Maybe We Shouldn’t Create Tiny Cameras That Can Live-Stream to the World
Joseph Cox, reporting for 404 Media:
A pair of students at Harvard have built what big tech companies refused to release publicly due to the overwhelming risks and danger involved: smart glasses with facial recognition technology that automatically looks up someone’s face and identifies them. The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members.
Here’s the full story: These clever Harvard students used the Instagram live-streaming feature on their Meta Ray-Ban glasses to beam a low-latency feed of what was being displayed via the tiny camera on the glasses to the entire internet, then ran live facial recognition software on the Instagram live stream. This is a niche experiment done by some college students fooling around, but what if a government did this? What if an adversarial one planted spies wearing nondescript Meta sunglasses on the streets of New York, finding subjects to further interrogate?
The problem here isn’t the camera, because we all have smartphones with high-resolution cameras with us pretty much everywhere — in public bathrooms, hospitals, and on the street, obviously. Those cameras also can beam what they’re pointed at to facial recognition software. Banning cameras is no solution to this problem. What is, however, is developing a system for letting people know they’re being recorded, and furthermore removing the boneheaded moronic feature that allows people to live-stream what they’re looking at through their glasses. Who even thought of that feature, and what purpose does it serve? Clips should be limited to a minute in length at the most — anything more than that is just asking for trouble — and the only way to post them should be a verbal confirmation after they’ve been taken, so that way people know you’re going to post videos of them to the internet.
Andy Stone, Meta’s communications director, responded to the criticism by saying this is not a feature Meta’s glasses support by default. Nobody said it was — this is a laughably unbelievable response from the communications director of a company currently being accused of letting people run facial recognition software on anyone on the street without their knowledge or consent. But of course, it’s exactly what to expect from Meta, which threw a hissy fit in 2021 when it no longer could track people’s activity across apps and websites on iPhones without their knowledge. Yes, it threw a tantrum because people discovered how it makes money. That is Meta’s moral compass out in the open for everyone to observe.
Stone also mentioned that the LED at the front, which indicates the camera is on, is tamper-resistant, and the camera will not function if it is occluded. First of all, a dry-erase marker would put that claim to the test; and second, it’s not like the light is particularly large or bright. The first-generation Snapchat Spectacles were a great example of how to responsibly do an LED indicator — the entire camera ring glowed bright white whenever the camera was recording. That’s still not fully conspicuous, but it’s better than Meta’s measly pinhole LED. The truth is, there really is no good way to indicate someone is recording with their glasses because people just don’t think of glasses as a recording tool. The Meta Ray-Ban glasses just look like plain old Ray-Ban Wayfarer specs from afar, so they can even be used as indoor reading glasses. Nobody is looking at those too hard, which makes them a great tool for bad actors. They’re so inconspicuous.
A blinking red indicator with perhaps an auditory beep every few seconds would do the trick, combined with a 60-second recording limit. Think of that Japanese agreement between smartphone makers that prevents disabling the camera shutter sound so people don’t discreetly take photos out in public: While slightly inconvenient, it’s a good public safety feature. I think we (a) need a de facto rule like that in the United States for these newfangled sunglasses with the power of large language models built-in, and (b) need to warn people they can be recorded and used for Meta’s corpus of training data whenever they’re out in public so long as some douche is wearing their Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses and recording people without their permission.
And yes, anyone who records people in public without their permission — unless it’s for their own safety — is a douche.