The technology, which marries Meta’s smart Ray Ban glasses with the facial recognition service Pimeyes and some other tools, lets someone automatically go from face, to name, to phone number, and home address.
The project is designed to raise awareness of what is possible with this technology.
This has nothing to do with smart glasses, and everything to do with surveillance capitalism. You could do the same thing with a smartphone, or any camera + computer. All this does is highlight how everyones most sensitive data has been aggregated by numerous corporations and is available to anyone who will pay for it. There was a time when Capitalism used to equate itself as the "free" and privacy preserving antithesis to Soviet style communist surveillance, yet no KGB agent ever had access to a system with 1/100th the surveillance capabilities that 21st century capitalism now sells freely for profit. If you need proof, a couple of college students were able to create every stalking victims worst nightmare.
It does mean that walking around with smart glasses will have people potentially reacting to you like you are waving a recording smartphone in their face.
Which is not great for product adoption, if you get my drift.
Pretty much no phone is directed at everyone else's face all the time, that alone is the huge difference. It's the differences between someone using their phone and someone actively holding it upright to record the crowd. Surveillance cameras might be out there too but they aren't sighted by everyone (different by country, some even have to deleted after 24h, unless there was a crime).
People quickly would tell you to stop recoding, if you'd hold up your phone all the time, even in situations where you're closer to each other, like in public transport.
Im sure you could find a usb c camera that could easily be obscured or pinned to a lapel or otherwise disguised for cheaper than the price of a pair of smart glasses, or even just wear your phone on a lanyard around your neck with the screen facing your chest. People might think its weird but noone is going to second guess it unless your phone is in your hands actively pointing at them.
Now we just need to use the user information to check their net worth, and if it's above a certain amount it needs to hover a quest marker above that person. I'm curious to see how long before privacy laws get stronger.
They'll probably just end up making a (very expensive) method of obscuring themselves from the recognition tech. That way they won't need to pass any laws, and ad companies (or cops or anyone else who knows how to jailbreak their hardware. Probably) can still take advantage of the technology in some way.
Apple already demonstrated that you can still get pretty darn close from eyes and hair. Combine that with a bit of logic (There is a 40% chance this is Sally Smith but she also lives three streets over and works on that street) and you still have very good odds.
Well... unless you are black, brown, or asian. Since the facial recognition tech is heavily geared toward white people because tech bros.
I think it would be funny to normalize wearing bloc in order to retain privacy. It’s why some people might wear accessories they normally don’t wear, such as beanies and sunglasses at protests, even if they aren’t in full bloc, covering hair and eyes (in addition to a surgical mask) can make it really hard to doxx someone.
A company called Clearview AI broke that unwritten rule and developed a powerful facial recognition system using billions of images scraped from social media. Primarily, Clearview sells its product to law enforcement. Clearview has also explored a pair of smart glasses that would run its facial recognition technology. The company signed a contract with the U.S. Air Force on a related study.
Just another reason to not post all your images to social media. Share with family/friends who care but thats it.
The main concern I have is unavoidably having my picture taken. Say I go to a family gathering, of course they will take my picture if it's a big event. They then will probably share it everywhere. I can't reasonably say "don't post this picture on the internet" they probably will.
If I could get glasses that told me "that guy enthusiastically greeting you by name right now is Marty, you last met him in university in such-and-such class eight years ago" I would pay any amount of money for that.
"Doxing people" and "recognizing people" have a pretty blurry border.
That’s not what they’re saying. Nuance is important here.
Some people have a legitimate condition where they can’t remember faces. Moreover there’s a lot of different brains out there and some people have very poor memory when it comes to other people’s names or other details, especially if they’re introverted and have anxiety in social situations. It can be helpful to have reminders, like keeping birthdays attached to people in your contacts so your calendar can remind you when it is someone’s birthday. Everyone is different and what you call “effort” might be a physical or mental deficiency or differently wired brain for someone else.
One of the students' names who did this was in the non-paywalled chunk of the article. A news search for that name brings up a ton of links about the story.
well, no, someone used meta smart glasses to feed their instagram, and used facial recognition software on a different device like a pc to scan the instagram photos, and push their results to their smartphone