When Google Glass first released back in 2012 I was running a conference technology startup, and since we had a database full of speaker and attendee profile photos the obvious thing we could build with Glass would be a "your glasses help you spot the people you are planning to meet in a crowded room" app.
The Google Glass developer terms strictly forbid building that, and it didn't take more than a few seconds of deeper thought to understand why.
I wish something like this existed that was completely offline. I'm face blind (prosopagnosia) so being able to feed an offline database photos of friends so it can recognise them would be great.
Accessibility shouldn't require giving up privacy.
Literally my thoughts. That would be so helpful, but I will not give any data-hungy company access to people around me.
I recently heard the best way to explain faceblindness: Apples.
Can you tell apples apart? Yes, sure, if you put two apples next to each other, they look similar, but there are differences.
But could you recognize that specific apple among 50 similar ones?
If an apple addressed you on the street, could you remember where you've seen it before?
That is how it feels to be faceblind.
There are workarounds, but they are context-dependent and error-prone.
That apple with red hair and a beard? Sure, that's the colleague from the office next door. But was that the same apple that waved to you in the city yesterday?
The only green apple among red ones? Easy to recognize. But only after some awkward misunderstandings you realize that there are two of them.
And changes of hairstyle are a real problem. I once wondered who that new colleague was during lunchbreak. I was about to ask her, when she said something (unrelated) and I recognized her voice. I had worked with her for 10 years, she had colored her hair.
I find myself asking this every time a new software product is released. "Nice, but why can't this be usable without an account and a tether to the developer's cloud?"
OR just sell me a widget. I don't want a relationship with the software developer or device manufacturer. I just want to buy something and forget about you.
Like the poster, I'm faceblind. It isn't the worst thing: I'm not voice blind, height blind, age blind, hairstyle blind, gender blind, features associated with race and ethnicity blind, attractiveness blind, affect blind, context blind, etc., so I'm mostly good at figuring out who someone is. Within one encounter with a bunch of people, I try to note what someone is wearing.
Every once in a while I don't recognize someone and I go through this whole thing of bringing up every biographical detail about them I remember and all the things we've talked about to show that I'm not an asshole who wasn't paying attention in the past. Fortunately, I have a decent memory for such things.
This is fascinating. So you know that you've met someone before. You know things about them. But you don't recognize them? What does this mean? You don't remember their name? You don't know why or how you know them?
"Hi there, I'm ABC, nice to meet you, what's your name"
"...Huh? I'm XYZ. We've met before."
"Oh right...sorry, I promise I remember you! We knew each other from there, and we've worked on this and that together, and etc. etc. etc. I'm just terrible with faces, I'm so sorry!"
It's not "you know things about them without recognizing them"; it's "you don't recognize them at first, it gets awkward, and so you recite facts about them prove that you didn't forget who they were"
I'm not the OP neither have their problem, but I can't remember names. I know who the person in front of me is, we can talk pleasantly about everything - I have a good memory otherwise - but I can't remember their name to save my life. Luckily they very seldom notice that, if ever. And I won't tell, obviously.
I recently learned that I have some level of face-blindness (I took the CFMT online and scored 43).
It's something I've had my whole life but only recently realized wasn't "normal". It's not like I can't recognize people at all, but rather that faces aren't very distinctive to me compared to other identifying characteristics (such as hair color/style/length, clothing, skin tone, height, voice, gait, mannerisms, etc.) It takes me a while to learn to distinguish everyone in a group of people (especially people who are similar along all of those attributes), but once I know someone well I will usually recognize them without problems.
The only real issues are when someone changes their appearance (e.g. getting glasses or shaving a beard), or when I run into someone in an unexpected context (like randomly meeting someone I know on the street). A few months ago I ran into my cousin at an event in another city, and didn't recognize her until after 20 or 30 seconds of conversation.
It's also not usually too hard to mask. I realized I have a subconscious habit of never greeting people by name because I'm always afraid of getting it wrong, and it's easy enough to bluff through "oh hi, how are you, good to see you, what have you been up to" pleasantries until I figure out who I'm talking to. The most awkward situations are when I'm unsure whether or not I know someone and have to risk either mistaking a stranger for a friend, or accidentally ignoring/reintroducing myself to an acquaintance. Also, starting a new TV show sucks.
Now that I know it's an actual condition with a name, I'm not sure yet whether it makes things better or worse if I try to explain it to people to excuse my mistakes.
If any other face blind people have useful tips or experiences, I'm all ears :)
If someone talks to you and you're not sure who they are, tell them you're faceblind and ask. It takes some getting used to, but it's worth it.
In my previous company we gave a short introduction when joining, and I included faceblindness. "If I meet you randomly on the street and don't say hello, that's not with malicious intent."
Most people are understanding, though a few are not, but really then it's their problem.
Honestly, if any big tech would implement it this way, it's likely Apple. Their image face recognition in Photos currently is fully on device from what I understand and it is set by who you associate it with locally.
Namely, if someone is using Facebook's AI-powered glasses in my vicinity, I want to get a notification (of some sort) so that I can avoid those persons
That pertains to collecting biometric info, not end users of facial recognition services. From your link:
> The BIPA requires companies doing business in Illinois to comply with a number of requirements pertaining to the collection and storage of biometric information. These include a requirement that companies:
> Obtain consent from individuals if the company intends to collect or disclose their personal biometric identifiers.
> Destroy biometric identifiers in a timely manner.
> Securely store biometric identifiers.[6]
> A key area of focus is that an entity must use a "reasonable standard of care"[7] in managing biometric information and identifiers.
If you actually read the full text of the law, it states:
" "Biometric identifier” means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, human biological
samples, [...] "
So if it's just pictures of faces, then it's okay. If, however, at any point in the pipeline the actual facial geometry is calculated or stored, that might be a violation.
Not sure if this is the future I want, but I've always thought the main idea of smart glasses is to automatically bring up information that is relevant in your current context. One part of this is to recognize who you are staring at.
