Meta Files Patent for Facial Recognition, Automatic Recording of People
privacyguides.org
privacyguides.org
https://www.engadget.com/2187824/wired-found-code-for-an-unr...
Anyway, an important topic to read about if you want to be a member of a free, democratic society.
Sooner or later people will decide that enough is enough.
This is the book. I thought that this was a thought provoking book. Sooner or later the world will look like the one described in it if we don't change our ways.
What we are doing is not sustainable.
Some variant of _Sorry, I cannot discus violence_ in some form is what seems to always result with the _French Revolution_ inquiries.
They are pre-programmed bias that are designed to limit knowledge and content consumption.
Another is asking if any employees working at AI company Y are Epstein associates. _No one that works at Y was associated with Epstein." It will keep it up until you give it a name of an actually employee that was an associate.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srIt1RFE-Zo
It's even worse than that, now he's buying up indigenous burial sites:
https://robbreport.com/shelter/celebrity-homes/mark-zuckerbe...
Billionaires buying tons of Hawaiian land is actually a huge problem. Marc Benioff has been doing it as well.
There will almost always exist loopholes in any scheme. Having wealth effectively buys you new loopholes. It's a (non)virtuous cycle. We need to tie tax to wealth level and be done with it.
Pictures of people, especially once they are identified, are person related data. And there are strict rules on how companies can collect / generate / process / transfer this kind of data.
Influencers and stores are damaging their brands by selling or advertising the glasses, but Ray-Ban seems to go completely free.
I do wonder if we're just moving to shun people wearing glasses with heavy frames in the near future. The glass only seems to appeal to a certain type of people anyway.
What type of people is that? I am just a dad who has them and films his kids doing cute things without making the phone camera an ever present intrusion while outdoors.
It's fine, it's Meta, suspicion is warranted, but I'm hoping it can be moderated and directed. People like me are kind of left out right now in what seems to be a runaway narrative.
P.S: Would love a suggestion that doesn't involve angrily telling parents to not take pictures of their kids as an alternative. It sucks that I have to explain that this will be happening anyway.
Good faith question:
If your worry is, "I don't know you're recording", what did you do with that information when someone was using a digital camera to video record their kids 15 years ago, with you in the background?
P.S: if your answer is just "you could be a creep", I totally empathize, but this is for the situation where I am actually just a parent.
Would love to see it if I missed this.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/meta-workers-seeing-dist...
It’s made clear during onboarding, but I’m sure it could be better.
This data - which includes their facial features, geolocation, and activities is not yours to take and immortalize.
This should be intuitive to any empathetic human being. One person saying "this breaches my sense of safety and privacy" should be enough for you to understand.
If someone shoves a camera in my face in public I am going to move away from that person. If I see them filming someone with me in the background at least I know what is going on and can judge the situation accordingly.
Now I don't know. Everyone with glasses is a suspect. It's more public tension, hyper vigilance and uncertainty.
I'm the asshole that covers his face while flipping off the person with the camera. I've done this for years. It used to be for news or other TV based content that they would blur out the finger gesture which meant blurring out my face. I've also noticed a camera in public places and deliberately stepped behind someone else as a blocker, or just moved to be behind the person with the camera. These are easy to do when it's obvious there's a camera. Glassholes are much more difficult to notice. Comparing these as equivalent is just a lack of being rational.
Given pockets, I don't think the camera part has ever been an "everyone"-level problem.
I hope, for the kids' sake, in addition to normalizing the idea that it's okay for dad to be recording them without their awareness, you teach them that most people find the idea of strangers doing this to be creepy and distasteful (for good reason), so they need to be wary around Meta glasses despite seeing them as a quotidian thing.
"in addition to normalizing the idea that it's okay for dad to be recording them without their awareness"
They're 2 man. You're at the point of questioning whether parents should be allowed to film their infants. Do we think we're off the deep end a bit?
You think Meta is going to create CSAM with my data?
Like I would dump them for using my data for analytics without my permission, but we probably should recalibrate our expectations a bit here.
- https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-chatbots-sex-a25311bf - https://www.404media.co/instagram-is-blocking-minors-from-ac...
