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Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

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Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#171
post #95

I wish something like this existed that was completely offline. I'm face blind (prosopagnosia) so being able to feed an offline database photos of friends so it can recognise them would be great. Accessibility shouldn't require giving up privacy.

Literally my thoughts. That would be so helpful, but I will not give any data-hungy company access to people around me. 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, co…

Thats exactly how I describe it. I recognize most people by their hair and voice, but its error prone. My other half, who I've been with for a decade and a half, put on a wig the other day and walked by me at a bar and the only thing I thought about was "that guy was good looking". He got a good laugh out of that.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#172

Former Facebook wanker, who worked in research. 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)…

I recall that Facebook asked me to identify faces of my friends in order to "verify" myself about 15 years ago. Do you know whether Facebook still stores that data?

Wired reported in 2021 Facebook said it would stop using facial recognition technology to identify people in photos and videos and delete accompanying data on more than 1 billion people.[1]

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-drops-facial-recognitio...

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall that Facebook asked me to identify faces of my friends in order to "verify" myself about 15 years ago. Do you know whether Facebook still stores that data?

Wired reported in 2021 Facebook said it would stop using facial recognition technology to identify people in photos and videos and delete accompanying data on more than 1 billion people.[1] [1] https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-drops-facial-recognitio...

I'd love to see a thorough audit of the company done to see whether they actually did this. I strongly suspect they did not actually delete that data.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#175

Former Facebook wanker, who worked in research. 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)…

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.[1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...

They really are mask off evil now. Any idea what those "other concerns" could be?

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#176

How does HN feel about this as a general ethos: - 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…

Yes that would be great. Right now, there are many applications that use pinned certificates to communicate to servers meaning there is literally no way to see the data your own device is sending/receiving from the internet. It's an insane thing that should be banned.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#177
post #71
post #39

Do these emit something unique that could be detected so that loud klaxon could let everyone know there is a glasshole approaching? Some unique bluetooth identifier perhaps?

Yes actually. You can poll for nearby Bluetooth devices and cap the packets advertising the manufacturer.

Advertising packets only go out on startup and pairing, not during normal operation.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#178
IMHO, Meta is the prime example for privacy intrusion in tech history and with this new smart glasses device, they've leveled their game too far by recording people in their home, sometimes even naked, without their consent. This was already discussed here about a month ago: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47961838)

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#179

IMHO, Meta is the prime example for privacy intrusion in tech history and with this new smart glasses device, they've leveled their game too far by recording people in their home, sometimes even naked , without their consent. This was already discussed here about a month ago: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47961838 )

It should be socially normalized to eject people wearing these from your premises and/or life.

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.

Re: Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses

#180

I'm in the position to make security policies at work, and one of them is that no smart glasses are allowed in the office. We will not be having workers aiming Facebook glasses at our screens showing confidential information. And along those lines, I can think of damn few scenarios where I'd be OK with someone using face recognition against me. Restaurants? It's not Facebook's business to know where I like to eat, pr…

I think it's important to keep in mind the difference between metadata versus full video as well as the difference between centralized versus device local solutions. I don't want BigTech tracking my every interaction any more than the government but I don't mind if the dash cam on my neighbor's car logs when I walk by his driveway so long as it isn't uploading that data to a third party. But of course most people don't want to self host and most services aren't E2EE so I won't try to pretend that any of this is important in practice at present. But if we're thinking about possible regulations and the world as we'd like it to be then it becomes relevant.
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