- 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'm saving this comment, thank you for a great explanation of what it is like.
I was in my late 20s when I realised I was "face-blind", but I should have realised a lot earlier, I remember reading in a book as a child about how "people can recognise a person by their face from a long distance, but find it difficult to recognise a voice", and I could not relate whatsoever to that passage.
I thought I regularly struggle to recognise someone until they start speaking, but it wasn't until a decade or two later that I read about prosopagnosia and then suddenly a lot of things made sense.
Your explanation is so much better than the rubbish illustrations of blanked or blurred faces, because it isn't like that at all, indeed sometimes I might rely on a detail about their face to recognise someone.
It's why face-blind isn't a great term either, because it's not a kind of blindness, I can see just as well as anyone, it just doesn't trip the automatic and instinctual recognition that I understand most people have.
- Thats exactly how I describe it. I recognize most people by their hair and voice, but its error prone. My other half, who I've been with for a decade and a half, put on a wig the other day and walked by me at a bar and the only thing I thought about was "that guy was good looking". He got a good laugh out of that.
- 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.
- And people give donations to homeless people every day ... but it doesn't mean we have a systemic solution to homelessness.
As said above, if you do want a systemic solution, it needs a business plan. That's just the reality of a world with scarce resources.
- Late stage capitalism.
- How do people around you react to your face blindness?
Do they consider not being remembered rude? Do you get incredulous reactions like people with aphantasia?
- Meta has to release the hardware, then we can get started on alternate OSes.
It's a shame open source hardware isn't a thing in this area, but we've been here before. (Buying locked down devices and installing alt OSes.)
- All hardware is open if you're willing to open it up ;)
But reverse engineering isn't as easy as my snarky response implies. But I do think more of us should get into hardware hacking. It's the only way we have to fight back. I'm tired of this "own nothing" paradigm and being forced into whatever dumb thing they want is to do. And it's so dumb too. There's not many power users but there's a disproportionate amount of resources dedicated to fucking us over
- 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"
- My aunt said tells neighbors/acquaintances to just introduce themselves by name every time when they start chatting with her, and reports great success with this — but my entire family is also rather 'take it or leave it' re: social stuff, so the people that don't introduce themselves don't get remembered, which seems perfectly fair.
- 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'm similar, and yes, there are easy options to replace person's name with, as long as you're putting a bit of thought into what you're saying so as not to paint yourself into a name corner.
Ironically, I'm insanely good at remembering faces. But it's kinda useless because of the name thing (and equally, the face context is also difficult).
- A trick helping momentarily is introducing them to another person. Then I pick up their name from the conversation and can use it myself - at least for 10 minutes until I forget it again.
- It's funny because I am the opposite. I can easily recognize a face, but if you asked me things like hair color or what they were wearing, I likely would be unable to answer.
- I can offen do neither.
General body shape and height are ok. Hair, clothes, make-up, etc are not.
Context is everything. Where are they when we meet? If it is someone from work, at work, this is very easy. If it is someone from work in a shopping centre, this is very difficult unless I know them well.
I make an active point of trying to remember people's faces so I can place them out of context, because it shouldnt be this hard, and they deserve to feel valued in so far as I remember them. Its an uphill battle.
- 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..."
- It’s possible to make it offline but one would still need a phone for the object recognition software…that software would have to be what stays offline. Definitely doable.
- 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.
- What ever model digiKam is using for face detection seems to be very accurate in my experience. It is open source and works fully offline.
- This shouldn't be hard to do, facial recognition is pretty easy to run locally.
- 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.
- Yeah, but Meta is the stalker that planted the bushes outside your house so they can have a place to hide while they're fapping as they're getting more data from you so they can... I mean, they don't know what they want to do with the data, but they have it. They also said they like the way you smell.
- And yet people with Google glasses were called the glassholes. What will we can people with Meta glasses?
- Just drop the gl. Seems to get the point across.
- How about Dad! I use them to film my toddler doing cute things without having to pull out the phone constantly and being more present. It'd be nice if people didn't call me names for doing so :)
- Buy a proper camera. Your memories will be a lot higher quality and you'll go from creepy guy uploading toddler footage for Zuck to watch to someone who loves their kid enough to run a real camera.
