The emergence of facial recognition in daily life is the direction toward which Meta glasses seem to be heading. A violation of fundamental rights? Tech at the heart of the news hunt.
Being able to recognize a whole crowd in one glance is what Rayban Meta glasses would allow. At a glance, the names and social networks of people in your field of vision instantly appear. In a business meeting: impossible to remember the name of your interlocutor. All the information discreetly appears in your field of vision.
The other side of the coin, through the eyes of Meta
These few use cases of the Name Tag feature (username, personal data…) could arrive as early as this year in Meta’s connected glasses, parent company of Facebook and Instagram. The emerging feature raises several questions about privacy and ethics. Would everyone agree to be filmed, and worse, analyzed by anyone, at any time? And most importantly, how would the general public receive such a digital revolution?
In an internal memo that leaked in the American press and therefore was not intended to be read by the general public, the group explicitly explains that it wants to take advantage of the highly tense political climate in the United States during which civil liberties defense associations are occupied with confronting Donald Trump’s policies, in order to discreetly launch its feature. To sugarcoat it, according to internal documents cited by The New York Times, Meta would present facial recognition as a tool for the visually impaired. This is once again quite cynical, even though in fact, it is a feature that could make sense.
Already a reality in the United States?
Recognizing social media users and associating them with their names and surnames does not pose a major problem. In fact, some enthusiasts have already hacked the glasses and demonstrated what it could lead to. Harvard students managed to hack the glasses to pair them with freely accessible facial recognition software.
Thus, they obtained the identity and plenty of personal information about all the people they met on the street, simply by taking their picture. Although it is illegal, they have not given up on it, as facial recognition is a goldmine for linking Meta’s massive digital database with the physical world.
Banned in France?
The practice is already completely illegal in the country. Facial recognition is prohibited in public places except for rare exceptions (experiments, for example, near stadiums to identify banned individuals or at the entrances of certain high schools). Otherwise, the consent of individuals is required to carry out such practices.
In the European Union, the AI Act prohibits the use of facial recognition in public spaces. And even if they were to be accepted in the future by the authorities, whether it would be well-received remains to be seen. We remember the wearers of Google Glass equipped with cameras, nicknamed “glassholes,” some of whom were attacked on the street. And yet, they weren’t even equipped with facial recognition.
Context: The article discusses the potential implications of the widespread use of facial recognition technology in everyday life, particularly through Meta glasses. It highlights concerns related to privacy, ethics, and legal restrictions on facial recognition technology in different regions.
Fact Check: Facial recognition technology raises significant privacy and ethical concerns due to its potential for widespread surveillance and data collection without consent. Legal restrictions on the use of facial recognition vary by region, with some countries implementing strict regulations to protect individual privacy rights.
