Everyone and their mom are now supposedly building smart glasses, including Facebook. However, there is a BuzzFeed News report notes that Facebook is apparently considering building facial recognition into its upcoming AR glasses. Um, no thanks.
In an internal meeting, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of augmented and virtual reality, said the social media giant was considering whether it had the legal capacity to include facial recognition features in its AR glasses. According to Buzzfeed, Bosworth said facial recognition is “perhaps the thorniest problem, where the benefits are so clear, and the risks so clear, and we don’t know where to strike a balance.” His comment was in response to an employee’s question whether such technology had the potential for “ real harm, ” particularly stalking. As for the potential benefits, Bosworth pointed out to secretly look up an acquaintance’s name if you have forgotten it or if you are face blind.
There is a lot to unpack here. For one thing, it’s not encouraging that the comments seem to focus on the legality of whether or not facial recognition is included on these AR smart glasses, rather than the ethical implications. The infamous incident involving a pair of Google Glass tore off a woman’s face in a bar sparked a nationwide conversation about the privacy implications of smart glasses – and that not have facial recognition. Facial recognition, even if you were to use it for “benign” reasons, poses a much greater ethical dilemma.
For example, it is unclear whether someone could prevent their face from being included in any database that Facebook would use to enable this feature. It would be pretty horrifying if you were to walk around outside and unknowingly pass a creep who could then learn your name and potentially access your Facebook profile after a 2 second encounter. Consent should come first with any facial recognition technology, so it’s annoying that BuzzFeed reported that Bosworth was apparently critical of Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which requires all companies that collect biometric data to seek consent first. In January Facebook was commissioned to create a $ 650 million settlement in a class action lawsuit in Illinois alleging that the company violated BIPA by collecting facial recognition data without permission.
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With all this in mind, it’s baffling that Facebook would even consider incorporating the technology into a device that already has a history of troubling people. That said, it can’t be taken for granted that Facebook will eventually include facial recognition in its smart glasses. In a tweet following the BuzzFeed report, Bosworth acknowledged that facial recognition is “a hugely controversial topic” and that the company would have a “very public discussion of its pros and cons.” He also stressed that Facebook’s smart glasses “would be fine without it [facial recognition] but there were some nice use cases if it could be done in a way that the public and regulators were comfortable with. ”
The last part here is the crux of the matter. Facial recognition is still a hotly debated technology, and there is by no means a social consensus on how to use it. Earlier this month, Minneapolis has banned the police of the use of facial recognition technology, and in November, the The Los Angeles Police Department did the sameIn total, 13 cities in the US, local law enforcement officials have banned the use of the technology. Various cities, including San Francisco and Boston, have also banned the use of facial recognition by the government. And even if – and it’s a big if – people and lawmakers were miraculously working on the technology before Facebook’s anticipated launch of these smart glasses later this year, Facebook doesn’t have the best track record of all companies in the field. privacy.
Simply put, society is barely warming up to the idea of putting extremely simple smart glasses on their face – let alone facial recognition glasses. Have devices like this one failed before, and will likely fail againbecause so far no company has been able to successfully convince consumers that this is a gadget that they absolutely have needIf Facebook wants to do this the right way, it will market smart glasses that solve consumers’ problems – not glasses that instantly knock over a whole ton of worms.