- This is screaming and downvoting into a void.
Parents have enough to carry around just because you don’t like a feature that is default off unless you ask for cloud analysis.
I don’t care what happens to Zuck, cancel him to all hell for all I care but maybe be a little more curious about why people use the tech they do past “people are stupid”.
- Only because they couldn't figure out how to sell ads doing it tho
- [dead]
- 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)
- Ah thanks. I think that would be very valuable indeed.
Even more if there's an iOS version.
- There is!
- What if these existed, but Facebook sold them?
- Of course they would. They already know who you hate from constant doomscrolling and rage bait. They'll call it asshole avoidance, and charge a premium.
- You kid...or at least I think you do :-)
But I get your point
I'd run away from any FB-made devices
- Why should the onus be on me to avoid them? I don't want the default to be imagery of myself and family members hoovered up and exploited by an ad company (already made it clear to family that my kids pictures aren't to be shared on any Meta platform). I could even see some reacting violently should they be foisted upon unsuspecting members of the public. It's nothing like CCTV or videos recorded passively on a camera or smartphone which is generally accepted.
- And I would like glasses that detect anti glasses wearers
- Sorry, wrong comment
- IMHO, Meta is the prime example for privacy intrusion in tech history and with this new smart glasses device, they've leveled their game too far by recording people in their home, sometimes even naked, without their consent. This was already discussed here about a month ago: Meta in row after workers who saw smart glasses users having sex lose jobs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47961838)
- It should be socially normalized to eject people wearing these from your premises and/or life.
I don’t care what convenience feature this possibly has, if you’re wearing a data miner you have no place near me. Fuck off.
- I had an appliance delivered from Home Depot, and after it was installed, the person mentioned he had Meta glasses on. I didn't realize the whole time he was wearing them in my home, because I didn't know what they looked like. I felt uneasy.
- I recently noticed that there are a ton of gig jobs (like this https://newyork.craigslist.org/brk/lbg/d/brooklyn-office-err...) that pay manual laborers to do their ordinary work with a wearable in order to train world/vision/robotics models. So expect a lot more of this horrifying intrusion unless the cutlure shifts.
- And to be clear, I would be uneasy with this being made by any company, but I am quadruple uneasy with it being fucking Meta. Fuck meta, fuck Facebook, fuck their shitty business model and their algorithm.
Most companies I can give like, they make SOME good shit. Even Google. Not Meta, our entire civilization would be better off if we shoved all their bullshit into an ocean.
- haha maybe you are down voted for the crass expression but I do agree with the sentiment - I never gave consent to be filmed in public, let alone for the express purpose of assisting zuckerbergs torture nexus (or for filling his minions' spank bank apparently). however I don't know of any precedent that considers physical violence as a valid response to being filmed without consent
- We are beyond precedent in so many respects, violence is likely the only way back to a more sane timeline.
- the powers that be will always quash discussion of violence as it threatens their monopoly on such behaviour , all that can be said here is that a good god is vengeful. otherwise, imagine being a child or elderly during a time of forced precedent rejection .. it must be very scary
- Amish communities exist. You are free to join them.
- Nuance also exists. For example: I love electricity. I do not love face-mounted facial recognition spy technology.
- Those glasses don't record by themselves. Somebody pressed the button and deliberately recorded it.
- They seem determined to make Chicago lawyers rich. [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_Act- 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]
[0]: https://www.rgrdlaw.com/cases-in-re-facebook-biometric-info-privacy-litig.html- $650M to Meta is a drop in the bucket.
- When people violate the law, we incarcerate them, i.e. restrict their movement. Corporate stock should be incarcerated (i.e. movement restricted i.e. can not be sold/traded) when corporations break the law.
- Since people cannot work from prison, corporations should be equivalent: they may not conduct any business. But since people in prison are still responsible for things like rent, corporations should keep paying rent and salary too. Not sure if it's possible to get a friend corporation to do that for you though…
- So geo-gate it?
- $1k/per with no exponential horsepower? Barely a tax.
- > $5,000 per violation if the violation is intentional or reckless.
- 5kilobuxx, barely a tax.
- How many biometrics per minute can every glass in Chicago collect, each one costing 5k? It's not per biometric, it's per violation. Collecting the same face 20x is 20 infractions.