Ordinary glass (as in spectacles) frames that have a near IR LED on the bridge and on the side. PWM to be efficient, bright, but erratic clock of around 10Hz.
>I really applaud Zuckerberg for positively embracing all the attention that's been shouldered on him, really. I think stuff like this SNL skit or him taking his core team at Facebook to watch "The Social Network" together at a movie theatre just shows tremendous inner strength and maturity on his part. It's great to see him be able to laugh it off and joke about it.
He's come a long way in his public speaking skills too, he was pretty natural and comedic during his talk at Startup School. I think he's only going to get better from this point on too.
Unscrupulous guy who stole the idea from other guys in university, then used tribal nepotism to make sure his fabric of society destructive platform is the one who gets big-finance VC funding in order to destroy society to make money?
Pretty common pattern in the business racket if you look at history.
Do these emit something unique that could be detected so that loud klaxon could let everyone know there is a glasshole approaching? Some unique bluetooth identifier perhaps?
I can't think of one single practical use case for this that would benefit my life, because, right behind the glasses I have my very own locally available facial recognition built in.
A lot of people are face blind (including me), and it's extremely embarrassing, especially when I'm supposed to remember a person's name. Wouldn't wear survialiance tech to try to fix it though.
I didnt know this was a thing, how severe is it for you?
I have a similar thing with names when and I think it's just because my brain somehow decides that interaction meant nothing and the information was not important to save.
I'm great at recognizing faces, but I'm pretty bad at remembering who they are. If this was offline only and the UX was reasonable, I might consider asking people I know if I can take their picture so my glasses can help me remember who they are. Of course, that's a pretty awkward conversation, so there's always the strategy of half introductions, hoping the people you half introduced fully introduce themselves and then you remember who they are. :P
I'm in the position to make security policies at work, and one of them is that no smart glasses are allowed in the office. We will not be having workers aiming Facebook glasses at our screens showing confidential information. And along those lines, I can think of damn few scenarios where I'd be OK with someone using face recognition against me. Restaurants? It's not Facebook's business to know where I like to eat, presumably to sell ads to show to me. Music clubs? They don't need to know what I listen to. Anything vaguely resembling a public bathroom? Fuck right off with that. Public sidewalks? I don't want them tracking who I spend time talking to.
No, I can't really think of any situation where I'd be remotely OK with this being used. To be blunt, I kinda hope this quickly turns not into just a public shaming against people wearing public spyware, but a situation where people are physically afraid to be caught wearing them outside. I think the branch of future possibilities where it's called out as antisocial behavior to poison public spaces like this would be a happier world than one where it becomes common behavior.
Edit: In before the "do you ban cell phone cameras at work, too?" unclever gotcha: Yes. Yes, we'd definitely ban people spending the whole day holding their cell phone cameras up to their screens to record their work. We don't share confidential info with anyone other than vendors we've vetted and contracted with. If I walked by a desk and saw someone recording, I would pull them aside and explain why they're on thin ice.
To make matters worse, I’ve seen threads where people with these glasses discuss how to circumvent/disable the “now recording” light, so people won’t know when they’re active.
I read an article on that this morning. That's totally a thing.
I do not advocate violence in such situations. If you find someone recording surreptitiously, do not harm the person when you remove the spyware and disable it.
I am highly opposed to these glasses, but there's nothing you can do about it in public besides swearing at these people and not being friends with them.
Sometimes I have wished I had a handheld EMP gun for such situations. What are they going to do? It would be harmless to living beings and leave no trace. Their device would simply stop working suddenly.
The tech's there. The genie can't be put back in the bottle, and it will only get cheaper and more invasive. Only question we have any control over is... do we want everyone to have it, or only govs and corps?
There's a second-amendment-like argument here, imo, that is very hard to push back on - because at least this stuff doesn't kill people. I want every cop to be surrounded by five or six recording devices that they don't control at all times - it's the least worst option.
(Obviously I'm not a fan of the "everying goes to facebook" architecture. I'm hoping we get past that).
The tech's also been there to put cameras everywhere, and to wiretap every phone, etc. We put guardrails in place to control how that tech is deployed.
We can't put the genie back in the bottle, but we can control how we react to it. As far as I'm concerned, I will treat people wearing smart glasses the same way I would treat someone shoving a smartphone camera in my face. I'll just refuse to engage with them.
you're implying there is some kind of symmetry here, that facial recognition will empower individuals in a way to counteract the power given to governments and corporations.
I should try to compile my own database of everyone's location? I fail to see how it helps me in any way
You as an individual? Probably not, but you could lobby your local government to, for instance, require any such dataset taken from information in the public be subject to the freedom of information act.
while I agree with you I can definitely see women wearing it to "feel safe". during dark months women wear vests with lights on them. admittedly I have not seen any of them wear bodycams yet.
The big difference is that if a woman wears a camera to make her feel safer, she'll do it in a way that it's obvious she's recording. The whole point is to make potential attackers aware that they're being recorded. A gopro or a cell phone camera body mount works a lot better for this than meta glasses.
I can definitely see women not wanting to be facially recognized as they're minding their own business and walking home from work and not wanting to be stalked.
I live in Canada (many dark months) and am a woman who knows many women and I've never known anyone to wear a vest with a light on them. I do own a hat with a light that I use when I'm walking to the gym in the dark so that drivers will see me, but so do many of my friends and it doesn't seem to be gendered.
I also fail to see how facial recognition would be analogous to lights in terms of safety or frankly anything else.
Meta had taken its name from the virtual world "Metaverse" in Neal Stephenson 1992 novel Snow Crash. The novel is the earliest known use of that word, so if it wasn't directly then it was indirectly.
The book also describes "Gargoyles": people using headsets with cameras and sensors to spy on everyone around them for the "Central Intelligence Corporation" while being also simultaneously in the Metaverse.
Funny, how the gargoyles are described in the book in a somewhat derogatory manner, and the villain of the story is an billionaire who owns a large Internet corporation.