Back to the original inference, anyway… generative ad Personalization instances DO NOT (afaik) appear in the public repository of ads. Researchers can't see it, but do we have to strain our imaginations to think that things like nudify apps aren't taking advantage of tools that do things like drop user avatars into their pitch? e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/comments/1uhy9yn/instagram_...
I don't have a specific citation to offer, but tbh I've seen enough.
going to hold my tongue regarding the majority of this conversation, but i couldn't help myself here.
meta has one of the worst track records of doing untoward things with data. a pattern of abusing its user's data, built over years. if you are still okay with them now, i am doubting your words that anything they could do would make you "dump them immediately".
Just so we're clear and can read past the headlines. This database doesn't exist and there has been no evidence that a database built off of meta ray-bans exists. And I would obviously dump the ray bans if this was actually a thing.
The technology exists to build it. The pipelines exist to populate it. The marketing engine exists to leverage it for targeted delivery of content.
And yet, somehow, nobody's built it?
How sure are you of that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook
> And if it has been, where can I buy this?
Depending on your preference: their advertising portal, or a stock broker.
you can do that, but you have no clue as to why people/companies don't tend to do those things?
big tech ignoring gdpr, ignoring or working around privacy protections, their technology being easily abused for stalking or harassment with no effort put into curtailing bad behavior, location data being bought and sold, etc.
i think the only thing from your list i haven't seen in the news in the last couple of months is employees of big tech doing break & enters.
(and this is all before we even approach the topic of data breaches!)
we're talking about meta supposedly using facial recognition on the glasses to build a master database of faces or something
like if I was Zuckerberg I would not want to do that, it would lead to a congressional hearing and all kinds of lawsuits I'd imagine.
like where do we draw the line on plausible?
or do we just go and say yeah meta must be spying on everything and feeding everything to a database where they sell everything about you
like what about CCTV backups or robo vac camera feeds? should we assume that companies are deliberately sending all the data so they can sell raw video feeds and they just don't tell you?
I'm not counting in incompetence and data breaches, I'm talking about intentional stuff
I mean, it's literally in the name?
Why?
Given Meta's history of disregarding everyone who's not Zuck (and him being a sociopath), why give them the benefit of any kind of doubt? Right now, everyone should assume malice as the first explanation, and then accept that maybe there was some ineptitude once evidence appears.
So, nothing except the main sales pitch then?
> There is no Rayban data in Facebook
There is no war in Ba Sing Se?
I’d be happy to join some kind of rage-off at metas general practices but my claim was specifically just about the glasses data
The Meta glasses, like everything Meta does, is marketed as a tool for interacting with Meta's services. Including Facebook.
This was my only claim. Which remains true. Videos off of the glasses voluntarily posted on FB is no different than iPhone videos posted on FB so it has nothing to do with the glasses themselves. If your claim is “posting videos in FB is a bad idea”, I agree, I don’t do that but again, that has nothing to do with the glasses either. It doesn’t make posting easier or force me to opt-out of automatically posting or anything silly like that
And you can’t do any “facial recognition” against Facebook either. I’m glad meta figured out that was a pointless bad idea.
You don't have to be constantly filming your kids, that's optional.
This is a cute spin, but what you're saying is "I like the glasses because I can film people without them knowing" it just happens the people in this case are (mostly) your children.
Again, I'm not saying this out of some bad faith, I just think this argument doesn't work the way you think it does. We actually have no data as to what its most commonly used for, apart from the headlines. Anecdotally, all my friends who have them use it for the exact same reason I do.
There is an alternative to your stealthy camera glasses, which you are aware of, and your admitted use case for them is filming people who are unaware that you are filming. Yet you can't imagine other people use them for the same purpose? I'm trying to assume good faith but you're not making it easy.
For the record the "people" here is my 2 year old. And I'm the one making a bad faith argument?
This confirms it, you're being deliberately obtuse.
I’m not feeling bad for him, but I’m also betting he’s not about to do something stupid like that.
And at this point, let me say you seem to care about your kids and probably have the technical skills and attention to make sure they never end up in his database. But you are an exception, and society needs to protect the children of parents who care less.
Early 2000s, for variety of reasons, their iconic check pattern got associated with cheapness and violence.