- Half a billion tax, last time they tried it.
- Lawyers operate on exciting laws. What happens when the laws change?
- 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.
- It will randomly turn the TV on/off and switch the channels as a funny bonus. Cool idea nontheless
- This. Projects like this already exist to blind surveillance cameras.
- I expect cameras will start to come with built-in IR filters in that case.
- Luckily they don't come with a built-in fist filter.
- To combat this I'll release a set of glasses with a high output CO2 laser on it
- If it's near IR, bright and erratic, enough will get through and it will mess up with the auto gain.
- 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.
- That is a lot! Is it a spectrum? do some people recognize very close relatives but not acquaintances etc.?
- I’m not diagnosed face blind but I’m hoooooorble with names. It’s weird because I’ve been tested and score in the 98th percentile for memory generally.
I hung out with a large group of people for nearly a decade and couldn’t remember who was who until the pandemic. The names under zoom helped me gradually learn over weeks.
When I teach scuba I recite the list of student names for my class in as random an order as possible while I drive to the shop to lower my cognitive load to put faces to names. When I do roll call, I write down every person’s name and try to gradually move off the cheat sheet as I call on them to answer questions. But once they put on their gear (especially since I teach where they use hoods) it all goes downhill. Two white guys approximately 35yo? I’ll get them confused.
If this were socially appropriate I’d totally use it as my prescription glasses to help continue smoothing the curve.
- I find it quite interesting the people on the thread mentioning face blindness or being bad at names and how it's embarrassing. I'm bad at names, really bad, but I've given up embarrassment about it. For one thing I can remember the names of some people and I've come to realize that being great at learning names is meaningless, I remember the names of people I really like... sorry others, we can't all click.
Secondly, put yourself in the opposite situation, do you really care if someone forgot your name? Does it even reflect how well you know someone? I had a friend at scouts when I was a kid and we were inseparable for a year. Never remembered his name. Didn't matter.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia
(not that i think meta is doing it for accessibility reasons...)
- 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
- 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.
- Yes that would be great. Right now, there are many applications that use pinned certificates to communicate to servers meaning there is literally no way to see the data your own device is sending/receiving from the internet. It's an insane thing that should be banned.
- There is one way, you can modify the app or the OS to change which certificate is pinned, ignore all certificate failures, lie about the certificate in use, log encryption keys, or not even ask the app whether it likes the certificate.
Not on iOS, of course.
- 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.
- [flagged]
- 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.
- Actually, that's battery. The assault is by the person recording without consent.
- How is filming someone causing physical contact or harm, or putting someone in apprehension of physical harm?
- 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.
- Gives a whole new meaning to the term spyware.
Spywear
- I'm stealing this, thanks.
- [dead]
- I think it's important to keep in mind the difference between metadata versus full video as well as the difference between centralized versus device local solutions. I don't want BigTech tracking my every interaction any more than the government but I don't mind if the dash cam on my neighbor's car logs when I walk by his driveway so long as it isn't uploading that data to a third party. But of course most people don't want to self host and most services aren't E2EE so I won't try to pretend that any of this is important in practice at present. But if we're thinking about possible regulations and the world as we'd like it to be then it becomes relevant.
- That's an important distinction, but yes, it's irrelevant here. If Apple offered on-device, privacy-preserving, not-uploaded facial recognition, I wouldn't be inherently opposed to it. There's no way Facebook wouldn't feed that data right into their own Eye of Sauron.
Same with Logitech Circle doorbells that tell you which of your friends or family is at the front door, using local computing. That's a great feature. I wouldn't use a Ring camera that was shipping the data back to Amazon and any number of police departments.
- This is a good start, for thinking about evolving privacy policies in a governmental sense.
- 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.
- 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…
- Not sarcastic, but I probably didn't convey the subtlety of what I was trying to say in a one line comment. I was objecting to the defeatist "oh the tech is there, so we can't do anything about it" attitude. I tried to choose the examples I chose that the tech being there definitely has some consequences and significant privacy implications, but some controls exist too (like, wiretaps are still applied very selectively, there's been a growing movement against Flock cameras and scaling back of their deployments in some places recently).
- 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.
- What about bodycams on public servants?
