if the feature was “exploratory” why are they mad? you explored what the reaction would be by having the code behind a feature flag in prod and the response wasn’t good so you scrapped it? seems like you should be glad wired did you a solid by not having you waste engineering hours developing a feature nobody wanted.
Oh, no. They didn’t scrap the code. It’s there, waiting to be deployed again with an obscured name once the dust settles a bit.
The starkest signal of the MAGAfication of Silicon Valley isn’t this fairly par-for-the-course spyware tech, but their public response.
A short couple of years ago they would have downplayed the whole thing and peppered a few apologies in, but these days the standard response is attack, attack, attack. Call the journalist a liar, call the journal failing, no need for evidence on either, just as long as you keep attacking.
I hope Roy Cohn is burning in Hell 2.
Backend Meta servers go brrrrrr
“Oh shit. We forgot to hide it better.”
Meta’s Vice President of Communications Andy Stone complained that Wired waited until the fourth paragraph to note the facial recognition feature was “not enabled,” and doesn’t note until the 16th paragraph that the feature is exploratory.
Why is the code pushes to the customer downloadable app of its an internal experiment.
If it was “experimental” and “not enabled”, why the fuck did you push it to the totality of the devices’ user base, fuckerberg?
Yeah, it seems clear to me that they intented to enable it in the future. But of course the CEO left that out barking at someone else instead. “Experimental”, sure. Certainly wasn’t internal anymore. Hypocrite. Tech companies managed to shatter my trust in them. They gambled my customer loyalty away. Now, if I don’t like something, I switch. Byeee
Meta deserves all the scrutiny and scorn it is getting for this terrible project. You know who else deserves scorn? Ray-ban. They hitched their brand to this bullshit and should be held just as accountable.
Wait…does this mean every time someone wearing a meta glass looked at me…rather its camera looked at me, meta stored my face for profiling purposes regardless of me being an user of meta Apps or not?? This is so messed up. Initially I thought that only friends of meta users used to get profiled via face recognition…wtf…but again it’s meta…violated multiple privacy laws and as such…so not a surprise tbh
yea, they did that before the glasses too. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/resources/library/media/20180524RES04208/20180524RES04208.pdf
On the internet every company does User profiling mainly for advert purposes…its impossible to escape these days but what’s most concerning about glasses was face data was pretty easily made available by the user…still advert and tracking cookies can be blocked…but meta glass camera? Which is basically one of its most highpoint feature? I doubt anyone will heights to block it physically considering that they cost an arm and a leg
Facebook parent company denies creating a book of faces.
Listen Meta, all you have to do is make the technology free and available to everyone, prove you aren’t motivated by profit, use your vast wealth and resources to improve society, and be completely transparent with all your business interactions. Then you wouldn’t be getting all this hate
All they needed to do was not be so scummy with people’s data and I think most would have been okay with the tradeoff. I would have bought one of their VR headsets if I didn’t think they were gonna scrape every aspect of its use and sell my gooning habits to advertisers.
Mostly just mad they got caught.
Smart Glasses: looks at Zuck “That’s him! That’s the criminal.”
meta will still develop new facial recognition code behind the scenes
Removes™ … the user’s UI part of face recognition?
Thank goodness for the geeks who go exploring all the tech nooks and crannies to find interesting tech behaviour. We need you.
We’ll keep going - it’s what we do as a hobby and for fun after all :)
There are different types of face recognition in smartphones today. One kind is the biometric recognition used for unlocking phones, and can tell people apart. The second is just the recognition that a face exists in a certain location, often used by filters. It seems like they wanted to mix these two kinds, but one is very simplistic and the other is very difficult.
Distinguishing among different people is a much harder problem, and can have a bunch of false positives. The facial recognition systems used by police seem to make the news frequently saying that they mistook one person for another. Those systems will have more processing power than a pair of smart glasses.
That’s assuming that they’re doing the processing locally. If they’re uploading data to AI datacenters for processing, then it’s really hard to justify calling them “smart glasses”. In the computer field, it used to be common for them to use terminals that sent all processing to a large server, and the terminal itself did no processing. They were called “dumb terminals.” It would be weird for smart glasses to actually be dumb terminals.
But anyways, if the processing is done locally, the error rate is going to be high. The glasses would tell you that Steve is over there, but it’s actually Doug. And worst of all, the mistakes it would make, just like the police’s facial recognition system, will inevitably come off as extremely racist.
So, it doesn’t surprise me that they cancelled the feature that would make all of their users be called racists. I’m not sure why they’d be mad about it. It seems like a doomed feature to me.
They’re already calling LLMs “AI”, calling dumb terminals “smart glasses” doesn’t seem that much of a stretch. And I think they only scrapped it after unfavourable reporting, not because they couldn’t make it work. Not saying they could make it work well and not be racist in the first place, but when did that ever stop them?
Edit: they only scrapped the code from the consumer product, I’m sure they’ll keep developing it. Another report mentions an internal memo about releasing it during turmoil to minimise backlash. They’re going to push it sooner or later unless law is passed to prevent them.
Based on my understanding:
The glasses would send data to the user’s phone, which would maintain the local end of a bank of faces, and relay that to a central server for full id.Similar to how Facebook builds profiles on you across the web on connected sites regardless of whether you are logged into Facebook.
They were called “dumb terminals.” It would be weird for smart glasses to actually be dumb terminals.
Smart when compared to glasses, dumb when compared to terminals. It’s not that nonsensical.
Why can’t a company do smart glasses with self-hostable or fully local processing?
I’d love a pair but fuck streaming everything I see to a random dude in Nigeria
Well for one thing, it’s creepy and the people around you don’t want to be passively recorded 24/7.
Remember Google Glass? Its users were called “glassholes” for a reason.
Sadly, Meta’s glasses is less obvious, so that term is harder to use accurately.
They’re still glASSHOLES
Because recording people without their consent is creepy AF.
Of course it is. But if I do it locally it’s just me, not some megacorps wage slaves looking at the data.
Mostly my nerd brain would like to go “what is this plant” or “overlay all planes overhead to my screen” 😀
There are to separate issues here:
- corporation gathering surveillance data on everyone
- creeps filming women and children
Even if it’s just for you it’s still creepy. You may not record people without consent but we don’t know that. All we see is a camera pointed at us.
Self-hosted doesn’t mean “look how nice I am”. When a piece of tech is shit, it’s shit whether it is self-hosted or not.
It’s not about being nice. It’s about me knowing where my data is.
Are you a cybersecurity expert? Can you guarantee that the data you’ll collect with your secret agent glasses won’t end up in the open?
Yes.
Unless someone phyiscally breaks into my house and steals my server. Which would require a very targeted attack which again is WAAY out of scope in my (and everyone else’s) threat model
You’re a smart guy.
The G2 augmented reality glasses fit that. No camera or microphone.
But I want a camera and a microphone.
I just want to use my own hardware to analyse whatever they’re recording.
