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Facebook Is Considering Facial Recognition For Its Upcoming Smart Glasses (buzzfeednews.com) 67

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Facebook is discussing building facial recognition into its upcoming smart glasses product and has been weighing the legal implications of the controversial technology, Buzzfeed News reported citing remarks from executives at an internal meeting Thursday. From a report: During a scheduled companywide meeting, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook's vice president of augmented and virtual reality, told employees that the company is currently assessing whether or not it has the legal capacity to offer facial recognition on devices that are reportedly set to launch later this year. Nothing had been decided, he said, and he noted that current state laws may make it impossible for Facebook to offer people the ability to search for others based on pictures of their face. "Face recognition ... might be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear, and the risks are so clear, and we don't know where to balance those things," Bosworth said in response to an employee question about whether people would be able to "mark their faces as unsearchable" when smart glasses become a prevalent technology. The unnamed worker specifically highlighted fears about the potential for "real-world harm," including "stalkers."
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Facebook Is Considering Facial Recognition For Its Upcoming Smart Glasses More

Facebook Is Considering Facial Recognition For Its Upcoming Smart Glasses

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  • Of course, if everyone has a VR headset and everyone is being tracked by their face globally, then if someone is stalking you, you can see them doing it. Disgusting. I wanted VR used for gaming on Linux. Facebook turned it into a stalker arms race.

    • I don't know anybody who has VR glasses.

      • Re:I fucking hate this. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday February 25, 2021 @07:30PM (#61100802)

        "I don't know anybody who has VR glasses."

        They know you! That's kinda the point.

        • Imagine what a wet dream come true this must be for Zuckerberg if he manages to make it popular. Of course everyone with a minimum of common sense will immediately see how dangerous it will be if FaceBook can actually look through your eyes all day long, see where you go, which people you meet, what products you look at, etcetera. Say goodbye to your last little bit of privacy.

          So of course the masses will love it, everyone will buy it and ask you why you haven't, why are you being so paranoid, look at all t

        • Looking for hook up with a stranger! Ready for any experiments! --==>>> v.ht/OauMm
      • i dont even know anyone who has a smart watch or .. a 3D tv (remember those?) - ive seen an 8K screen up close though ... definitely worth the look (but probably not the €10.000 tag) - i thought we been there with google glasses and the whole shebang and then the whole shebang and legal issues on privacy concerns and european government suits and so google dropped the whole thing after investing billions ... and now faceberg , on the verge of the 1st anti-trust wave is gonna "just do it" ?
        m hm .... i

    • Re:I fucking hate this. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @06:43PM (#61100710)

      Yep. This is the one and only reason why I kinda wish the coronavirus situation never fully clears up: at least it provides a good rationale for wearing a mask and escape the panopticon somewhat (especially if you wear dark glasses on top of it).

      It's a sad state of affairs when Google, Facebook and their nefarious gpvernment buddies make you wish a horrible pandemic sticks around.

    • You're confusing AR with big brother. The latter already exists and is widely deployed. Your face is being tracked, at least if you're in any big city that doesn't explicitly have laws against it (and possibly even still).

      • Considering how common cameras are to where almost everyone has them (even built into cellphones), we should be surprised we have the privacy we do.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vlad30 ( 44644 )
      We had Glassholes now we have Zuckholes? Zuckface? I'm sure someone on here can come up with a good one
    • One has to seriously question the desire to go forward with a project your developers already cited as potential for real world harm. If the foreseen can claim real world harm imagine what a shit show the unforeseen will reign down?

  • Bless their hearts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by emc ( 19333 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @06:14PM (#61100624)

    >> The unnamed worker specifically highlighted fears about the potential for "real-world harm," including "stalkers."

    Um, sorry to break it to you Facebook. You guys are the stalkers causing real-world harm.

  • One thing that would be cool for smart glasses, is that it authenticated by scanning your face/eyes as you put it on...

    Apart from that, I do see real utility to those of us who are awful at names, to present a tag overlaid on the people coming up to me, if we are friends on Facebook along with things like common groups.

    • Of course there is a utility to you to use the technology. But I don't want you to know my name. I don't want salespeople pretending to be old friends. And I don't want FB updating my location in real time - if I wanted that I could put their tracker on my phone.

      • But I don't want you to know my name.

        If we are friends on Facebook, in fact you DO want me to know your name. Either you sent me a friend request and I accepted, or I sent you a friend request and you accepted.

        That's why I said, IF WE WERE FRIENDS ON FACEBOOK it would overlay your name...