Being expensive means your more exclusive. Being creepy, I don't see that helping.
That's ridiculous.
> Ray-Ban seems to go completely free.
because reasonable adults can distinguish between Meta and Ray-Ban.
Donald Trump - becomes president, after all it was just “locker room talk”
Billy Bush - career destroyed for passively chuckling
A "reasonable adult" would have no trouble understanding why someone who thinks the existence of these glasses is a moral and privacy nightmare would also seek to punish Ray-Ban.
I replaced them with a brand I was able to confirm was a) Not Ray Ban b) Not a Luxotica brand. c) Owned and operated in America (note, that doesn't mean the glasses were made in USA). d) Cost less than 1/4 of previous ray-bans.
Regardless of what THEY do, what WE as consumers can do is to permanently brand these awful glasses as "pervert glasses" [2] and publicly shame them. I'm here for it.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/meta-takes-around-3-sta...
[2] https://futurism.com/future-society/meta-ray-ban-smart-perve...
Is there? "Massive?"
Outside of HN and a few tech pubs read by a statistically insignificant number of people, 99.9995% of people don't even know these exist.
my local gym has posters up forbidding them. my non-tech daughter has asked me about them. the college i teach at has policies about them.
their banned in courts in various countries. they've been criticized in mainstream outlets like the guardian, BBC, CNN, business insider, national post, yahoo, and the independent. (i dont think any of those outlets are reasonably considered "tech pubs read by a statistically insignificant number of people")
Thinking of pubs in a different sense of the word, even Wetherspoons has opinions about them: https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/wetherspoons-bans-meta-glasses...
Yes, I would consider that "massive" since none of them are HN readers nor work in any tech or media related fields.
You really think if I asked 200,000 people in my city, only one would have heard of Meta RayBans? when there are billboards, magazine ads, and window stickers in every glasses store? Couldn't tell you the real number but it's probably closer to 1 in 5.
Not uncommon, in comments like these, for there to be so many 9s that the population of Earth is exceeded.
Now people will not confront because they would only provide content and see themselves in new viral video.
But if it gets a smartphone moment, no-one will talk about the privacy and the cameras anymore and that's why they keep trying.
At best adoption is delayed a while until the marketing department figures out a strategy that is more palatable.
Facial recognition is becoming common enough that it’s no longer very surprising if you’re in a crowded public space. Malls argue they need it to catch thieves, airports argue they need it to catch terrorists, and so on and so forth.
Privacy is like Humpty Dumpty, except he’s being poked to death.
in the future, everyone's automatic recording of people will be fully accessible to all.
in the future, everyone's glasses will also be AR glasses, enabling everyone to view everyone else's POV at any time.
in the future there will be no privacy, because everyone will be able to watch everyone else.
"Mark Zuckerberg spends $30 million on four homes to ensure privacy" - https://www.nbcnews.com/businessmain/mark-zuckerberg-spends-...
A longer argument can be put here: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/software/we-need-to-talk-abo...
Its perfectly possible that AR glasses could be _more_ privacy preserving than mobile phones. THe problem is, either the market needs to make it financially advantageous to be privacy preserving (yes I can hear the laughing from here) or the legal mechanism by which the end user can request damages from either the user of the glasses, or the maker ofthe glasses, or both.
Person of Interest (2011)
1786798199 | Meta Patents AI Glasses to Use Facial Recognition to Identify People | https://www.404media.co/meta-patents-ai-glasses-to-use-facia... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310153
But since Warren Spector is retiring, I just have to throw in this quote: Do you have a single fact to back that up?
How many male users of these pervert glasses are secretly recording attractive women at gyms, at beaches, in scantily clad clothing wherever, so they can go back home and "spank the monkey"? Our taking the video clips and running it through ai to create nudy content ?
They will get periodic slaps on the wrist, but this is purely for show. There is too much money to be made and spread around.
I'd say Facebook is the most evil company, but we also have Google, so competition is fierce here. Kind of sad to see what became of the big US corporations - Evil prevailed there, continues and expands.
I'm not sure what part of meta delevoped that, I can't find those names in linkedin. I vaguely recognise one name but can't be sure about it.
