Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition to Its Smart Glasses ⇥ nytimes.com

Kashmir Hill, Kalley Huang, and Mike Isaac report, in the New York Times, that Meta has been planning on bringing facial recognition features to its smart glasses. There is a money quote in this article you may have seen on social media already, but I want to give a greater context to it (the facial recognition feature is called “Name Tag”, at least internally):

[…] The document, from May, described plans to first release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company did not do last year, before making it available to the general public.

Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.

“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

The second part of this is a cynical view of public relations that would be surprising from most any company, yet seems pretty typical for Meta. This memo is apparently from May, a few months before a Customs and Border Protection agent wore Meta’s Ray-Bans to a raid, so I am not sure civil rights organizations would ignore the feature today. However, the first part of the quote I included also seems pretty cynical: releasing it as an accessibility feature first.

Facial recognition may potentially be useful to people with disabilities, assuming it works well, and I do not want to sweep that aside in the abstract. But this is Meta. It is a company with a notoriously terrible record on privacy, to the extent it is bound by a 20-year consent order (PDF) with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which it violated in multiple ways, one of which concerned facial recognition features. Perhaps there is a way for technology to help people recognize faces that is safe and respectful but, despite positioning itself as a privacy-focused company — coincidentally, at the same time as the FTC said it violated its consent decree — Meta will not be delivering that future.

For one, it is still considering the scope of which faces its glasses ought to recognize:

Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.

The feature would not give people the ability to look up anyone they encountered as a universal facial recognition tool, two people familiar with the plans said.

Instagram has over three billion monthly users and, while that does not translate perfectly to three billion public personal accounts, it seems to me like a large proportion of people any of us randomly meet would be identifiable. Why should that suggestion even make it past the very first mention of it in some meeting long ago? Some ideas are obviously bad and should be quashed immediately.