        And yes, it's very probable someone I am friends with on Facebook might come up to me and I would have no idea what their name was, or how I knew them without some contextual clues missing in that situation.

        • Oh, you expect FB to respect privacy settings? And if they did, it would identify my face, and geotag it regardless of if were friends. The only question is if you know my name, not FB. And I don't want them tracking me in the real world, so fuck your use case.

          Unless you think it will only work by a "this person is my FB friend, but I forgot their name" button.

          • Oh, you expect FB to respect privacy settings?

            If they built it the way I specified, it's not respecting anything, it's obeying a simple rule.

            it would identify my face, and geotag it regardless of if were friends.

            That horse left the barn about 10 years ago man.

            so fuck your use case.

            Well that escalated quickly.

            Further hostile responses sent to /dev/null

            • Re:Yes you do, in some cases. (Score:5, Insightful)

              by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @07:26PM (#61100788)

              You really need to grok the difference between "fuck you" and "fuck your use case". Meanwhile, I don't let friends take photos with me in them if they want to upload them to FB (or Instagram). Since every photo is explicitly binned in either "upload" or "don't", I can avoid what I don't want (being on FB) and still be around people. Automatic uploading changes that.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I was going to make the same point. If it was limited to people you had manually added, stored locally on your glasses and never shared, it could be a useful aid for many people.

      But since it's Facebook it will be a privacy nightmare.

    • Apart from that, I do see real utility to those of us who are awful at names, to present a tag overlaid on the people coming up to me, if we are friends on Facebook along with things like common groups.

      Oh because we all love the sincerity when your account rep calls you and asks about that random thing you mentioned last conversation, as if it wasn't written in his CRM system.

      • Oh because we all love the sincerity when your account rep calls you and asks about that random thing you mentioned last conversation

        We actually all do love when people remember at least something about us from a previous encounter, yes.

        I can remember a lot of stuff on my own, once given the context of who a person is and where I know them from. But I badly need that initial boost, or else it is kind of off-putting to tell people you do not remember even their name...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ahodgson ( 74077 )

      Meanwhile in the real world this is just more data for Facebook to sell to their actual customers; the advertisers.

      • Meanwhile in the real world this is just more data for Facebook to sell to their actual customers; the advertisers.

        Yes it is but the utility of this is valuable enough to me, that tradeoff is probably OK. For other people it would not be, and great for you who can remember names really well... it's a skill that has never come to me easily.

      • >"Meanwhile in the real world this is just more data for Facebook to sell to their actual customers; the advertisers."

        And to give to "authorities" when "requested." Certainly it would never be misused and only obtained with due process.

        The people wearing such things around others are "glassholes", regardless of which company makes them or what fancy name they stick on them. Hopefully they are easily identifiable so we can either whip out our phones and hold them in the person's face the whole time, or

    • It's more so you an tag people and hate them without forgiveness, 20 years later, for not saying sorry when they bumped into you back then.

      Sure, they had a really bad day, hadn't slept much, and their head was so full of problems and their matters so pressing that they simply didn't think of it at that moment because mom was close to death and aaah, panic.... But hey, at least you can post their face ID so that random strangers with even less of a clue can hate them too, 20 years later, and willingly bump

    • When we all share the same AI motives come into question. When I can have my own AI that I can carry around with me, that has been written to prioritize me over general john q public, maybe I will give these tools a try. Why the hell isnt Nineteen Eighty Four required reading at multiple grade levels?

  • Of course they'll have facial recognition (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @06:20PM (#61100650)

    The only reason FB wants to sell smart glasses isn't for money - it's to geolocate their users in real time with GPS and have their users point cameras at everyone else so they can geotag people who don't have FB accounts or at least don't have the app on their phones. Oh, and as a bonus, they can also tag all the other things in pictures in case they weren't sure you did X.

    The only company I trust less than Google with always on cameras being carried by the populace is Facebook. Hopefully, they'll name it something where something like "Glasshole" can take off and its users properly shunned.

  • This should provide a good boost (Score:4, Funny)

    by theCat ( 36907 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @06:21PM (#61100654) Journal

    ... to sales of those Guy Fawkes masks.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Now that COVID made masking up more acceptable, the use of masks in public spaces might become commonplace just to mess with facial recognition. Sure you won't have as many people masking up, but you'll have more than a few.

      Must work. China banned wearing masks to obscure your face.

      • If Facebook wants to make glasses that recognize me, can Google make glasses I can wear that make Facebook glasses think I'm Zuckerberg?
    • Someone should invent the Coherent Beam Electromagnetic Pulse Gun. Point-and-shoot, will take out the electronics of one nosy Facebook user with surgical accuracy.

