Meta hopes you’ll be too distracted by the federal government kidnapping both nonviolent immigrants and citizens off the street and the destruction of the U.S. health and science apparatus to care if they stick facial recognition capabilities inside their smart glasses. That’s not hyperbole.
In fact, the sentiment reportedly stems from a leaked internal memo from inside Meta.
“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,” is what The New York Times quotes Meta is telling staff about its plans to add facial recognition capabilities to glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta HTSN smart glasses and Meta Ray-Ban Display AR spectacles. Meta has reportedly been looking for ways to stick facial recognition in its glasses for the past year despite knowing there are “safety and privacy risks” associated with the technology.
Should Meta ever launch the feature, it’s unclear if the company would make facial recognition an exclusive feature of a new pair of smart glasses or if it would add them to existing pairs. In an emailed statement sent to Gizmodo, a Meta spokesperson said, “We’re building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives. While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature—and some products already exist in the market—we’re still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out.”
Less about accessibility and more about AI
Ostensibly, this technical capability could be used to help those who are hard of seeing or suffer from prosopagnosia (literal face blindness) to recognize the mugs of friends or family. In reality, it appears that Meta wants the feature for more than accessibility purposes. The Times claims Meta is working on “super sensing” capabilities for its glasses. Essentially, this would let the device’s cameras and microphone capture information whenever you’re wearing them, not just when you hit record. It would feed all this data to an AI assistant to help with everyday tasks, such as when you forget where you parked.
Putting aside facial recognition for a minute, glasses that are always recording establish even broader ethical dilemmas than facial cameras already do. Ray-Ban Meta glasses can be used to discreetly capture video—just like in the “glasshole” days. Meta’s glasses normally light up when recording, but will a new pair of glasses keep a light blinking at all hours while it records? Even if it does, a single piece of tape can turn anybody into a one-man band of surveillance.
A new avenue for nationwide surveillance
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been working hard to cozy up to the Trump regime. The company recently won out in a federal antitrust case over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. It knows that to keep playing the game, it needs to acquiesce to whatever the White House asks of it. It’s not a big stretch to believe that the company could work with federal authorities to provide data collected by users of its smart glasses, if it’s not already doing so.
There’s a good reason people may be antsy about giving facial recognition technology to the masses. In 2024, two Harvard students hacked the Ray-Ban Meta glasses to make them compatible with a freeware facial recognition tool. The glasses could trawl through publicly available information online to come up with people’s phone numbers, home addresses, and more pertinent information.
It’s also not the first time Meta has been on a facial recognition kick. It first enabled the technology on Facebook in 2010 to make tagging friends in photos easier. Users didn’t have a choice in the matter until 2019, when Facebook finally made it an option. Meta shoved Facebook’s facial recognition tech into a shallow grave back in 2021.
Facial recognition tech has become so robust, there’s almost no way you can hide your biometric data from the enveloping surveillance apparatus. Gizmodo has talked to several experts in the field of biometrics, and they all say you can’t just throw on some makeup and a mask and hope not to be recognized. It’s already nearly impossible to avoid the cameras in our airports or even on public streets. If everybody is carrying around a camera that’s constantly recording, then there will be nowhere left to hide.
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