- Computers can do as much work as they want to automatically, so long as none of it touches a network boundary.
- Any time a computer wants to touch the network it must be explicitly initiated by a human action.
Sort of like how in browsers capturing the mouse or entering fullscreen mode requires a trusted user action and isn't something a page can do unilaterally, but broader. This also means that the extent of the network communication must be made explicit and clear with no chance of misunderstanding by the user. If what you're doing is genuinely complex beyond your ability to communicate to your target user then you shouldn't be doing it on the behalf of that user. Note that this only really applies to mass consumer products, not something built/deployed internally.
I feel like if a hard boundary is not set around this we will end up in a Panopticon. Set aside governments actively pushing for it, it seems a simple profit motive in a digital era yields this outcome. Maybe nuanced rules would produce better outcomes in theory, but humans don't seem great at sticking to nuanced and fiddly rules when there's strong incentive to bend them beyond recognition.
i was hoping that it's a good book to suggest to the "i have nothing to hide" folk...
sadly, it's "only" about the sickos at fb. don't get me wrong, it's a good thing that it's written, but hardly anyone needs it who lived through the past few years with an open eye...
1) we were always told and legal always pushed back hard on anything face detecting.(ie haar cascade "this is a face" let alone actual this is dave/sally)
2) the FTC would audit us to make sure we weren't doing that kind of stuff
3) all of the research prototypes had inbuilt/inline face removers up until 2024(I left after that so I don't know when/if that changed)
3.1) One of the very first things I worked on was face removal, it was a central core of the entire fucking project. Like if we didn;t have any of those constraints we'd have been 2 years ahead.
4) Stella is the name for v1 rayban stories, so its very odd that they get the update when they've not had any new features since for a long time(unless I am mistaken).
now, I will say that Boz was pushing to have facial recognition when I was were, and some of the early storyboards for XROS were pretty reilant on it (ie in an office having the sims like diamonds above your head that indicated who you were and if you were busy)
I assumed that Zuck said no because he'd had enough time with the lawyer and the FTC sniffing about to not bother.
However the glasses based AI lifelog stuff (which was basically a really effective personal assistant) would be a lot more effective if it could use facial recognition (we weren't allowed to use speaker diarization as that would allow us to record individual audio from users and recognise them like with facial recognition)
I recall that Facebook asked me to identify faces of my friends in order to "verify" myself about 15 years ago. Do you know whether Facebook still stores that data?
> Do you know whether Facebook still stores that data?
Honestly I couldn’t answer that. I never really touched production userdata (mainly because it was scary and also it was in PHP or some horrid transpiled interface to PHP)
My gut feeling is that facebook doesn't throw data away unless its forced to. So its probably there on your graph somewhere.
Pure speculation, probably they finally figured out the correct legal ToS and privacy policy and everything else that made them feel confident + some regulatory/lawmaker discussions reached a certain point that they finally decided they could do it? Does that add up?
I think the ToS is lenient enough to get away with most things.
I suspect that its a two-fer,
1) zuckerberg has said "it must be done" as part of the AI push
1.1) it might be also that Wang has pushed to get that data, but thats a guess. I doubt he has that kind of sway
2) they've realised that the FTC isn't either capable, or they have bribed the right part of the government to avoid getting nailed.
The thing that gets me is the number of lawyers that are there, and the sheer amount of process that is there to stop this kind of thing happening requires Zuck to explicitly say "I WANT THIS" repeatedly.
> probably they finally figured out the correct legal ToS and privacy policy
Unlikely IMHO - the person who agreed to the TOS is the one person the glasses don’t record.
More likely they’ve decided to launch it and see what happens; they can always withdraw the feature later, and laws can be surprisingly flexible when you’re a large corporation.
The number of times those get grabbed of someone’s face and stomped on will be greater than zero. And businesses will have signs for No guns/spyglasses.
At what point does civil disobedience become justified? Expected even? Also let's be clear - this is not violence, not assault, it is simple destruction of property.
I don't think you could plausibly do this and only catch a property crime charge. If you're caught, forcefully removing worn objects from another person will almost certainly catch you a misdemeanor battery charge in most US jurisdictions.
I'm no lawyer and things vary by location, but clothing is generally considered an extension of the person and usually touching their worn objects constitutes physical contact with the person themselves. Doing so with intent of committing criminal mischief, vandalism, or felony property damage will get all of them thrown at you. If you hastily do so and happen to harm the person in the process (since you're naturally grabbing at someone's eyes, that seems like a serious risk), there's a good chance you'll be given an aggravated or felony battery charge instead.
This is incredibly creepy and invasive, and should be outlawed, frankly. There is no legitimate reason for this to exist. My only hope is regular Wayfarers aren't completely tainted by these creep glasses having the same design, but it may be too late.
Smartglasses, NFTs, getting ai to write your emails, always talking to Alexa, taking photos of everything constantly for social media.
People who do these things must think the tech makes them more likable and interesting. But, in fact, I immediately deeply dislike these people and would never want to be friends with them. Its a paradox.
Its actually like watching a dude pissing themselves in public and thinking "Ah yeah, I'm covered in pee now! I'm so cool, look how jealous those non-pissers are!"
Fudge... we can de-flock all we want but if naive people walk around with the portable surveillance cameras on their face, there's nothing we can do about that.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that privacy regulation is coming with the current admin and weak “opposition”, and lack of capacity to care or understand the stakes by the populace. We need some very effective political organizing, yesterday. And normalized, cheap, scramble suits wouldn’t hurt either.
The US courts have almost always held that anything in public can be recorded. The only expectations of privacy relevant to 'smart glasses' that the courts recognize, I think, are gonna be restrooms and your own home. I guess what I'm getting at is I don't expect regulation or the courts to do anything about the privacy and recording issues. IMHO, the only potential regulation might be around how the recorded data is handled, but honestly, I don't expect anything there, either. I mean, apparently, the US DHS wants to build their own 'smart glasses' to record and do facial recognition for ICE.