In meta, there are a number of research teams, SOme are pure hardware, although they are less now, some are software and some are about specific modes of interaction. Ie agios is about touch, opals are about displays (assuming they exist anymore) surreal is about visual understanding and graphics is well, graphics.
Surreal built a "ego centric" platform, ie research perv glasses. They are quite capable https://www.projectaria.com/
Recording data is easy, processing and making that data usable, within the power budget is hard.
On the face of this, its trivially simple to do. Just record all that video and sound, do some STT facial recogntion and location extraction and jobs a goodun.
Doing it with a total power envelope of <500mwhrs is the hard part.
However, in terms or problems. These glasses have the ability to precisly locate the wearer. By inference it can locate anything it can see. If you have more than one wearer, you can locate lots of objects/people in real time.
This means that you can trivially map people's movments,s thoughts and actions in more or less real time.
Great for advertising, great for visually impaired, shit for everyone else.
the whiplash can be jarring, but it's important to remember that the commentariat are many individuals, not a single entity you can agree or disagree with
The world that results may be exactly what we want, IDK. It's just be nice if we could decide, collectively, one way or the other, then be deliberate about it.
We're literally about to require Meta to prohibit the creation of multiple accounts. Their T&Cs already prohibit that, so what we're saying is that just asking is not enough - we are demanding it is enforced. What we ask for, we get.
>A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities. In particular, the term denotes publications of this type distributed by university administrations at the start of the academic year, with the intention of helping students to get to know each other. A face book or facebook is a paper or online directory of individuals' photographs and names published by some American universities. In particular, the term denotes publications of this type distributed by university administrations at the start of the academic year, with the intention of helping students to get to know each other.
Skype and Zoom have been used to train AI to create human likenesses (which is why they are free to users), and probably for identification purposes too.
Always read the small print.
After I came home I decided that I am going to put up a sign in my front yard - "I will shoot you if I see you with meta glasses in front of my house". I don't own a gun but I will definitely put up the sign just to tell people how shitty they are.
I would love if meta glasses were freely distributed in poor, black and brown communities in the United States where police intimidation and rights violations are routine, and where there is almost no recourse because even when filmed via phone (if you manage it) enough context is missing to allow any litigation to err on the side of taking the word of the police. Not everyone is able to capture these on their phone in the moment, with enough context to make a case. In a world where police are predatory, a camera on your face becomes like a dashcam. Insurance against becoming a victim. Many police are still not required to wear body cams, courts and juries tend to take cops word as veracious evidence.
Citizens wearing glasses that record, if evenly distributed, would seem to reflect the surveillance state back at the authorities. If the problem is it's made by Meta, then fine. But it is irritating how much of this no cameras in public discourse seems authored by relatively privileged types who ignore the actual benefits of cameras in public given the power of witness testimony in the courts, and the biased nature in which such testimony is often favored.
Imo if you don't have answer for that problem, nor an ability to acknowledge more cameras in public has actually been an equalizer where oppression actually happens, then I have to doubt your sincerity.
Unless you have a plan to codify privacy as a right, repeal patriot act era powers and actually have it pass the Senate, then you are by definition advocating a poor solution as it is not viable.
Meanwhile in the courts were being poor is criminalized and sends people to actual oppression in jails and prisons right now today as opposed to an imagined "technofeudalist" oppression sometime in the future having a camera recording is usually the best and only defense possible against the state. If no one recorded it's you vs the state, and you will lose.
Your examples and grievances are real and shared by me and many reading your comment, however, maybe let's start by making sure police are accountable? At the same time stop employing thugs and racists. Stop giving them weapons and a uniform. And make them unaccountable for (as the rest of the world see it) out and out cold bloodied murder.
I agree with your sentiments but we also have to be realistic about the solutions you suggest. It is frustrating to only hear pie in the sky solutions when so many people are suffering today. It often reads like the move against cameras is a move from an already privileged class to confine the surveillance state to poor communities, were it already exists in the form of hyperaggressive and predatory policing. If the state is going to do surveillance anyway, one might be tempted to suggest an equalization of this power is a good thing. I'm simply saying its not as straightforward as many people have been led to believe.
