Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition for Its Smart Glasses to Phones
wired.comI don't have Facebook nor Instagram, but my partner does and so does my siblings, parents and cousins.
Photos of me undoubtedly exist on their platform, with my name as well.
Not sure I am ok with random people instantly knowing who I am and who my relatives are.
I don't upload myself or my relatives on social media.
Pictures of me undoubtedly exist online, but they weren't uploaded by me.
There is this old concept on facebook called "tagging faces". Someone who taken pictures of you has tagged it allready, mostly not just one person so fb probably has pretty good biometrics of your and my face. They scrape contact lists as well and other grey patterns to obtain your contact info. It is depressing how for each privacy activist there's dozens of useful idiots who will tag you and publish your phone number on fb in spite of you not wanting them to feed surveillance systems.
Meta should be wiped from this planet...when I read sh*t like this I always say something like "this is the worse" until next week when something even worse comes out re Meta
To complete their bigBrother dreams they could partner with smart tv manufacturers to have a camera and non removable fb app with face recognition. The scary part is that most consumers wouldn't even object to this.
A small minority using this face recognition to identify the right people to complain at whenever they are in public should sort this out.
This is an opportune moment for me to add a story about my dad. He once asked me, "Do you use Facebook?" I don't use Facebook. My colleague Jeff once sent me an invite whether he would like to be my "friend" on Facebook. I had Jeff's email address, and so I emailed him and I said, "Look Jeff, we're business partners. I send you invoices; you pay me. That is the extent of our relationship. I do not want to be your friend on Facebook." He looked at me and then continued and said, "Jeff never replied to apologise."
Because of course they did.
I have read in a couple of recent news articles that ICE has been building a database of faces of people whom they consider relevant to their now infamous manhunts.
I wonder how hard it would be for this researcher to add scaffolding that would equivalently make a Meta smart glasses device into an ICE face collector?
My understanding:
US ICE has been patrolling the interior of the US, not the border, and using cell phones to video record people it encounters. Ice agents have claimed that "[they] now know who you are", referring to people who are onsite, nearby their inner-country patrol and capture activity.
Ironically, this is exactly the thing I have always wished smart glasses could give me: a HUD overlay with facial recognition, to remind me 1) what this person’s name is, 2) how I know them, and 3) when was the last time I saw them.
It would make running into people unexpectedly such a better experience for me.
I see that Meta’s engineers are still busy and happy to build a dystopia in exchange of money.
Damage is already done, they’ve shipped nearly working software to any creep and police officer that need little modification to actually work.
I wonder though what is the GDPR status of something like that? Is anybody just allowed to build a biometric database using public or personal photos?
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403588