Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses
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Accessibility shouldn't require giving up privacy.
Online comparison just adds latency.
It's not like you can't tell your wife apart from your orthodontist.
I got a personal kick out of that example, because one of my good friend's wife is his orthodontist :-D
It's something I've had my whole life but only recently realized wasn't "normal". It's not like I can't recognize people at all, but rather that faces aren't very distinctive to me compared to other identifying characteristics (such as hair color/style/length, clothing, skin tone, height, voice, gait, mannerisms, etc.) It takes me a while to learn to distinguish everyone in a group of people (especially people who are similar along all of those attributes), but once I know someone well I will usually recognize them without problems.
The only real issues are when someone changes their appearance (e.g. getting glasses or shaving a beard), or when I run into someone in an unexpected context (like randomly meeting someone I know on the street). A few months ago I ran into my cousin at an event in another city, and didn't recognize her until after 20 or 30 seconds of conversation.
It's also not usually too hard to mask. I realized I have a subconscious habit of never greeting people by name because I'm always afraid of getting it wrong, and it's easy enough to bluff through "oh hi, how are you, good to see you, what have you been up to" pleasantries until I figure out who I'm talking to. The most awkward situations are when I'm unsure whether or not I know someone and have to risk either mistaking a stranger for a friend, or accidentally ignoring/reintroducing myself to an acquaintance. Also, starting a new TV show sucks.
Now that I know it's an actual condition with a name, I'm not sure yet whether it makes things better or worse if I try to explain it to people to excuse my mistakes.
If any other face blind people have useful tips or experiences, I'm all ears :)
If someone talks to you and you're not sure who they are, tell them you're faceblind and ask. It takes some getting used to, but it's worth it.
In my previous company we gave a short introduction when joining, and I included faceblindness. "If I meet you randomly on the street and don't say hello, that's not with malicious intent."
Most people are understanding, though a few are not, but really then it's their problem.
Every once in a while I don't recognize someone and I go through this whole thing of bringing up every biographical detail about them I remember and all the things we've talked about to show that I'm not an asshole who wasn't paying attention in the past. Fortunately, I have a decent memory for such things.
Ironically, I'm insanely good at remembering faces. But it's kinda useless because of the name thing (and equally, the face context is also difficult).
The interaction described goes like this:
"Hi there, I'm ABC, nice to meet you, what's your name"
"...Huh? I'm XYZ. We've met before."
"Oh right...sorry, I promise I remember you! We knew each other from there, and we've worked on this and that together, and etc. etc. etc. I'm just terrible with faces, I'm so sorry!"
It's not "you know things about them without recognizing them"; it's "you don't recognize them at first, it gets awkward, and so you recite facts about them prove that you didn't forget who they were"
I think normal people are more likely to have the experience where they can't remember a name and why/how/where they know someone from. I of course forget things like anyone, but that's unrelated.
General body shape and height are ok. Hair, clothes, make-up, etc are not.
Context is everything. Where are they when we meet? If it is someone from work, at work, this is very easy. If it is someone from work in a shopping centre, this is very difficult unless I know them well.
I make an active point of trying to remember people's faces so I can place them out of context, because it shouldnt be this hard, and they deserve to feel valued in so far as I remember them. Its an uphill battle.
As said above, if you do want a systemic solution, it needs a business plan. That's just the reality of a world with scarce resources.
I recently heard the best way to explain faceblindness: Apples.
Can you tell apples apart? Yes, sure, if you put two apples next to each other, they look similar, but there are differences.
But could you recognize that specific apple among 50 similar ones?
If an apple addressed you on the street, could you remember where you've seen it before?
That is how it feels to be faceblind.
There are workarounds, but they are context-dependent and error-prone.
That apple with red hair and a beard? Sure, that's the colleague from the office next door. But was that the same apple that waved to you in the city yesterday?
The only green apple among red ones? Easy to recognize. But only after some awkward misunderstandings you realize that there are two of them.
And changes of hairstyle are a real problem. I once wondered who that new colleague was during lunchbreak. I was about to ask her, when she said something (unrelated) and I recognized her voice. I had worked with her for 10 years, she had colored her hair.
I was in my late 20s when I realised I was "face-blind", but I should have realised a lot earlier, I remember reading in a book as a child about how "people can recognise a person by their face from a long distance, but find it difficult to recognise a voice", and I could not relate whatsoever to that passage.
I thought I regularly struggle to recognise someone until they start speaking, but it wasn't until a decade or two later that I read about prosopagnosia and then suddenly a lot of things made sense.
