Facebook's Andrew Bosworth told staff that Facebook is considering building facial recognition into future smart glasses products, weighing legal implications
Facebook is discussing building facial recognition into its upcoming smart glasses product and has been weighing the legal implications …
BuzzFeed NewsRyan Mac
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's smart-glasses push has been building since its partnership with Ray-Ban maker Luxottica was announced with few details, and Andrew Bosworth subsequently confirmed the first product would arrive "sooner than later" in 2021 as a camera-and-audio wearable without AR features. The new wrinkle: Bosworth told staff that facial recognition is on the table for future versions, with Facebook explicitly weighing the legal implications before committing.
That framing matters because a face-identifying wearable puts Facebook's data practices on a stranger's face in public space — a far sharper legal exposure than anything in the current no-AR hardware plan, and one that lands on Luxottica's brand as much as Facebook's.
First-order effects
Facebook's own legal team becomes the gatekeeper for the feature: the internal weighing of implications means facial recognition will not ship in the Ray-Ban line unless the company judges the regulatory risk survivable.
Luxottica inherits direct brand exposure — a fashion label whose flagship product could be perceived as covertly identifying people in public.
Second-order effects
Rival smart-glasses efforts face a forced choice: match Facebook's biometric capability or differentiate on explicit no-face-ID positioning, turning bystander privacy into a marketing axis.
Privacy regulators get a concrete target — a mass-market consumer device that identifies non-consenting people — likely drawing scrutiny that shapes what any vendor can ship in this category.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, consumer wearables split into two camps — camera-first recorders like the point-of-view recording feature being teased versus identity-aware devices — with legislation on bystander biometric consent becoming the structural constraint on which camp wins.
The episode extends Facebook's established pattern of shipping data-hungry features after internal legal review rather than external approval, keeping AI hardware litigation risk as a standing cost of its hardware ambitions.
The trend: Consumer smart glasses are moving from passive cameras toward active biometric identification, with each vendor's legal-risk appetite — not the technology — setting the pace.
At today's Facebook companywide meeting, Facebook execs discussed the possibility of adding facial recognition to its upcoming smart glasses product after one employee brought up concerns about “real world harm” including “stalkers.” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
We've been open about our efforts to build AR glasses and are still in the early stages. Face recognition is a hugely controversial topic and for good reason and I was speaking about was how we are going to have to have a very public discussion about the pros and cons. (1/2) http…
FB has one of the world's largest user-uploaded photo databases, and has been working on FR for years. That tech powers features like suggested tags. Deploying it on smart glasses to help ppl recognize unknown faces in the real world would be totally new. https://www.buzzfeednews…
Earlier this week a Facebook exec spoke on a public forum about how difficult it was that someone was reporting out internal meetings in real time. If that reporting didn't happen, the public wouldn't know about things like this. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Facebook is considering facial recognition for its AR glasses. Of course it is. There are a lot of reasons to do that, and a ton not to as well. @boztank and @KavyaPearlman should work together to figure out how to do cool social stuff without the freaky factor. https://twitter.c…
I fear that if Facebook goes down this path that it could sink the entirety of AR. Because nearly every user will assume that all AR headsets have facial recognition even if they don't. https://twitter.com/...
We've been through this. Haven't we? Andrew Bosworth shouldn't be anywhere near any business which involves heightened privacy concerns. Whether for the ears or the eyes. https://twitter.com/...
@boztank I can see where there is a use case to be made for people suffering from conditions that affect the ability to recognize faces, but if that is really the only positive use case, maybe it should be by prescription so the bad use cases don't run amok for the small upside.
In our meeting today I specifically said the future product would be fine without it but there were some nice use cases if it could be done in a way the public and regulators were comfortable with.
Boz wants a public convo on pros/cons of AR facial recognition: How do people give consent to be ID'd based on spatial context? Is it recorded on a server? What about Third-Party doctrine/Fourth Amendment implications for private spaces? See @CodedBias doc for how it's gone wrong…
@boztank I've longed for a good set of AR glasses since Magic Leap put out their first ad. I would never buy a pair that's armed with FRT. Your product will undoubtedly become a policing tool. Please, just don't. It would be worse than Clearview for civil liberties, especially fo…
May be more context in the full meeting, but that the comments from Facebook in here thinking about deploying facial recognition in its smart glasses are focused somewhat on the legality, and not the ethics, of facial recognition is concerning https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
I gotta say.... obvious surveillance state thing aside, here me out... this... is awesome? Like just on a pure “wow this is cool technology” way, right? Cmon you gotta admit https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
Back in 2015/16, Facebook employees built a facial recognition app that told them someone's name if they pointed their phone camera at their face. https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
This is a super important conversation for us to be having as a society. As with other issues, the tech is coming whether we begin to process it and set norms or not. https://twitter.com/...
Andrew Bosworth, who famously said “We connect people. Period. That's why all the work we do in growth is justified...Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools” is now in charge of a product that can put people's lives at risk. https://twitter.com/...
Flashback: In 2013, Google banned apps for Glass that used facial recognition, under pressure from members of Congress. https://www.theguardian.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
They are literally following the script of The Circle. I just can't. FB STOP. @hartzog @neilmrichards @ariezrawaldman @imran_malek https://twitter.com/...