(I think the precise form factor is something of a distraction. I'm talking about cheap, tiny, always-on cameras hooked up to giant hard discs in the sky, however they're packaged).
- Bodycams that just record video: I'm fine with that. There's a clear societal benefit to it, and if you see a uniformed police officer, you presume your actions are being witnessed (if only by the human police officer). I'm way less skeeved out by a policeman carrying a gun than some drunk rando in a bar.
Bodycams that feature face recognition: Not OK, whether it's law enforcement or some weirdo at a night club. The former, because I don't want to live in a society where police log civilians' movements. The latter, because it's creepy with civilians do it, too.
- > Bodycams that feature face recognition: Not OK, whether it's law enforcement or some weirdo at a night club.
Ok, but... you know it's inevitable, right? Shops are already doing it, the first weirdo doing it at a nightclub is probably going to be the doorman (transferring the old "do not accept checks from this man" mugshots to the digital realm), I don't know about other countries but the UK police are doing it (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-use-of-fac...).
One of the advantages of bodycams for the police is that the people they deal with get a bit better behaved when they know they're on camera. I'm saying we should have that advantage too. (This is "an armed society is a polite society" redux - a surveilled society is a polite society?)
Check out David Brin's concept of the Transparent Society. He's been banging on about this for a couple of decades, and he's a deeper thinker and more persuasive than I am. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
I stress I believe transparency is the least-worst option available to us, not the most desirable option.
- It’s not inevitable if people choose to make it illegal. Illinois for one has strict laws around collecting bioinformatics.
- Maybe I'm cynical, but it's already here.
Is this the Illinois law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_Information_Privacy_... Because the second sentence in that article is "Notably, the Act does not apply to government entities."
My whole point is that the tech is already on top of us, the only question that's still up in the air is who gets access to it.
- They haven’t even sold 10mill units. We can still say no.
- 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.
- This is all theoretical and pie in the sky stuff, just to be blunt. People are not going to organize like this in any meaningful way. It is going to be generally just bad for society.
We have traffic/crime cams all over the place. We’ve done nothing to flip that on its head. A little minor vandalism here and there and some bad press. Why would this be any different?
- Victims of stalking would likely be greatly harmed by such a rule.
- 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.
- No, you must have signage posted that you are actively video recording. That's my understanding.
- Perhaps the laws should be modernized
- I'm sure our entirely functional US government will get right on that.
- Headline should be modded, these models aren't actively wired in anywhere. No idea why they'd be shipping these but the HN headline doesn't even match the blog headline.
- I think it’s accurate. Facial recognition has been shipped to devices, and is all wired up, just not exposed to the average user.
It’s on your device, you just haven’t been granted access to it.
- Author has the word "dormant" in the headline and HN doesn't. Critical word. Let's not just support headlines when they confirm our biases.
- The company feels like the corporate embodiment of its founder.
- Doesn't every company? Amazon is another example that immediately springs to mind.
- 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?
- Facebook.com, the OG first version, was access limited to certain higher education institutions.
Like you couldn't get an account at Facebook in 2005 unless you were were a ... I don't remember ... Harvard student?
Regarding nepotism: You know, "oh I remember that guy from my time at Harvard University so let's hire him" .. isn't that nepotism?
- 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.
- You say that like people shouldn’t be allowed to change their opinion of other people.
- Yeah 15 years ago. We also thought Twitter was going to foster a positive social revolution, increase accountability, and topple autocracies. We saw how that turned out. Uber was once loved, Airbnb was once loved, we’ve seen it over and over again. HN isn’t exceptional here.
- 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 know a few folks who work in FTC compliance roles at Meta. I don't think the wider nerd-sphere appreciates the extent to which the FTC regulates Meta following the consent order after their privacy scandals of the 2010s, or the sheer number of roles within Meta now working only on FTC related compliance. I'm sure Zuck is no doubt desperate to ramp it down.
> https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/07/...
- “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.[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...
- They really are mask off evil now. Any idea what those "other concerns" could be?
- Donald Trump.
- 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?
- Wired reported in 2021 Facebook said it would stop using facial recognition technology to identify people in photos and videos and delete accompanying data on more than 1 billion people.[1]
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-drops-facial-recognitio...