Your explanation is so much better than the rubbish illustrations of blanked or blurred faces, because it isn't like that at all, indeed sometimes I might rely on a detail about their face to recognise someone.
It's why face-blind isn't a great term either, because it's not a kind of blindness, I can see just as well as anyone, it just doesn't trip the automatic and instinctual recognition that I understand most people have.
It's a shame open source hardware isn't a thing in this area, but we've been here before. (Buying locked down devices and installing alt OSes.)
But reverse engineering isn't as easy as my snarky response implies. But I do think more of us should get into hardware hacking. It's the only way we have to fight back. I'm tired of this "own nothing" paradigm and being forced into whatever dumb thing they want is to do. And it's so dumb too. There's not many power users but there's a disproportionate amount of resources dedicated to fucking us over
Do they consider not being remembered rude? Do you get incredulous reactions like people with aphantasia?
The Google Glass developer terms strictly forbid building that, and it didn't take more than a few seconds of deeper thought to understand why.
Parents have enough to carry around just because you don’t like a feature that is default off unless you ask for cloud analysis.
I don’t care what happens to Zuck, cancel him to all hell for all I care but maybe be a little more curious about why people use the tech they do past “people are stupid”.
Image quality is real. That glasses camera is teeny tiny. At the most basic layer, it's going to look like a bad camera from decades ago by the time your kids are old enough to want to see those photos.
Meta sells that device to generate data and profit from "services". Zuck said so directly in an earnings call: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zuckerberg-explained-ai-glass...
You are the frog being boiled. Your glasses are the pot.
If I don't like something about my hot frog pot, I'll just switch to the Apple glasses when they come out [1] ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . Zuck doesn't have much room to maneuver without shooting himself in the foot.
My larger point stands, not all who wear cameras deserve to be maligned.
I wouldn't malign you, but if you were a close friend I'd probably approach it in the same way I approach friends who are getting a little too deep into gacha or gambling or funko pop "collecting".
Either way I'm not a glasshole, I'm just a dad.
There is no point arguing about the value of photographs.
Namely, if someone is using Facebook's AI-powered glasses in my vicinity, I want to get a notification (of some sort) so that I can avoid those persons
But I get your point
I'd run away from any FB-made devices
(not affiliated, I did a simple search before writing an app myself)
Even more if there's an iOS version.
I don’t care what convenience feature this possibly has, if you’re wearing a data miner you have no place near me. Fuck off.
Most companies I can give like, they make SOME good shit. Even Google. Not Meta, our entire civilization would be better off if we shoved all their bullshit into an ocean.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_Act> The BIPA requires companies doing business in Illinois to comply with a number of requirements pertaining to the collection and storage of biometric information. These include a requirement that companies:
> Obtain consent from individuals if the company intends to collect or disclose their personal biometric identifiers.
> Destroy biometric identifiers in a timely manner.
> Securely store biometric identifiers.[6]
> A key area of focus is that an entity must use a "reasonable standard of care"[7] in managing biometric information and identifiers.
" "Biometric identifier” means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, human biological samples, [...] "
So if it's just pictures of faces, then it's okay. If, however, at any point in the pipeline the actual facial geometry is calculated or stored, that might be a violation.
[0]: https://www.rgrdlaw.com/cases-in-re-facebook-biometric-info-privacy-litig.htmlOrdinary glass (as in spectacles) frames that have a near IR LED on the bridge and on the side. PWM to be efficient, bright, but erratic clock of around 10Hz.
Want a picture of me? Ask, or use film.
Or use those 1550 nm LiDAR lasers that are safe for eyes but burn out cameras pointed at them
(not that i think meta is doing it for accessibility reasons...)
I have a similar thing with names when and I think it's just because my brain somehow decides that interaction meant nothing and the information was not important to save.
3.08%, according to https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-common-face-blindness
I hung out with a large group of people for nearly a decade and couldn’t remember who was who until the pandemic. The names under zoom helped me gradually learn over weeks.
When I teach scuba I recite the list of student names for my class in as random an order as possible while I drive to the shop to lower my cognitive load to put faces to names. When I do roll call, I write down every person’s name and try to gradually move off the cheat sheet as I call on them to answer questions. But once they put on their gear (especially since I teach where they use hoods) it all goes downhill. Two white guys approximately 35yo? I’ll get them confused.
If this were socially appropriate I’d totally use it as my prescription glasses to help continue smoothing the curve.