  • Would help me with my AWFUL memory for names! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BobC ( 101861 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @06:44PM (#61100714)

    I can remember faces well, but am absolutely terrible at remembering names. I have even forgotten the names of close friends if too much time (years) has passed since we last met. So I would LOVE to have glasses that could prompt me in such situations. I can imagine politicians and Navy ship captains would also benefit from assisted name recollection.

    One way to safeguard such a system would be for the glasses to ONLY remember faces that were captured and labeled using the glasses. That is, people I've been physically near (at social distancing limits), and whose name I've personally entered or copied from a contact. Which specifically excludes using online databases of images or video, which ALSO means the glasses MUST detect when they are being pointed at a screen.

  • ...might be the thorniest issue ...

    When object recognition and facial recognition was suggested 35 years ago, there wasn't a nation-wide pool of photos for its use. The implication being, like phone caller-id photos, it was something you uploaded and stored on your device. The arrival of Facebook, Google-cloud backup, and state/federal data (photo) sharing, changed that.

    Also, object recognition (eg. CPU, DRAM card, graphics port) is a minor interest while everybody is building better facial recogntion.

  • Been tried, people got *attacked* over it (Score:3)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @07:03PM (#61100754) Journal
    Remember Google Glasses? Remember the news stories about people in public places literally getting physically attacked for wearing them? Go right ahead, Facebook, we'll be seeing more of that in the news if you do.
    I know damned well many people claim to not care about cameras in public. But you put a camera literally in their face like that and suddenly they care.

    Facebook Plans On Becoming Even More Malignantly Cancerous

    That's what this story title should be.

  • "where the benefits are so clear, and the risks are so clear, and we don't know where to balance those things"

    This is so much of modern technology, including Facebook itself. Facial recognition is something you read about in a William Gibson novel or see in any science fiction movie that has some gimmicky HUD tech. It seems so cool in that fleeting unreal way, when it's a pure fantasy about something we might have one day. Reality is much much messier. Even the idea of opting out ... how do you enforce that

    • . Facial recognition is something you read about in a William Gibson novel or see in any science fiction movie that has some gimmicky HUD tech. It seems so cool in that fleeting unreal way, when it's a pure fantasy about something we might have one day.

      I'm pretty sure SciFi has always presented facial recognition as dystopian. Minority Report had Tom Cruise ripping out his eyes to fool the ubiquitous iris scanners.

      • Actually that was an eyeball change. If memory serves it did more than iris (back of the eye), because if just iris, something less severe could have been done.

    • Even if governments get on top of this and try to pass laws,

      Even in countries that already have laws that stop this, Facebook's position is that unless those laws were made very recently, they want to challenge them.

      Facebook's vice president of augmented and virtual reality (Andrew Bosworth) has said that even laws as recent as 2008 shouldn't apply because they're too old for Facebook's technology.

      While Bosworth said he understood privacy concerns over facial recognition on Thursday, he criticized current legislation, including Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which prevents private companies from collecting and storing biometric data like face scans without people’s consent. He noted the law was passed in 2008 and questioned how such out-of-date legislation could apply to the technologies of today.

  • How about other countries laws that won’t let this shit fly? Prime example is Germany + many other European countries.
    • "He noted that current state laws may make it impossible for Facebook to offer people the ability to search for others based on pictures of their face" Easy one to solve: Forget states . Use a VPN, and Facebook in at least a few countries will have no problem doing face recognition where such servers are in a completely different country. The glasses can have a save for later feature. And there will be great when picture theaters reopen, or police resume abusive and deadly arrests now the fuss has died dow

  • Oh great (Score:3)

    by Dorianny ( 1847922 ) on Thursday February 25, 2021 @10:38PM (#61101082) Journal
    As if the battery wasn't enough, now I got to carry around a stack of release forms as well.
  • It will help identify the assailant when they punch these stupid spy glasses straight off the idiot wearer's face.

  • As if those things will be legal... well, /anywhere/...

    FB look as deluded as Trump at the end of his term.

  • Nope to anything FB !

  • If the data stays with the person who owns the glasses, and Facebook cannot use it for marketing,or resale to third parties then sure what is the problem with the feature? It can be tremendously useful for a variety of reasons. Facebook (or anyone else, including law enforcement) should not be allowed to use the data for its own purposes.

  • First Glassholes soon to be Faceholes. I hope peer pressure takes care of this crap quickly. No one wants to be on your walking spy camera, asshole.

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