I think we need legislation. The "no expectations of privacy" probably was ok when little old ladies were spending time outside their home watching passerbys, but not when everyone's movements are tracked and saved by fully autonomous systems.
Or they all left or were fired. It's safe to assume anyone still working there at this point in time after everything they've done is in favor of this.
If Zuck could ship a set of 1950 x-ray glasses, they would.
Never really grew up past middle school. I have dealt with high schoolers with better self control and moral compasses.
The rest of SV billionaire class is so abhorrent that you figure they either enjoy being the villains or they figure "it's ok if you get away with it." Sociopaths.
Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ...
Then imagine that it wasn't tracked, recorded, saved, or tied into anything at all. Just a useful service, in service to only you.
Thanks Meta et al, for pushing forward with this broken (for people) model of business and ensuring we'll never be able to have that.
There's this degradation over the last ~30 years from "wow it's like a kind of capital-equipment anyone can own that'll empower them with agency and serve their own individual interests" to "you're renting this product from a supranational corporation so that it can exploit you".
The problem isn't that I'm being recorded by cameras everywhere, the problem is when those silos are broken down to create a panopticon.
> have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids
"How much outsourcing of your mind do you want to give to technology?"
"Yes"
If you really can't remember all the details of people that you want to remember, you can always write those details on your phone or trusty Rolodex after you meet them and then check them out before you meet them again if you must.
>If you really can't remember all the details of people that you want to remember, you can always write those details on your phone or trusty Rolodex after you meet them and then check them out before you meet them again if you must.
i do not see any practical difference between the hypothetical device the parent proposes and this, except that your suggestion is more cumbersome. you're just "outsourcing your mind" to paper or whatever.
(i will note that i agree with your general point. i try to make a concerted effort to remember those details, rather than rely on any type of note-taking)
Fair point on the outsourcing. Although I'd argue that one practical difference is that one device doesn't distract you from being present when you have the person in front of you (presumably because you will have to read the details appearing in the glasses).
Also, I take it that the next logical (and worrisome) step to something like that is to record the conversations so the AI can summarise and extract the important data from the conversation for it to be later accessible, which is going to bring us into the ultimate performative scenario. Young people nowadays are already aware that anyone could be recording their most embarrassing moments; recording everything we say would be worse.
>>Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids
Here is some feedback for you: plain dumb and stupid
Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ...
I already have that. It's called a memory. Came free with my brain.
Which is great for you, but a lot of people genuinely don’t have the memory capabilities to remember the birthdays of various people. I literally forget how to spell my own name sometimes, keeping track of birthdays is out of the question. But people get really offended if their birthdays go by unnoticed…
When Google Glass first released back in 2012 I was running a conference technology startup, and since we had a database full of speaker and attendee profile photos the obvious thing we could build with Glass would be a "your glasses help you spot the people you are planning to meet in a crowded room" app.
The Google Glass developer terms strictly forbid building that, and it didn't take more than a few seconds of deeper thought to understand why.
I wish something like this existed that was completely offline. I'm face blind (prosopagnosia) so being able to feed an offline database photos of friends so it can recognise them would be great.
Accessibility shouldn't require giving up privacy.
Literally my thoughts. That would be so helpful, but I will not give any data-hungy company access to people around me.
I recently heard the best way to explain faceblindness: Apples.
Can you tell apples apart? Yes, sure, if you put two apples next to each other, they look similar, but there are differences.
But could you recognize that specific apple among 50 similar ones?
If an apple addressed you on the street, could you remember where you've seen it before?
That is how it feels to be faceblind.
There are workarounds, but they are context-dependent and error-prone.
That apple with red hair and a beard? Sure, that's the colleague from the office next door. But was that the same apple that waved to you in the city yesterday?
The only green apple among red ones? Easy to recognize. But only after some awkward misunderstandings you realize that there are two of them.
And changes of hairstyle are a real problem. I once wondered who that new colleague was during lunchbreak. I was about to ask her, when she said something (unrelated) and I recognized her voice. I had worked with her for 10 years, she had colored her hair.
Thank you so much for sharing this, I had no idea this condition existed and you provided a perfect explanation.
I find myself asking this every time a new software product is released. "Nice, but why can't this be usable without an account and a tether to the developer's cloud?"
And the answer is monetization. We can't just solve a problem. It has to have a business model built around it. No exceptions.
Feel free to solve a problem and release it for free. People do that every day.
OR just sell me a widget. I don't want a relationship with the software developer or device manufacturer. I just want to buy something and forget about you.
Probably quite feasible. Immich on my little raspberry pi is able to do facial recognition for 50k images over night.
Sorry that you have to deal with this condition. What method do you use currently to help with recognising them?
Like the poster, I'm faceblind. It isn't the worst thing: I'm not voice blind, height blind, age blind, hairstyle blind, gender blind, features associated with race and ethnicity blind, attractiveness blind, affect blind, context blind, etc., so I'm mostly good at figuring out who someone is. Within one encounter with a bunch of people, I try to note what someone is wearing.
Every once in a while I don't recognize someone and I go through this whole thing of bringing up every biographical detail about them I remember and all the things we've talked about to show that I'm not an asshole who wasn't paying attention in the past. Fortunately, I have a decent memory for such things.
This is fascinating. So you know that you've met someone before. You know things about them. But you don't recognize them? What does this mean? You don't remember their name? You don't know why or how you know them?
(Not the parent, but I'm faceblind as well)
The interaction described goes like this:
"Hi there, I'm ABC, nice to meet you, what's your name"
"...Huh? I'm XYZ. We've met before."
"Oh right...sorry, I promise I remember you! We knew each other from there, and we've worked on this and that together, and etc. etc. etc. I'm just terrible with faces, I'm so sorry!"
