Meta Files Patent for Facial Recognition, Automatic Recording of People

Ten years ago people would have said the same about a lot of the surveillance tech we have today: TVs that sell your viewing data, always on microphones that listen to everything in your house to send to big tech so you can easily set a timer, doorbells that record your neighbors house and upload everything to the police 24/7, etc

Not so long ago this was also the thought about mobile phones, now everyone is walking around with them so they can film/pic anyone all the time while 'faking' to be doing something else. If there is any convenience for people to be had, they will go for it. I think the convenience part over phones is just not there (yet). The experience is just not yet anything worthwhile / good / smooth so it's just lame, cringy and clunky, outside of filming. Maybe someone will make something that works, maybe it will be something completely different.

But if it gets a smartphone moment, no-one will talk about the privacy and the cameras anymore and that's why they keep trying.

There is a reason why they are partnering with Rayban; meta has no brand name it can use. Which is pretty wild, because every other big tech company has _some_ kind of brand a non trivial number of people — paying money — who would say something like: "I really need/want to use it every day because it is useful to me, my work would be severely hampered without it"(or some syntactical variation of that sentence with varying amounts of affection towards the brand)

Things have become normalized which just a decade ago would have been thought to never be socially acceptable. Frame it differently, make things convenient and offer something "for free" and everybody around you will forget their concerns, if they ever had any.

saw an ad today for some ear pieces that look like audio speakers but theyre actually cameras as well, so it seems manufacturers realise glasses will annoy people but arent giving up.

Well, RayBan was junk brand in 90s, if it becomes junk it would be just fine.

>> "The glass only seems to appeal to a certain type of people anyway."

What type of people is that? I am just a dad who has them and films his kids doing cute things without making the phone camera an ever present intrusion while outdoors.

It's fine, it's Meta, suspicion is warranted, but I'm hoping it can be moderated and directed. People like me are kind of left out right now in what seems to be a runaway narrative.

> but I can't understand how it's not absolutely destroying the Ray-Ban brand?

> Ray-Ban seems to go completely free.

because reasonable adults can distinguish between Meta and Ray-Ban.

Penalty because it’s based on what people think when they see them. They don’t say Meta Raybands but just Meta glasses. If influential people were to start saying the former enough that it becomes then martins. Also is the question of do other Rayband glasses look like it. If this line is distinct enough than it won’t harm other lines since the visual association isn’t made.

Anecdotal but I hear quite a few people talk negative about Ray-Ban related to the backlash. They are the "pervert glasses" brand now. I think there definitely is reputation damage. Also the "banray" [0] campaign for my country is doing well I think (I regularly see their stickers), and this name reversal may also harm the brand if it sticks.

[0] https://banray.eu/en/

It's especially frustrating because the Ray-Ban logo no longer indicates quality or exclusivity: They were acquired by Luxottica Group in 1999.

> I do wonder if we're just moving to shun people wearing glasses with heavy frames in the near future. The glass only seems to appeal to a certain type of people anyway.

That's ridiculous.

Luxottica, the owners of Ray-Ban since 1999, realized after they survived the expose on their blatant monopolistic price gouging that none of this sticks. People just see something they recognize and go with it.

Yes, but also no.

A longer argument can be put here: https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/software/we-need-to-talk-abo...

Its perfectly possible that AR glasses could be _more_ privacy preserving than mobile phones. THe problem is, either the market needs to make it financially advantageous to be privacy preserving (yes I can hear the laughing from here) or the legal mechanism by which the end user can request damages from either the user of the glasses, or the maker ofthe glasses, or both.

Luckily, the future isn't set in stone. I see a ton of skepticism towards this surveillance tech.

But some are everyone-er than others.

thats a nightmare for privacy enthusiasts :/

Fully accessible to all? Not when there's money to be made by putting it behind a paywall. Unless it's served with ads I guess.

3GC

>> in the future there will be no privacy, because everyone will be able to watch everyone else.

"Mark Zuckerberg spends $30 million on four homes to ensure privacy" - https://www.nbcnews.com/businessmain/mark-zuckerberg-spends-...

That series was prescient.

Government agencies love this stuff. Everything that's illegal for them to do (just in case they still care), Meta does it for them.

Technically quite a big difference.

I'm not sure what part of meta delevoped that, I can't find those names in linkedin. I vaguely recognise one name but can't be sure about it.

In meta, there are a number of research teams, SOme are pure hardware, although they are less now, some are software and some are about specific modes of interaction. Ie agios is about touch, opals are about displays (assuming they exist anymore) surreal is about visual understanding and graphics is well, graphics.

Surreal built a "ego centric" platform, ie research perv glasses. They are quite capable https://www.projectaria.com/

Recording data is easy, processing and making that data usable, within the power budget is hard.

On the face of this, its trivially simple to do. Just record all that video and sound, do some STT facial recogntion and location extraction and jobs a goodun.

Doing it with a total power envelope of <500mwhrs is the hard part.

However, in terms or problems. These glasses have the ability to precisly locate the wearer. By inference it can locate anything it can see. If you have more than one wearer, you can locate lots of objects/people in real time.

This means that you can trivially map people's movments,s thoughts and actions in more or less real time.

Great for advertising, great for visually impaired, shit for everyone else.

When did you last see a security camera in the bathroom?

Security cameras generally don't change their location.

The massive database it's connected to, the government's awareness of said database, and the government's intentions regarding the database.

"Current lawsuits are pushing for universal recording because we require users to tell us their age" is a weird argument.

You're buying supporter status in the National Surveillance Effort. Seats in patriot heaven don't come for free.

[delayed]

Police can and should be reined in. There are so many better levers that can be pulled to do this, if only the political will were present. A technofeudalist surveillance state is a poor solution.