- I'd love to see a thorough audit of the company done to see whether they actually did this. I strongly suspect they did not actually delete 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.
- Amazingly valuable insight.
It also suggests a certain amount of self-policing by Facebook, which leads to obvious failure cases:
Since Mark Zuckerberg attended Trump's most recent inauguration celebration and NOT non-billionaire average citizens, by and large, I speculate that the FTC threat is no longer a concern to Zuckerberg's Meta corporation. Back scratching all around?
- 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.
- 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.
- Advertising packets only go out on startup and pairing, not during normal operation.
- This may be true for standard BT (I genuinely have not looked into it), but Meta's glasses are pushing out ADV frames every few seconds, paired or not because they act as a BLE beacon.
- In case anyone missed it. Michel Foucault the face tested in this article talked about the mechanisms of surveillance and the Panopticon.
- Knowledge is power, I believe?
And Leadership is likely to be involved in saying what is "true" and what is "false", which are key elements of knowledge to be clear, in order to manage the strength of their own power.
- The more impactful and positive an invention is, the more harmful it can be in the wrong hands. Sadly, AI is being developed at break neck speeds and everyone is trying to extract something from it which also means the powerful will seek to increase their power through it.
Feels like we're juggling with ball sized nukes these days... So amazing... until someone eventually drops a ball.
- 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.
- Your last point is making me laugh, sardonically.
- Using makeup and decoration to escape facial recognition: https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/article/48030/1/anti-sur...
- 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.
- I had the exact same thought about the brand crashing due to association with Facebook. Gotta juice them numbers, I guess.
- 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!"
- _Careless People_ should be required reading for anyone buying this crap.
- I have a feeling people using these don't read many books.
- 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...
- 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.
- Yep, there's a anime called I think it's the Eden of the East, which explores this as a key motivating technology in the story.
- 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.
- I have some vague recollection of a sketch where the user walks around and gets popups and ads in his glasses and later removes them to discover there is a calm city life around him. Was that Black Mirror?
- ICE contract coming soon!
- 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.
- Not when cops are wearing them. Cops with these that have the day's BOLO and warrant hotlist loaded on them will be the new hot ALPR.
- Capturing the faces of every small child at a playground, by a creeper who's just standing outside the fence, looking onto the inside...
Imagine that, this weekend. Brought to you by Meta Smart Glasses
- Real tough guy hours
- 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.
- Mostly because perverts tend not to press charges when they're confronted, not because they wouldn't have legal standing. Also your scenario is clearly not what I was replying to about civil disobedience.
- My mind immediately went to the scramble suits in A Scanner Darkly! Is this where we’re headed?
- Not the point of this article, but that schema design is quite bad.
- What a huge surprise coming from the company that records its own employees.
- 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...
- Yes, our rights are being narrowed, and billionaires including Meta executives are collaborating with the increasingly authoritarian US government's executive, in my understanding.
I recently read in a couple of articles and saw a video, of US ICE agents obnoxiously taunted protesters during their manhunt activities, saying, "we now know who you are," referring to the agent's cell phones who they are using to record the immediate-area protest activity, and apparently collecting faces on preloaded apps.
Rhetorically, what's to stop the US ICE from requesting, and the authoritarian-administration-friendly billionaire executive leaders granting, special editions of the Meta glasses? Or, requesting for national security reasons, which is literally what ICE's mandate is, requesting all of the databases of PII laden facial recognition social networking in the real world, of regular citizen owned Meta smart glasses?
- 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.
- i feel like ai would be very beneficial here. use ai to create massive amount of fake facebook accounts with fake picture and fake friends. meta wants all the data so we give them more than they would ever care about. make it impossible for them to really know real from fake.
- Thank you for sharing these insights. One of my main purchase factors was the facial recognition concerns. I now understand that this is very important and that they aren't disclosing everything. I cannot buy any of Meta's smart glasses and someone would likely break mine even if I did.
- So why not turn it on?
At least in China, where face recognition is at building gates, subway gates, store checkouts...
- Hope they get sued out of existence for this by Illinois. The biodata stored and used only serves authoritarians.
- Heading towards surveillance economy, paid by our foolishness.
- How many ships does Meta have?