It's not "you know things about them without recognizing them"; it's "you don't recognize them at first, it gets awkward, and so you recite facts about them prove that you didn't forget who they were"
[delayed]
I'm not the OP neither have their problem, but I can't remember names. I know who the person in front of me is, we can talk pleasantly about everything - I have a good memory otherwise - but I can't remember their name to save my life. Luckily they very seldom notice that, if ever. And I won't tell, obviously.
Usually you talk to them and then you remember who they are or where you know them from.
It's not like you can't tell your wife apart from your orthodontist.
I recently learned that I have some level of face-blindness (I took the CFMT online and scored 43).
It's something I've had my whole life but only recently realized wasn't "normal". It's not like I can't recognize people at all, but rather that faces aren't very distinctive to me compared to other identifying characteristics (such as hair color/style/length, clothing, skin tone, height, voice, gait, mannerisms, etc.) It takes me a while to learn to distinguish everyone in a group of people (especially people who are similar along all of those attributes), but once I know someone well I will usually recognize them without problems.
The only real issues are when someone changes their appearance (e.g. getting glasses or shaving a beard), or when I run into someone in an unexpected context (like randomly meeting someone I know on the street). A few months ago I ran into my cousin at an event in another city, and didn't recognize her until after 20 or 30 seconds of conversation.
It's also not usually too hard to mask. I realized I have a subconscious habit of never greeting people by name because I'm always afraid of getting it wrong, and it's easy enough to bluff through "oh hi, how are you, good to see you, what have you been up to" pleasantries until I figure out who I'm talking to. The most awkward situations are when I'm unsure whether or not I know someone and have to risk either mistaking a stranger for a friend, or accidentally ignoring/reintroducing myself to an acquaintance. Also, starting a new TV show sucks.
Now that I know it's an actual condition with a name, I'm not sure yet whether it makes things better or worse if I try to explain it to people to excuse my mistakes.
If any other face blind people have useful tips or experiences, I'm all ears :)
Best tip I can give: Be open with it.
If someone talks to you and you're not sure who they are, tell them you're faceblind and ask. It takes some getting used to, but it's worth it.
In my previous company we gave a short introduction when joining, and I included faceblindness. "If I meet you randomly on the street and don't say hello, that's not with malicious intent."
Most people are understanding, though a few are not, but really then it's their problem.
> It's not like you can't tell your wife apart from your orthodontist.
I got a personal kick out of that example, because one of my good friend's wife is his orthodontist :-D
"open wide..."
Honestly, if any big tech would implement it this way, it's likely Apple. Their image face recognition in Photos currently is fully on device from what I understand and it is set by who you associate it with locally.
Apple will create a comparable device; it'll just take them five more years to get the product experience down.
I’m not sure why they don’t do it this way already with the meta glasses.
Online comparison just adds latency.
I'd like to wear an EXACT OPPOSITE of this...
Namely, if someone is using Facebook's AI-powered glasses in my vicinity, I want to get a notification (of some sort) so that I can avoid those persons
Nearby Glasses on Play Store does this
(not affiliated, I did a simple search before writing an app myself)
What if these existed, but Facebook sold them?
They seem determined to make Chicago lawyers rich. [0]
That pertains to collecting biometric info, not end users of facial recognition services. From your link:
> The BIPA requires companies doing business in Illinois to comply with a number of requirements pertaining to the collection and storage of biometric information. These include a requirement that companies:
> Obtain consent from individuals if the company intends to collect or disclose their personal biometric identifiers.
> Destroy biometric identifiers in a timely manner.
> Securely store biometric identifiers.[6]
> A key area of focus is that an entity must use a "reasonable standard of care"[7] in managing biometric information and identifiers.
If you actually read the full text of the law, it states:
" "Biometric identifier” means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. Biometric identifiers do not include writing samples, written signatures, photographs, human biological samples, [...] "
So if it's just pictures of faces, then it's okay. If, however, at any point in the pipeline the actual facial geometry is calculated or stored, that might be a violation.
Exactly. They've done it in the past, and it cost them $650M. It's unclear whether that was enough of a deterrent to change their behavior. [0]
$1k/per with no exponential horsepower? Barely a tax.
> $5,000 per violation if the violation is intentional or reckless.
5kilobuxx, barely a tax.
Lawyers operate on exciting laws. What happens when the laws change?
Not sure if this is the future I want, but I've always thought the main idea of smart glasses is to automatically bring up information that is relevant in your current context. One part of this is to recognize who you are staring at.
It worked well for the Terminator, so why shouldn't it work for us too? Being able to identify target/foe is of course how this will be used.
However, I'd be much more inclined for the Black Mirror use of being able to block someone literally not just a number in your phone.
Start up idea:
Ordinary glass (as in spectacles) frames that have a near IR LED on the bridge and on the side. PWM to be efficient, bright, but erratic clock of around 10Hz.
Want a picture of me? Ask, or use film.
I expect cameras will start to come with built-in IR filters in that case.
This. Projects like this already exist to blind surveillance cameras.
Maybe Meta, Flock and Palatir could team up? Create an evil combo stock similar to musky's
The company feels like the corporate embodiment of its founder.
HN was positive on him at one point.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157445
>I really applaud Zuckerberg for positively embracing all the attention that's been shouldered on him, really. I think stuff like this SNL skit or him taking his core team at Facebook to watch "The Social Network" together at a movie theatre just shows tremendous inner strength and maturity on his part. It's great to see him be able to laugh it off and joke about it.
He's come a long way in his public speaking skills too, he was pretty natural and comedic during his talk at Startup School. I think he's only going to get better from this point on too.
How do you extrapolate "HN was positive" from a single positive comment 15 years ago?
You say that like people shouldn’t be allowed to change their opinion of other people.
Unscrupulous guy who stole the idea from other guys in university, then used tribal nepotism to make sure his fabric of society destructive platform is the one who gets big-finance VC funding in order to destroy society to make money?
Pretty common pattern in the business racket if you look at history.
What does tribal nepotism mean here?
My mind immediately went to the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly! Is this where we’re headed?
