Meta Plans to Bring Back Facial Recognition Technology.
According to the New York Times , Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. This feature, called “Name Tag” by Meta, will allow users to identify people and retrieve information about them using Meta’s artificial intelligence. Rollout of this feature could begin as early as this year.
However, the addition of this feature has not yet been decided. According to an internal document cited by The Times, the company is weighing the “security and privacy risks” associated with implementing facial recognition and discussing how to respond to the undoubtedly controversial feature.
A document cited by The Times states that Meta is deliberately timing its launch to minimize scrutiny. “We will launch the project in a dynamic political environment, when many civil society groups we expect to attack us will be focusing their resources on other issues,” states the document from Meta’s Reality Labs division.
Meta has a long history of working with facial recognition technologies.
This isn’t the first time Meta has experimented with facial recognition. In 2021, Meta discussed adding facial recognition to the first generation of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, but abandoned the idea due to privacy concerns. And Facebook, Meta’s social network, identified and tagged people as early as 2010, but the company withdrew the feature in 2021, citing “numerous concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society.”
Concerns also include the risk of personal data being exposed. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has described the use of facial recognition by law enforcement as a “systematic invasion of privacy,” though personal use of this technology raises other questions . Glasses with facial recognition capabilities could allow for the instant disclosure of personal data by linking anyone’s face to publicly available information, including social media profiles, addresses, and phone numbers.
Meta states that it has no plans to release a universal facial recognition tool. The company is exploring the possibility of creating glasses that would identify only those people the user knows based on their connections on the Meta platform, or only those who have a public Meta account, such as on Instagram. “While we often hear interest in such features—and some products already exist on the market—we are still evaluating our options and will carefully consider their implementation before launching anything,” Meta said in a statement.
Benefits of smart glasses with facial recognition technology.
Privacy concerns aside, this technology does have useful applications, particularly for the visually impaired. According to The Times, Meta initially planned to present Name Tag to attendees of a blind conference before releasing it publicly, highlighting the group of people who could potentially benefit from facial recognition technology. However, this plan was abandoned for unknown reasons.
Mike Buckley, CEO of Be My Eyes, an accessibility technology company that works closely with Meta, said he has been in talks with Meta about developing facial recognition glasses for over a year. “It’s incredibly important and impactful for this group of people,” Buckley told The Times.