Meta's Smart Glasses Repurposed For Covert Facial Recognition (404media.co) 29
Two Harvard students have developed smart glasses with facial recognition capabilities, sparking debate over privacy and surveillance. The project, dubbed I-XRAY, uses Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses coupled with facial recognition software to identify strangers and retrieve personal information about them. AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the creators, tested the technology on unsuspecting individuals in public spaces. The glasses scan faces, match them against online databases, and display personal details on a smartphone within seconds. The students claim their project aims to raise awareness about potential privacy risks.
paywall :-( (Score:2)
All is Paywall, Resistance is $14.95 a month (Score:1)
Zuck and Elon been smokin' same shit lately
rofl (Score:1)
"The students claim their project aims to raise awareness about potential privacy risks."
uh-huh. so close, let me fix it:
"The students hope their project raises their hirability and starting salary when they apply to companies involved in privacy risks."
hahahahahaha
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Maybe. But lots of very college/university kids are bright, knowledgeable, and so enthusiastic about their personal projects that they're childishly naÃve about almost everything else.
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Just now? (Score:3)
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I'm honestly surprised we're just getting to this point.
It's possible the we're NOT just getting to this point. Sometimes there's a pretty big gap between what's available to / known about by the public, and what already exists in secret.
The technology to do this less surreptitiously has been known about publicly since the Glasshole era, if not before then. I wouldn't be surprised if law enforcement agencies and/or spooks have had, for perhaps years, nearly-undetectable devices that do covert identification.
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A good friend of mine worked for a FAANG and was developing their machine vision systems about 20 years ago. One of the products they worked on allowed cell phones to take a photo and the servers would figure out what the object was. This could also be used to identify people. The team put their foot down that their tech should not be allowed to be used in this way. So the tech capability has been there for about 20 years, but unfortunately it has finally bec
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Years ago stories leaked that there was smartphone app, and not a public one, that would do the same thing. It was so secret, journalists had to quote sources who were shown the app by a braggart.
How is this bad? (Score:2)
In the US, you can be recorded unless you're in an area where privacy is normally considered "private", i.e., your home, a bathroom, private property, etc. When a gov't does it, it can be restricted behavior based on laws and court rulings but a private citizen can record your activities when you're in a public area. If linking that with software and an Internet connection bothers you, change the laws.
In an era of cellphones and augmented vision technology, is anybody surprised that the linkage of that tech
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Except for the fact that I, as a person being recorded, am also (unknowingly) having my data sucked into Meta's gaping maw without any consent, implied or otherwise. What is Meta's defined policies regarding their rights to, and usage of, images recordings and other data collected through their devices?
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You mean, like how when you are being recorded in public, and information about you makes it go viral on Reddit, or Youtube?
You do not get to own information about you pursuant to the first amendment, but you can keep people from rummaging through your secrets, either because they trespassed on your IRL or digital property, or because they violated some contractual obligation (like your doctor gossiping about you), this is called the "intrusion into seclusion" or the "disclosure of *private* facts) theory o
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Because things can be both legal and bad. You have to be a total weirdo to think otherwise.
Even students get into repugnant surveillance (Score:2)
Don't they have better and more noble things to do than take a piece of dystopia technology from a disgusting big data company and create more dystopia?
Help with Disability? (Score:1)
For someone like me who has a terrible time remembering faces and names, augmented reality with facial recognition could replace the defective & underperforming 'wetware' that I have. Like a hearing aid for those with ear problems, or glasses for those with retina or lens problems. These things are socially acceptable, probably because there's accepted norms for their use.
Feels like if the use case is to compensate for a disability, that's ok; but if you're using something that enriches a third party, o
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If it's in an environment we're you are expected to know people, like at a company we're everyone wears name / photo badges, or with people who you've met and been told their name, then this seems fine to me. It would probably be polite to ask people if it's OK when you first meet them.
It's linking it to vast online databases that seems creepy.
I'm curious, would you say you have apantasia [wikipedia.org]? I do, and I also have a terrible time remembering people's faces.
Fucking Finally (Score:2)
This is the feature that makes smart glasses worth using -- giving you seem less information on who you are talking to -- it's just all the tech makers have been too cowardly to actually enable it.
And no bullshit about how this harms privacy. Your privacy is as or perhaps more invaded by the tons of cameras in stores, atms etc recording and saving your image. This just makes that fact salient.
I agree it's important to make sure the devices alert when they are storing recordings but facial recognition is u
The pendulum is swinging away from nerd (Score:2)
Does anyone remember when nerds were not cool, but anti-social, in the sense of anti-social personality disorder not social anxiety? It swings back that way. This fear based need for predictability and control projected on a whole population, needing absolute surveillance at all times. Thus the guy shows up at the party, with the surveillance glasses that report on everyone there. No.
Still, bold for MZ to shoot for something to come after phones, no one else is doing it, and if he is wrong what is right? Ju
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Thus the guy shows up at the party, with the surveillance glasses that report on everyone there.
... Followed by the guy getting his ass kicked by the other attendees, as soon as they figure out what he's doing.
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True nerds just want to be left alone. In exchange for leaving everyone else alone.
These glasses would be more likely to be used by the "social influencer" class. The people that like to organize big parties, pretend that they know "absolutely everyone, darling", name drop and use all of these skills to do their social climbing. In other words, someone who is famous for being famous.
Straight out of the book (Score:2)
This is exactly what happens in the beginning of the book, "Light of Other Days". One of the characters arrives at a party and uses her glasses to identify people and bring up peronsal information on them.
Overblown nonsense (Score:2)
Meta Glasses let you take pictures
They made an automation to take this picture and look it up in online reverse image search
THAT IS IT
This is not terminator or robocop. It's just stupid.
Smartphone can do this too. (Score:2)
Any smartphone sticking out of your shirt pocket can be programmed to do this. it can buzz if it recognizes someone relevant, otherwise just record times and places, or whatever else.
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>> Any smartphone
Very true, and even just a Raspberry Pi with a cheap camera unobtrusively mounted on your clothing can do it. The glasses are handy because they can display the recognition products in real time.
This is highly unethical (Score:3)
This isn't a question of whether what they did was legal or not; it's a question of whether it's ethical -- and it's not. And I strongly suspect that the researchers knew this which is why they didn't even bother trying to acquire consent.
Harvard needs to investigate this, and that investigation needs to include the faculty and staff involved, because somehow they failed to teach these students some of the fundamental principles of ethical research and they didn't shut this project down. And they should probably prepare themselves for the possibility that litigation on behalf of the victims is coming.
"more than 10 years" (Score:2)
Here's a link to a non-paywalled version; https://archive.ph/e7H9S#selec... [archive.ph]
New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill detailed how both Facebook and Google had the technology to use facial recognition in combination with a camera feed, but declined to release it. As Hill mentions, Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt said more than ten years ago that Google “built that technology, and we withheld it.”
Just like ads on back of vintage comix (Score:2)
It used to be a gag gift, Zuck is making it real. [wikipedia.org]
Clearview AI (Score:2)