I fail to see how nonstop recording of every interaction with people in everyday life will pass muster in a two-party consent state.
My understanding is that those laws cover audio, not video.
Perhaps the laws should be modernized
Do these emit something unique that could be detected so that loud klaxon could let everyone know there is a glasshole approaching? Some unique bluetooth identifier perhaps?
Someone posted a tool that does this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140042
Wow, no idea how I missed that thread. Thankyou.
Yes actually. You can poll for nearby Bluetooth devices and cap the packets advertising the manufacturer.
I can't think of one single practical use case for this that would benefit my life, because, right behind the glasses I have my very own locally available facial recognition built in.
A lot of people are face blind (including me), and it's extremely embarrassing, especially when I'm supposed to remember a person's name. Wouldn't wear survialiance tech to try to fix it though.
I didnt know this was a thing, how severe is it for you?
I have a similar thing with names when and I think it's just because my brain somehow decides that interaction meant nothing and the information was not important to save.
A lot of people are face blind
3.08%, according to https://hms.harvard.edu/news/how-common-face-blindness
so 250 million people? Thats a good amount of people.
I'm great at recognizing faces, but I'm pretty bad at remembering who they are. If this was offline only and the UX was reasonable, I might consider asking people I know if I can take their picture so my glasses can help me remember who they are. Of course, that's a pretty awkward conversation, so there's always the strategy of half introductions, hoping the people you half introduced fully introduce themselves and then you remember who they are. :P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
(not that i think meta is doing it for accessibility reasons...)
I'm in the position to make security policies at work, and one of them is that no smart glasses are allowed in the office. We will not be having workers aiming Facebook glasses at our screens showing confidential information. And along those lines, I can think of damn few scenarios where I'd be OK with someone using face recognition against me. Restaurants? It's not Facebook's business to know where I like to eat, presumably to sell ads to show to me. Music clubs? They don't need to know what I listen to. Anything vaguely resembling a public bathroom? Fuck right off with that. Public sidewalks? I don't want them tracking who I spend time talking to.
No, I can't really think of any situation where I'd be remotely OK with this being used. To be blunt, I kinda hope this quickly turns not into just a public shaming against people wearing public spyware, but a situation where people are physically afraid to be caught wearing them outside. I think the branch of future possibilities where it's called out as antisocial behavior to poison public spaces like this would be a happier world than one where it becomes common behavior.
Edit: In before the "do you ban cell phone cameras at work, too?" unclever gotcha: Yes. Yes, we'd definitely ban people spending the whole day holding their cell phone cameras up to their screens to record their work. We don't share confidential info with anyone other than vendors we've vetted and contracted with. If I walked by a desk and saw someone recording, I would pull them aside and explain why they're on thin ice.
To make matters worse, I’ve seen threads where people with these glasses discuss how to circumvent/disable the “now recording” light, so people won’t know when they’re active.
I read an article on that this morning. That's totally a thing.
I do not advocate violence in such situations. If you find someone recording surreptitiously, do not harm the person when you remove the spyware and disable it.
I am highly opposed to these glasses, but there's nothing you can do about it in public besides swearing at these people and not being friends with them.
Sometimes I have wished I had a handheld EMP gun for such situations. What are they going to do? It would be harmless to living beings and leave no trace. Their device would simply stop working suddenly.
1. I am sympathetic to the notion, in fictional settings.
2. Real world pacemakers, deep brain stimulators, infusion pumps, cochlear implants, etc. may be less tolerant of it.
That's still common assault.
That's still common assault.
So call a cop.
Where I live, one might get around to responding to you in six to 12 hours.
Good people break bad laws.
Gives a whole new meaning to the term spyware.
Spywear
I'm stealing this, thanks.
The tech's there. The genie can't be put back in the bottle, and it will only get cheaper and more invasive. Only question we have any control over is... do we want everyone to have it, or only govs and corps?
There's a second-amendment-like argument here, imo, that is very hard to push back on - because at least this stuff doesn't kill people. I want every cop to be surrounded by five or six recording devices that they don't control at all times - it's the least worst option.
(Obviously I'm not a fan of the "everying goes to facebook" architecture. I'm hoping we get past that).
The tech's also been there to put cameras everywhere, and to wiretap every phone, etc. We put guardrails in place to control how that tech is deployed.
Very limited guard rails (WRT cameras) - they can't be in bathrooms is about all I am aware of as a universal restriction
Man, I can’t tell if this is sarcastic or not…
We can't put the genie back in the bottle, but we can control how we react to it. As far as I'm concerned, I will treat people wearing smart glasses the same way I would treat someone shoving a smartphone camera in my face. I'll just refuse to engage with them.
If only people already had recording device in their pocket they take with them everywhere…
This is more like putting hidden cameras in hotels. The difference is the discrete factor and the facial recognition. Both are disgusting imo.
How often you see someone taping a phone to their head and wearing it into a bathroom?
It's sociopathic to wear spywear in a public setting.
They haven’t even sold 10mill units. We can still say no.
Are you forgetting Google Glass? We put this genie back into the bottle once: we can do it again.
I was going to write something about that. The "techno fatalism" is annoyingly strong nowadays.
you're implying there is some kind of symmetry here, that facial recognition will empower individuals in a way to counteract the power given to governments and corporations.
I should try to compile my own database of everyone's location? I fail to see how it helps me in any way
You as an individual? Probably not, but you could lobby your local government to, for instance, require any such dataset taken from information in the public be subject to the freedom of information act.
Victims of stalking would likely be greatly harmed by such a rule.
while I agree with you I can definitely see women wearing it to "feel safe". during dark months women wear vests with lights on them. admittedly I have not seen any of them wear bodycams yet.
The big difference is that if a woman wears a camera to make her feel safer, she'll do it in a way that it's obvious she's recording. The whole point is to make potential attackers aware that they're being recorded. A gopro or a cell phone camera body mount works a lot better for this than meta glasses.
