Huge Group of Experts Warns Meta That Its Pervert Glasses Will Enable Terrible Crimes

Last month, a joint investigation by two Swedish newspapers revealed that entrepreneurs in Kenya were watching home videos recorded by users of Meta’s Ray Ban AI glasses.

The devices, which can easily be used to film other people in public without their knowledge or consent, are facing a growing backlash online, with internet users calling them “pervert glasses”.

Now Meta’s plan to add facial recognition technology to its hardware, as part of a new feature internally dubbed “Name Tag”, has outraged rights groups. As Wired reports, a coalition of more than 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, LGBTQ+, labor, and immigrant organizations signed a petition, calling on Meta to rescind it altogether.

In February, the New York Times first reported the facial recognition feature, which would allow wearers to identify people and receive information about them via an AI assistant. An internal document seen by the newspaper revealed that Meta planned to roll out the feature first at a conference for the blind.

Ironically, Meta expected that rights groups would be too busy to intervene, given the dire geopolitical climate.

“We will enter a dynamic political environment in which many civil society groups, who we expect to attack us, will focus their resources on other concerns,” reads the document, cited by the newspaper. New York Times.

But given the latest news, many people are opposed to this new feature. In a public letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the coalition called on the billionaire to “immediately stop and publicly disavow his plans to deploy facial recognition features on his Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses.”

The group specifically singled out Meta for “taking advantage of this federal administration’s growing authoritarianism and disregard for the rule of law to roll out a product that will harm vulnerable people while further jeopardizing our democracy,” describing the act as “despicable behavior, unbecoming of a company that plays such an important role in shaping our children, our society, and our future.”

The coalition is made up of 75 civil liberties groups, including the ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation, GLAAD, Mothers Against Media Addiction, Reproductive Equity Now and the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts.

“For two decades, it has been clear that the ‘act fast and break it’ philosophy exploits consumers, endangers vulnerable communities, and profoundly undermines civil rights and civil liberties,” the letter reads. “Meta’s new plans will only worsen this disastrous record.”

Such functionality “cannot be addressed by changes to product design, opt-out mechanisms, or additional safeguards,” the coalition argued, especially since spectators in public have no way of consenting to being identified by the glasses.

This is a particularly precarious situation, given the Trump administration’s militarization of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose agents use cutting-edge technology to identify their targets.

“People should be able to move about their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum will silently and invisibly verify their identities and potentially match their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviors,” the coalition wrote in its letter.

As Wired points out that if Meta turned off the facial recognition feature, it wouldn’t be the first time. In late 2021, the company canceled a phototagging feature on Facebook that used the technology to identify individuals.

“We must balance the positive use cases of facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules,” the company wrote in a statement at the time.

Meta was also ordered to pay billions of dollars to settle biometric privacy lawsuits, some of which related to the use of facial recognition software.

“When you act fast, you break things – and in this case, the victims may well include our democracy, our privacy, and countless individuals, families, and communities,” the coalition’s letter reads. “An approach to technology that privatizes profit and socializes evil has irreversible consequences for people’s security, liberty, and civil rights. »

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