Secondly, put yourself in the opposite situation, do you really care if someone forgot your name? Does it even reflect how well you know someone? I had a friend at scouts when I was a kid and we were inseparable for a year. Never remembered his name. Didn't matter.
At least where I've worked, there's a constant churn of care staff — with some workers bridging a gap for only a single shift. Institutions currently offer a printed list with portrait, name, room number, and relevant pathologies for each resident. But it takes most people at least a few days to memorize the info. And some people are difficult to recognize from their intake photo.
OTOH, the tech would only need to match a handful of residents. And it would need to conform to privacy laws. So doing the match locally on the device would be a much better fit.
- Computers can do as much work as they want to automatically, so long as none of it touches a network boundary.
- Any time a computer wants to touch the network it must be explicitly initiated by a human action. Sort of like how in browsers capturing the mouse or entering fullscreen mode requires a trusted user action and isn't something a page can do unilaterally, but broader. This also means that the extent of the network communication must be made explicit and clear with no chance of misunderstanding by the user. If what you're doing is genuinely complex beyond your ability to communicate to your target user then you shouldn't be doing it on the behalf of that user. Note that this only really applies to mass consumer products, not something built/deployed internally.
I feel like if a hard boundary is not set around this we will end up in a Panopticon. Set aside governments actively pushing for it, it seems a simple profit motive in a digital era yields this outcome. Maybe nuanced rules would produce better outcomes in theory, but humans don't seem great at sticking to nuanced and fiddly rules when there's strong incentive to bend them beyond recognition.
Not on iOS, of course.
No, I can't really think of any situation where I'd be remotely OK with this being used. To be blunt, I kinda hope this quickly turns not into just a public shaming against people wearing public spyware, but a situation where people are physically afraid to be caught wearing them outside. I think the branch of future possibilities where it's called out as antisocial behavior to poison public spaces like this would be a happier world than one where it becomes common behavior.
Edit: In before the "do you ban cell phone cameras at work, too?" unclever gotcha: Yes. Yes, we'd definitely ban people spending the whole day holding their cell phone cameras up to their screens to record their work. We don't share confidential info with anyone other than vendors we've vetted and contracted with. If I walked by a desk and saw someone recording, I would pull them aside and explain why they're on thin ice.
There's a second-amendment-like argument here, imo, that is very hard to push back on - because at least this stuff doesn't kill people. I want every cop to be surrounded by five or six recording devices that they don't control at all times - it's the least worst option.
(Obviously I'm not a fan of the "everying goes to facebook" architecture. I'm hoping we get past that).
I should try to compile my own database of everyone's location? I fail to see how it helps me in any way
We have traffic/crime cams all over the place. We’ve done nothing to flip that on its head. A little minor vandalism here and there and some bad press. Why would this be any different?
It's sociopathic to wear spywear in a public setting.
(I think the precise form factor is something of a distraction. I'm talking about cheap, tiny, always-on cameras hooked up to giant hard discs in the sky, however they're packaged).
Bodycams that feature face recognition: Not OK, whether it's law enforcement or some weirdo at a night club. The former, because I don't want to live in a society where police log civilians' movements. The latter, because it's creepy with civilians do it, too.
Ok, but... you know it's inevitable, right? Shops are already doing it, the first weirdo doing it at a nightclub is probably going to be the doorman (transferring the old "do not accept checks from this man" mugshots to the digital realm), I don't know about other countries but the UK police are doing it (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fac...).
One of the advantages of bodycams for the police is that the people they deal with get a bit better behaved when they know they're on camera. I'm saying we should have that advantage too. (This is "an armed society is a polite society" redux - a surveilled society is a polite society?)
Check out David Brin's concept of the Transparent Society. He's been banging on about this for a couple of decades, and he's a deeper thinker and more persuasive than I am. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
I stress I believe transparency is the least-worst option available to us, not the most desirable option.
Is this the Illinois law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_... Because the second sentence in that article is "Notably, the Act does not apply to government entities."
My whole point is that the tech is already on top of us, the only question that's still up in the air is who gets access to it.
I also fail to see how facial recognition would be analogous to lights in terms of safety or frankly anything else.
Same with Logitech Circle doorbells that tell you which of your friends or family is at the front door, using local computing. That's a great feature. I wouldn't use a Ring camera that was shipping the data back to Amazon and any number of police departments.
More importantly, you have to catch the person doing it. You’ll likely never know what they did or the harm they enabled.
We need privacy regulation...
I recently read in a couple of articles and saw a video, of US ICE agents obnoxiously taunted protesters during their manhunt activities, saying, "we now know who you are," referring to the agent's cell phones who they are using to record the immediate-area protest activity, and apparently collecting faces on preloaded apps.