If you think the problem with ICE is too many cameras once again I think you make my point. More people have died in ICE custody and at the state's hand since, yet don't have such clear incriminating footage of ICE available. ICE doesn't want to wear bodycams. They don't want cameras in their prison camps.
Don't you think under such circumstances, it is a little suspect that you won't acknowledge at all the way cameras are actually an equalizer? ICE is already doing the things you claim to fear. More meta glasses on the streets, especially on the heads of regular decent people, activists or vulnerable populations could only be a good thing.
Phones can also be used to spy on populations. Should citizens thus refrain from filming ICE with their phones? Or is preventing people from being murdered and letting the state brand them a terrorist right in front of you more important?
It's not a perfect world. You have to make a tradeoff. Imo you're making the wrong trade, and frankly one that is obviously coming from a place of speculation, and not immediate fear of actual oppression.
ICE doesn't like cameras. Apparently you don't either. Yet you claim to be against ICE? Why don't you square the circle for me instead of deflection by way of slippery slope. If you have a meaningful rationale I'm eager to hear it.
I've dealt with this same sort of objection three times now in other comments. Instead of repeating the same objection, why don't you attempt to pick up any of my rejoinders, all of which are lacking a thoughtful reply. I am happy to be proven wrong here. Yet all I get are essentially 4 different versions of the same cheap attempt to mangle my point into some defense of Meta or surveillance or big tech. The inability to deal with the actual substance of my point suggests a concerning lack of candor.
Can you do better?
Is easy access to private camera positive for people disadvantaged against the system? Likely yes.
Would the benefits be largely eclipsed by negative impact like perpetuating violence, depression and polarization if Meta is main vendor? Also yes, because they are careless enough to extract private data and offer it to people benefiting from vulnerable individuals.
Hardly surprising your comments are discussed in context of Meta if you comment in thread about Meta.
How is pointing out the utility of cameras on consumer glasses (as cameras on consumer phones) to actually make an impact where oppression actually happens arguing in a vacuum?
You didn't answer the question. It seems to me you live in a speculative world, where in the real world it is well known people use these things to level the playing field. Do you deny that the ubiquity of cameras among the populace has lessened the ability of the state to act with impunity on American streets? Or do you only speak of oppression through the prisim of speculation?
Is it a perfect solution? Does oppression end at camera point? Obviously not, no more than at gunpoint or take your pick.
Perfect options do not exist. It is easy to insist on some sort of ideological litmus test when the consequences of what actually happens in reality are remote to you. Anyone who has actually seen how the criminal justice system operates would understand the value of cameras for those the state seeks to incarcerate or worse. What could be more oppressive? Seeing an ad you don't like?
Forgive me for not filming you getting bludgeoned in the streets, I don't agree with Google's data policy? What a useful civic actor that makes you. Accompanied by the obvious fact you don't even have a remotely plausible plan to usher in your supposed alternative.
In such a situation, it is hard to distinguish you from any other adversary to righting these ills, as your utility to anyone in actual risk is doubtlessly negative.
What I'm arguing is that if Meta ceased to exist some years ago, there would be less bludgeoning to film to begin with, as social media-driven hate is source for a lot of them.
Obviously, Meta appears as more of a social ill. It's a social network. What has made society necessary and yet unpleasant has always been the same - other people. Rodney King and worse preceded Facebook. I simply don't think you actually have a very robust framework of how the world works. Sorry to put it bluntly. It's just deeply unsatisfying reasoning to anyone whose knowledge of history spans past the current millennium.
Even with respect to Apple and Google, Im not sure the claim Meta is uniquely evil actually is sustained on robust examination. Nevertheless, I take your point. At the very least, I appreciate your attempt to have a discussion. Have a good day.
And yes in the end it's always people. What makes a difference is that some of those people sit on the Meta's board and they consistently show, they aren't humanity's finest. To the point, where I don't think any technological stunt can make up for harm they're doing, therefore making their existence net negative for humans.
Of course one can argue on cynical/real-politik level something like Meta was unavoidable due to "how the world works", but that doesn't mean they should be immune from criticism, as honest public discourse is one of the ways to push Overton window.
Happy to see appreciation on your part :-)