I can definitely see women not wanting to be facially recognized as they're minding their own business and walking home from work and not wanting to be stalked.
I live in Canada (many dark months) and am a woman who knows many women and I've never known anyone to wear a vest with a light on them. I do own a hat with a light that I use when I'm walking to the gym in the dark so that drivers will see me, but so do many of my friends and it doesn't seem to be gendered.
I also fail to see how facial recognition would be analogous to lights in terms of safety or frankly anything else.
Meta had taken its name from the virtual world "Metaverse" in Neal Stephenson 1992 novel Snow Crash. The novel is the earliest known use of that word, so if it wasn't directly then it was indirectly.
The book also describes "Gargoyles": people using headsets with cameras and sensors to spy on everyone around them for the "Central Intelligence Corporation" while being also simultaneously in the Metaverse.
Funny, how the gargoyles are described in the book in a somewhat derogatory manner, and the villain of the story is an billionaire who owns a large Internet corporation.
At least the gargoyles in the book got paid.
How does HN feel about this as a general ethos:
- Computers can do as much work as they want to automatically, so long as none of it touches a network boundary.
- Any time a computer wants to touch the network it must be explicitly initiated by a human action. Sort of like how in browsers capturing the mouse or entering fullscreen mode requires a trusted user action and isn't something a page can do unilaterally, but broader. This also means that the extent of the network communication must be made explicit and clear with no chance of misunderstanding by the user. If what you're doing is genuinely complex beyond your ability to communicate to your target user then you shouldn't be doing it on the behalf of that user. Note that this only really applies to mass consumer products, not something built/deployed internally.
I feel like if a hard boundary is not set around this we will end up in a Panopticon. Set aside governments actively pushing for it, it seems a simple profit motive in a digital era yields this outcome. Maybe nuanced rules would produce better outcomes in theory, but humans don't seem great at sticking to nuanced and fiddly rules when there's strong incentive to bend them beyond recognition.
_Careless People_ should be required reading for anyone buying this crap.
i was hoping that it's a good book to suggest to the "i have nothing to hide" folk...
sadly, it's "only" about the sickos at fb. don't get me wrong, it's a good thing that it's written, but hardly anyone needs it who lived through the past few years with an open eye...
I have a feeling people using these don't read many books.
Former Facebook wanker, who worked in research.
1) we were always told and legal always pushed back hard on anything face detecting.(ie haar cascade "this is a face" let alone actual this is dave/sally)
2) the FTC would audit us to make sure we weren't doing that kind of stuff
3) all of the research prototypes had inbuilt/inline face removers up until 2024(I left after that so I don't know when/if that changed)
3.1) One of the very first things I worked on was face removal, it was a central core of the entire fucking project. Like if we didn;t have any of those constraints we'd have been 2 years ahead.
4) Stella is the name for v1 rayban stories, so its very odd that they get the update when they've not had any new features since for a long time(unless I am mistaken).
now, I will say that Boz was pushing to have facial recognition when I was were, and some of the early storyboards for XROS were pretty reilant on it (ie in an office having the sims like diamonds above your head that indicated who you were and if you were busy)
I assumed that Zuck said no because he'd had enough time with the lawyer and the FTC sniffing about to not bother.
However the glasses based AI lifelog stuff (which was basically a really effective personal assistant) would be a lot more effective if it could use facial recognition (we weren't allowed to use speaker diarization as that would allow us to record individual audio from users and recognise them like with facial recognition)
I recall that Facebook asked me to identify faces of my friends in order to "verify" myself about 15 years ago. Do you know whether Facebook still stores that data?
> Do you know whether Facebook still stores that data?
Honestly I couldn’t answer that. I never really touched production userdata (mainly because it was scary and also it was in PHP or some horrid transpiled interface to PHP)
My gut feeling is that facebook doesn't throw data away unless its forced to. So its probably there on your graph somewhere.
Pure speculation, probably they finally figured out the correct legal ToS and privacy policy and everything else that made them feel confident + some regulatory/lawmaker discussions reached a certain point that they finally decided they could do it? Does that add up?
I think the ToS is lenient enough to get away with most things.
I suspect that its a two-fer,
1) zuckerberg has said "it must be done" as part of the AI push
1.1) it might be also that Wang has pushed to get that data, but thats a guess. I doubt he has that kind of sway
2) they've realised that the FTC isn't either capable, or they have bribed the right part of the government to avoid getting nailed.
The thing that gets me is the number of lawyers that are there, and the sheer amount of process that is there to stop this kind of thing happening requires Zuck to explicitly say "I WANT THIS" repeatedly.
> probably they finally figured out the correct legal ToS and privacy policy
Unlikely IMHO - the person who agreed to the TOS is the one person the glasses don’t record.
More likely they’ve decided to launch it and see what happens; they can always withdraw the feature later, and laws can be surprisingly flexible when you’re a large corporation.
Trump is POTUS. And Zuckerberg seems to be on good terms with Trump.
The number of times those get grabbed of someone’s face and stomped on will be greater than zero. And businesses will have signs for No guns/spyglasses.
The number of times the grabber gets a beatdown will be equivalent, signs will be ignored
At what point does civil disobedience become justified? Expected even? Also let's be clear - this is not violence, not assault, it is simple destruction of property.
I don't think you could plausibly do this and only catch a property crime charge. If you're caught, forcefully removing worn objects from another person will almost certainly catch you a misdemeanor battery charge in most US jurisdictions.
I'm no lawyer and things vary by location, but clothing is generally considered an extension of the person and usually touching their worn objects constitutes physical contact with the person themselves. Doing so with intent of committing criminal mischief, vandalism, or felony property damage will get all of them thrown at you. If you hastily do so and happen to harm the person in the process (since you're naturally grabbing at someone's eyes, that seems like a serious risk), there's a good chance you'll be given an aggravated or felony battery charge instead.
If it’s a woman slapping them off a pervert and accidentally stepping on them, 100% walks no charges.
