offline on a laptop. Built with FFmpeg (stream decode/encode), OpenCV (face recognition/blurring), Faster Whisper (voice transcription), and Phi-3.1 Mini (LLM for transcription analysis).

I'd love feedback and ideas for tackling the privacy challenges in wearable camera apps!

Show HN: Real-time privacy protection for smart glasses
github.com

I can taste the irony.

I don't know this would actually make others any more comfortable/guaranteed, which is where the bulk of the privacy concerns around smart glasse lie. I'm also not sure if that's actually a problem for more technology to be able to solve. The nice thing about e.g. recording consent is you do it on your device, or in some cloud device by a 3rd party. The moment you do it through the other person's device it's no different (from a trust/easiness/guarantee factor) than just asking the person themselves to not record you (again, beyond the benefits to the operator themselves around that). If some guy walked up to you with a literal video camera pointed at you and said "it only records your face if you give it consent":

- Do you even trust the person is telling the truth?

- If you do, do you trust the technology to work 100% of the time?

- If it is a lie or doesn't work and they post something, are you any better off than if you weren't asked for consent and said no? (note: separate this from the value to the person operating the camera, who does get value from those that say yes).

- If you say no, are you really not going to feel awkward compared to not having someone recording the rest of the situation?

Maybe the answer for you to all of these is "Absolutely!", I'd bargain to bet it's not the case for the vast majority of those concerned with the privacy implications of the technology though (which I don't consider myself a part of that group necessarily, I'm just putting myself in their shoes for a second).

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So I'd split my thoughts into two main sections: I'm not sure technology is going to solve any external privacy concerns here, but I think it's an interesting approach to internal privacy concerns with the tech.

I fully expected this to be about solutions for empowering the user to ensure that her audio and visual experiences weren't being exfiltrated to a third-party, not that they were being censored before even getting to her.