Rhetorically, what's to stop the US ICE from requesting, and the authoritarian-administration-friendly billionaire executive leaders granting, special editions of the Meta glasses? Or, requesting for national security reasons, which is literally what ICE's mandate is, requesting all of the databases of PII laden facial recognition social networking in the real world, of regular citizen owned Meta smart glasses?
Pretty common pattern in the business racket if you look at history.
Like you couldn't get an account at Facebook in 2005 unless you were were a ... I don't remember ... Harvard student?
Regarding nepotism: You know, "oh I remember that guy from my time at Harvard University so let's hire him" .. isn't that nepotism?
Zuck was very well connected in the academic, legal, tech and finance industry, that's how he got away with theft and got VC money thrown at his company and not other companies doing the same thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157445
>I really applaud Zuckerberg for positively embracing all the attention that's been shouldered on him, really. I think stuff like this SNL skit or him taking his core team at Facebook to watch "The Social Network" together at a movie theatre just shows tremendous inner strength and maturity on his part. It's great to see him be able to laugh it off and joke about it.
He's come a long way in his public speaking skills too, he was pretty natural and comedic during his talk at Startup School. I think he's only going to get better from this point on too.
1) we were always told and legal always pushed back hard on anything face detecting.(ie haar cascade "this is a face" let alone actual this is dave/sally)
2) the FTC would audit us to make sure we weren't doing that kind of stuff
3) all of the research prototypes had inbuilt/inline face removers up until 2024(I left after that so I don't know when/if that changed)
3.1) One of the very first things I worked on was face removal, it was a central core of the entire fucking project. Like if we didn;t have any of those constraints we'd have been 2 years ahead.
4) Stella is the name for v1 rayban stories, so its very odd that they get the update when they've not had any new features since for a long time(unless I am mistaken).
I assumed that Zuck said no because he'd had enough time with the lawyer and the FTC sniffing about to not bother.
However the glasses based AI lifelog stuff (which was basically a really effective personal assistant) would be a lot more effective if it could use facial recognition (we weren't allowed to use speaker diarization as that would allow us to record individual audio from users and recognise them like with facial recognition)
> https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...
I suspect that its a two-fer,
1) zuckerberg has said "it must be done" as part of the AI push
1.1) it might be also that Wang has pushed to get that data, but thats a guess. I doubt he has that kind of sway
2) they've realised that the FTC isn't either capable, or they have bribed the right part of the government to avoid getting nailed.
The thing that gets me is the number of lawyers that are there, and the sheer amount of process that is there to stop this kind of thing happening requires Zuck to explicitly say "I WANT THIS" repeatedly.
Unlikely IMHO - the person who agreed to the TOS is the one person the glasses don’t record.
More likely they’ve decided to launch it and see what happens; they can always withdraw the feature later, and laws can be surprisingly flexible when you’re a large corporation.
Honestly I couldn’t answer that. I never really touched production userdata (mainly because it was scary and also it was in PHP or some horrid transpiled interface to PHP)
My gut feeling is that facebook doesn't throw data away unless its forced to. So its probably there on your graph somewhere.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-drops-facial-recognitio...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...
It also suggests a certain amount of self-policing by Facebook, which leads to obvious failure cases:
Since Mark Zuckerberg attended Trump's most recent inauguration celebration and NOT non-billionaire average citizens, by and large, I speculate that the FTC threat is no longer a concern to Zuckerberg's Meta corporation. Back scratching all around?
The book also describes "Gargoyles": people using headsets with cameras and sensors to spy on everyone around them for the "Central Intelligence Corporation" while being also simultaneously in the Metaverse.
Funny, how the gargoyles are described in the book in a somewhat derogatory manner, and the villain of the story is an billionaire who owns a large Internet corporation.
At least the gargoyles in the book got paid.
Feels like we're juggling with ball sized nukes these days... So amazing... until someone eventually drops a ball.
And Leadership is likely to be involved in saying what is "true" and what is "false", which are key elements of knowledge to be clear, in order to manage the strength of their own power.
People who do these things must think the tech makes them more likable and interesting. But, in fact, I immediately deeply dislike these people and would never want to be friends with them. Its a paradox.
Its actually like watching a dude pissing themselves in public and thinking "Ah yeah, I'm covered in pee now! I'm so cool, look how jealous those non-pissers are!"
sadly, it's "only" about the sickos at fb. don't get me wrong, it's a good thing that it's written, but hardly anyone needs it who lived through the past few years with an open eye...
