Facebook's Andrew Bosworth told staff that Facebook is considering building facial recognition into future smart glasses products, weighing legal implications
Bosworth's disclosure puts legal scrutiny alongside Facebook's hardware roadmap: identification capabilities would change what the glasses do around bystanders as well as wearers.
First-order effects
Facebook's smart-glasses team must weigh facial-recognition functionality against the legal implications Bosworth identified, potentially separating the feature from the initial non-AR product plan.
Luxottica's Ray-Ban collaboration faces a product-design decision that reaches beyond recording hardware into how the glasses identify people.
Second-order effects
Facebook's treatment of personal data in its glasses becomes more central to product acceptance, extending the concerns raised in earlier discussions of AR-glasses data use.
Competing smart-glasses makers gain a clearer trade-off to navigate: identification features may differentiate products, but they also add legal exposure around use in public settings.
Third-order effects
If facial recognition becomes a standard smart-glasses capability, wearable computing will face a more durable governance divide between cameras that capture scenes and devices that identify people within them.
The hardware market's ability to add recognition features will increasingly depend on legal and social constraints, not solely on advances in AR or optics.
The trend: Smart glasses are evolving from capture devices toward context-aware wearables, with facial recognition making legal risk a core product constraint.
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…
Hmmm Facebook is considering putting facial recognition into its upcoming smart glasses, weighing up the legal - and hopefully the social - issues Whaddya think? https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ...
This continues to be Facebook's behavior - not fixing the issues but treat it is as a PR problem. There are fundamental quick simple steps the @oculus team could do that they refuse to do. A privacy statement is not privacy. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
The only sensible course of action is for the government to ban facial recognition technology. It's a bad technology and with very few exceptions (like unlocking a phone) there are huge and obvious downsides to any way it can be used. https://twitter.com/...
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/...
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/ ...
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…
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…
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/...
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/...
They are literally following the script of The Circle. I just can't. FB STOP. @hartzog @neilmrichards @ariezrawaldman @imran_malek 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.
@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…
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.
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/...
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/...
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 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/...
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/ ...