- Please God no
- Ideas for what individuals can do about this and related awful tech:
1. Ask your local and state governments to completely ban "stalkerware" and "Big Tech surveillanceware" (like will use this and other face recognition), as well as ban using hidden cameras (including in these glasses) to photograph/video people.
2. Tell everyone, before their buy the glasses, what a "glasshole" is.
3. Social negative feedback to people who wear these. Tell your friends if they're being inconsiderate. Tell coworkers it's inappropriate in the workplace. Frown at strangers who do it. Tell apparent creepers to stop, and/or consider calling the police.
4. Social negative feedback to people who work at the companies pushing this tech. There's plenty of tech talent on the job market. Why consider someone who continued to work for one of the companies, in some cases after years of sociopathic abuses of society?
5. Be skeptical of influencers and astroturfing shills promoting the products.
Other ideas?
- As a programmer, I 100% support this.
I have the knowledge to compellingly argue, to legislators who do not have the knowledge, all these points.
- Meta are making the glasses something you could be punched for wearing.
I live in a big city and I love it because i feel anonymous - nobody cares who I am. It's a stark contrast to where I grew up, where if you were out in public with someone unusual you could hear about it at school the next day.
I think the age of anonymity in public is getting to a close. First government mass surveillance and now private mass surveillance (which will surely be funneled into government surveillance over time)
- What can go wrong with :)
- 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.
- Title is: Meta's smart glasses app ships complete, dormant face-recognition pipeline
- _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"
- I wonder if people held their phones in the face of people recording with glasses if they'd be ok with it.
- 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.
- This is terrible but inevitable for privacy. Meta is going to exploit this and hoard all the data all the while claiming they conform to all the laws of the land. I just wish this doesn’t take off but they are targeting sub $500 and it’s bound to get all the instagram influencers and heavy users to buy.
- It is absolutely not inevitable. Please don't spread this defeatism. It is absolutely possible to ban the use of these things in public.
- I am not sure of that, may be in Europe, cannot see the U.S. banning. May be some states but highly skeptical there. Better chance of it flopping or doesn’t get to a good enough threshold to matter.
- Creeper glasses.
- Yep, everyone from children to all the people attending Democratic rallies, identities and social network profiles siphoned up just by Meta smart glasses.
- The shame of this is that even if you as a consumer choose not to buy them, others will. And while anyone can take a photo of you in public, you’ll have glasses taking pictures of you and transferring your identity and location to Meta servers (who by the way contract with the government).
- 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.)
- Please hurry Apple.
- Anybody else or does it all feel desperate? Like "here set this bubble play money on fire before it gets worthless" desperate?
- This company is so beyond creepy and disgusting.
- I'd rather be face forgetting self than wear this nonsense.
- 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
- [dead]
- Imagine being a POS that works for that company.
- Thats a w’eird apostrophe
- 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.
- > 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- If I remember you have two hypothetical kids and one loves robotics and the other loves games; they are 9 and 11; but I can't remember their names no matter how many times I've asked (much to my increasing embarrassment), it doesn't mean I'm pretending to be interested.
In any case the point I was making was more about how the technology we are allowed is not in our service. This was just a use case where having a trustworthy service would be nice, but is impossible.
- IMO if you remember two kids, rough ages, and their hobbies; you are probably far ahead of needing glasses to make it through the interaction gracefully.
I do agree with your main point, just not for this device. I think this device breaks expectations for socialization in a weird way.
But I am dismayed that it is a cloud device, I am dismayed by all cloud devices, and I am dismayed by people who happily buy it all. I don't know what I'm going to do next time I buy a car, for example.
- 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…
- I literally forget how to spell my own name sometimes
You should see a doctor about that.
a lot of people genuinely don’t have the memory capabilities to remember the birthdays of various people
Because they don't try.
30 years ago, it wasn't weird to have 30, 40, even 50 phone numbers memorized. Ask anyone who was alive then. Now people just push the icon for the person they want, allowing their brains to get lazy.
Your brain: Use it or lose it.
- > Because they don't try.
Must be nice.
In any case the point of my original post was much more about technology that serves only the user - not any specific use case.
From the replies, I see I could have done a better job of making that clear.
- [flagged]
- Sounds like I touched a nerve.