However, I'd be much more inclined for the Black Mirror use of being able to block someone literally not just a number in your phone.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-removes-face-recognition-co...
I'm no lawyer and things vary by location, but clothing is generally considered an extension of the person and usually touching their worn objects constitutes physical contact with the person themselves. Doing so with intent of committing criminal mischief, vandalism, or felony property damage will get all of them thrown at you. If you hastily do so and happen to harm the person in the process (since you're naturally grabbing at someone's eyes, that seems like a serious risk), there's a good chance you'll be given an aggravated or felony battery charge instead.
Imagine that, this weekend. Brought to you by Meta Smart Glasses
It’s on your device, you just haven’t been granted access to it.
At least in China, where face recognition is at building gates, subway gates, store checkouts...
1. Ask your local and state governments to completely ban "stalkerware" and "Big Tech surveillanceware" (like will use this and other face recognition), as well as ban using hidden cameras (including in these glasses) to photograph/video people.
2. Tell everyone, before their buy the glasses, what a "glasshole" is.
3. Social negative feedback to people who wear these. Tell your friends if they're being inconsiderate. Tell coworkers it's inappropriate in the workplace. Frown at strangers who do it. Tell apparent creepers to stop, and/or consider calling the police.
4. Social negative feedback to people who work at the companies pushing this tech. There's plenty of tech talent on the job market. Why consider someone who continued to work for one of the companies, in some cases after years of sociopathic abuses of society?
5. Be skeptical of influencers and astroturfing shills promoting the products.
Other ideas?
I have the knowledge to compellingly argue, to legislators who do not have the knowledge, all these points.
I live in a big city and I love it because i feel anonymous - nobody cares who I am. It's a stark contrast to where I grew up, where if you were out in public with someone unusual you could hear about it at school the next day.
I think the age of anonymity in public is getting to a close. First government mass surveillance and now private mass surveillance (which will surely be funneled into government surveillance over time)
(i.e. if you control the money printer, then all you care about is that your subjects continue playing. fb is just one cog in a big machine.)
Never really grew up past middle school. I have dealt with high schoolers with better self control and moral compasses.
The rest of SV billionaire class is so abhorrent that you figure they either enjoy being the villains or they figure "it's ok if you get away with it." Sociopaths.
Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ...
Then imagine that it wasn't tracked, recorded, saved, or tied into anything at all. Just a useful service, in service to only you.
Thanks Meta et al, for pushing forward with this broken (for people) model of business and ensuring we'll never be able to have that.
The problem isn't that I'm being recorded by cameras everywhere, the problem is when those silos are broken down to create a panopticon.
"How much outsourcing of your mind do you want to give to technology?" "Yes"
If you really can't remember all the details of people that you want to remember, you can always write those details on your phone or trusty Rolodex after you meet them and then check them out before you meet them again if you must.
i do not see any practical difference between the hypothetical device the parent proposes and this, except that your suggestion is more cumbersome. you're just "outsourcing your mind" to paper or whatever.
(i will note that i agree with your general point. i try to make a concerted effort to remember those details, rather than rely on any type of note-taking)
Also, I take it that the next logical (and worrisome) step to something like that is to record the conversations so the AI can summarise and extract the important data from the conversation for it to be later accessible, which is going to bring us into the ultimate performative scenario. Young people nowadays are already aware that anyone could be recording their most embarrassing moments; recording everything we say would be worse.
I already have that. It's called a memory. Came free with my brain.
You should see a doctor about that.
a lot of people genuinely don’t have the memory capabilities to remember the birthdays of various people
Because they don't try.
30 years ago, it wasn't weird to have 30, 40, even 50 phone numbers memorized. Ask anyone who was alive then. Now people just push the icon for the person they want, allowing their brains to get lazy.
Your brain: Use it or lose it.
Must be nice.
In any case the point of my original post was much more about technology that serves only the user - not any specific use case.
From the replies, I see I could have done a better job of making that clear.
If I wanted to chat with someone pretending to be interested in me I could just answer the door when salesmen come knocking.
In any case the point I was making was more about how the technology we are allowed is not in our service. This was just a use case where having a trustworthy service would be nice, but is impossible.
I do agree with your main point, just not for this device. I think this device breaks expectations for socialization in a weird way.
But I am dismayed that it is a cloud device, I am dismayed by all cloud devices, and I am dismayed by people who happily buy it all. I don't know what I'm going to do next time I buy a car, for example.