Facebook facial recognition for its AR glasses

Everyone and their mom are supposed to be building a pair of smart glasses now, Facebook included. However, a BuzzFeed News report notes that apparently Facebook is considering incorporating facial recognition into its next pair of AR glasses. Uh, no thanks.

In an internal meeting, Andrew Bosworth, vice president of augmented and virtual reality at Facebook, said the social media giant is considering whether it has the legal capacity to include facial recognition features in its AR glasses. . According to Buzzfeed, Bosworth said facial recognition “could be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear and the risks so clear, and we don’t know where to balance it. His comment answered an employee’s question as to whether such technology had the potential to “harm in the real world”, particularly harassment. As for the potential benefits, Bosworth has indicated that he secretly searches for an acquaintance’s name if you forgot about it or had facial blindness.

There is a lot to unpack here. For starters, it’s not encouraging that the reviews seem to focus on the legality of whether or not to include facial recognition on these AR smart glasses, rather than the ethical implications. The infamous incident in which a pair of Google Glass was ripped off a woman’s face in a bar sparked a national conversation about the privacy implications of smart glasses – and those does not have have facial recognition. Facial recognition, even if you had to use it for “benign” reasons, presents a much bigger ethical dilemma.

It’s unclear, for example, if someone could opt out of having their face included in the database Facebook would use to activate this feature. It would be pretty obnoxious if you walked outside and unwittingly passed a creep that could then learn your name and potentially access your Facebook profile from a 2 second encounter. Consent should be at the forefront of any facial recognition technology, so it’s uncomfortable that BuzzFeed reported that Bosworth was apparently critical of Illinois’ Biometric Information Protection Act (BIPA), which requires all businesses that collect biometric data to obtain their consent before doing so. In January, Facebook was ordered to pay a $ 650 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit in Illinois, alleging the company violated BIPA by collecting facial recognition data without consent.

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With all of that in mind, it’s baffling that Facebook would even consider including the technology in a device that already has a history of disrupting people. That said, it’s not certain that Facebook will ultimately include facial recognition in its smart glasses. In a tweet following the BuzzFeed report, Bosworth acknowledged that facial recognition is “an extremely controversial topic” and that the company would have a “very public discussion of the pros and cons”. He also pointed out that Facebook’s smart glasses “would be fine without [facial recognition] but there were good use cases if it could be done in a way the public and regulators were comfortable with.

The last part is at the heart of the matter here. Facial recognition is still a hotly debated technology and there is by no means a societal consensus on how it should be used. Earlier this month, Minneapolis bans police to use facial recognition technology, and in November, the The Los Angeles Police Department did the same. In total, 13 cities across the United States have banned local law enforcement agencies from using the technology. Many cities, including San Francisco and Boston, have also banned the government’s use of facial recognition. And while – and this is a big if – people and lawmakers miraculously connected to the technology before Facebook’s planned launch of these smart glasses later this year, Facebook of all companies doesn’t have the best. confidentiality check.

Put simply, society is barely warming up to the idea of ​​putting extremely simple smart glasses on their faces – let alone a pair with facial recognition. Devices like these have stranded before, and will probably fail againbecause no company has so far been able to convince consumers that this is a gadget they need. If Facebook is to do this the right way, it will release a pair of smart glasses that will solve consumer problems – not one that will immediately spill a whole barrel of worms.