This is incredibly creepy and invasive, and should be outlawed, frankly. There is no legitimate reason for this to exist. My only hope is regular Wayfarers aren't completely tainted by these creep glasses having the same design, but it may be too late.
Smartglasses, NFTs, getting ai to write your emails, always talking to Alexa, taking photos of everything constantly for social media.
People who do these things must think the tech makes them more likable and interesting. But, in fact, I immediately deeply dislike these people and would never want to be friends with them. Its a paradox.
Its actually like watching a dude pissing themselves in public and thinking "Ah yeah, I'm covered in pee now! I'm so cool, look how jealous those non-pissers are!"
I had the exact same thought about the brand crashing due to association with Facebook. Gotta juice them numbers, I guess.
So why not turn it on?
At least in China, where face recognition is at building gates, subway gates, store checkouts...
What a huge surprise coming from the company that records its own employees.
How many ships does Meta have?
Creeper glasses.
Hope they get sued out of existence for this by Illinois. The biodata stored and used only serves authoritarians.
Anybody else or does it all feel desperate? Like "here set this bubble play money on fire before it gets worthless" desperate?
_Frantically Tattoos "Do Not Sell My Personal Information" message under my eyes so I can lawsuit meta for ignoring my data privacy preferences_
By looking at my face you agree with EULA take explicitly says "don't look at my face"
How do these glasses communicate/upload info? Is it saved to the glassed itself? I wonder if there's a way to deauth them when they are near you.
Please God no
Title is: Meta's smart glasses app ships complete, dormant face-recognition pipeline
I wonder if people held their phones in the face of people recording with glasses if they'd be ok with it.
Fudge... we can de-flock all we want but if naive people walk around with the portable surveillance cameras on their face, there's nothing we can do about that.
We need privacy regulation...
I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that privacy regulation is coming with the current admin and weak “opposition”, and lack of capacity to care or understand the stakes by the populace. We need some very effective political organizing, yesterday. And normalized, cheap, scramble suits wouldn’t hurt either.
The US courts have almost always held that anything in public can be recorded. The only expectations of privacy relevant to 'smart glasses' that the courts recognize, I think, are gonna be restrooms and your own home. I guess what I'm getting at is I don't expect regulation or the courts to do anything about the privacy and recording issues. IMHO, the only potential regulation might be around how the recorded data is handled, but honestly, I don't expect anything there, either. I mean, apparently, the US DHS wants to build their own 'smart glasses' to record and do facial recognition for ICE.
I think we need legislation. The "no expectations of privacy" probably was ok when little old ladies were spending time outside their home watching passerbys, but not when everyone's movements are tracked and saved by fully autonomous systems.
Please hurry Apple.
Disgusting. Meta does not care about the harm they do so long as they make money.
i'm afraid it's about much more than just money... it's about retaining power/dominance over the very game that is being played.
(i.e. if you control the money printer, then all you care about is that your subjects continue playing. fb is just one cog in a big machine.)
they finally wore down all the people internally who were against this
Or they all left or were fired. It's safe to assume anyone still working there at this point in time after everything they've done is in favor of this.
I'd rather be face forgetting self than wear this nonsense.
This company is so beyond creepy and disgusting.
If Zuck could ship a set of 1950 x-ray glasses, they would.
Never really grew up past middle school. I have dealt with high schoolers with better self control and moral compasses.
The rest of SV billionaire class is so abhorrent that you figure they either enjoy being the villains or they figure "it's ok if you get away with it." Sociopaths.
Dystopian
Imagine being a POS that works for that company.
Absence of consent is abuse. Smashing your spy glasses is self-defense.
Another case of really cool tech done badly.
Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ...
Then imagine that it wasn't tracked, recorded, saved, or tied into anything at all. Just a useful service, in service to only you.
Thanks Meta et al, for pushing forward with this broken (for people) model of business and ensuring we'll never be able to have that.
There's this degradation over the last ~30 years from "wow it's like a kind of capital-equipment anyone can own that'll empower them with agency and serve their own individual interests" to "you're renting this product from a supranational corporation so that it can exploit you".
The problem isn't that I'm being recorded by cameras everywhere, the problem is when those silos are broken down to create a panopticon.
> have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids
"How much outsourcing of your mind do you want to give to technology?" "Yes"
If you really can't remember all the details of people that you want to remember, you can always write those details on your phone or trusty Rolodex after you meet them and then check them out before you meet them again if you must.
>If you really can't remember all the details of people that you want to remember, you can always write those details on your phone or trusty Rolodex after you meet them and then check them out before you meet them again if you must.
i do not see any practical difference between the hypothetical device the parent proposes and this, except that your suggestion is more cumbersome. you're just "outsourcing your mind" to paper or whatever.
(i will note that i agree with your general point. i try to make a concerted effort to remember those details, rather than rely on any type of note-taking)
Fair point on the outsourcing. Although I'd argue that one practical difference is that one device doesn't distract you from being present when you have the person in front of you (presumably because you will have to read the details appearing in the glasses).
Also, I take it that the next logical (and worrisome) step to something like that is to record the conversations so the AI can summarise and extract the important data from the conversation for it to be later accessible, which is going to bring us into the ultimate performative scenario. Young people nowadays are already aware that anyone could be recording their most embarrassing moments; recording everything we say would be worse.
Remembering someone's birthday and the names of their kids signals that you care about them. If Meta short circuits that then the signal evaporates.
>>Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids
Here is some feedback for you: plain dumb and stupid
Sounds like I touched a nerve.
I don't want superficial interactions with people pretending to remember my birthday or children using details from a fucking glasses summary.
If I wanted to chat with someone pretending to be interested in me I could just answer the door when salesmen come knocking.
Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ...
I already have that. It's called a memory. Came free with my brain.
Which is great for you, but a lot of people genuinely don’t have the memory capabilities to remember the birthdays of various people. I literally forget how to spell my own name sometimes, keeping track of birthdays is out of the question. But people get really offended if their birthdays go by unnoticed…