Last month, a joint investigation by two Swedish newspapers found that contractors in Kenya were watching personal videos recorded by users of Meta’s Ray Ban AI glasses.
The devices, which can easily be used to film others in public without their knowledge or consent, have been facing a growing backlash online, with netizens calling them out for being “pervert glasses.”
Now, Meta’s plans to add facial recognition tech to its hardware, as part of a new feature internally dubbed “Name Tag,” has outraged rights groups. As Wired reports, a coalition of over 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, LGBTQ+, labor, and immigrant advocacy organizations has signed a petition, calling on Meta to cancel it altogether.
In February, the New York Times first reported on the facial recognition feature, which would let wearers identity people and receive information about them via an AI assistant. An internal document viewed by the newspaper revealed that Meta was planning to first roll out the feature at a conference for the blind.
Ironically, Meta expected rights groups to be too busy to step in, given the disastrous geopolitical climate.
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” the document reads, as quoted by the NYT.
But given the latest news, plenty are lining up to oppose the new feature. In a public letter addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the coalition called on the billionaire to “immediately halt and publicly disavow its plans to deploy facial recognition features on its Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses.”
The group specifically singled out Meta for “taking advantage of rising authoritarianism and this federal administration’s disregard for the rule of law to roll out a product that will harm vulnerable people while further imperiling our democracy,” describing the act as “vile behavior, unbecoming of a company with such a prominent role in shaping our children, our society, and our future.”
The coalition is made up of 75 civil liberties groups, including the ACLU, the 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 ethos of ‘move fast and break things’ exploits consumers, endangers vulnerable communities, and profoundly undermines civil rights and civil liberties,” the letter reads. “Meta’s new plans will only compound that disastrous track record.”
Such a feature “cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards,” the coalition argued, especially considering bystanders in public have no way to consent to being identified by the glasses.
It’s an especially precarious situation, given the Trump administration’s militarization of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, whose agents have been using cutting-edge tech to identify their targets.
“People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching 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, if Meta were to shut down the facial recognition feature, it wouldn’t be the first time. In late 2021, the company canceled a Facebook phototagging feature that used the tech to identify individuals.
“We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules,” the company wrote in an announcement at the time.
Meta has also been ordered to pay billions of dollars to settle biometric privacy lawsuits, some of which were related to the use of facial recognition software.
“When you move fast, you break things — and in this case, the casualties 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 harm carries with it irreversible consequences for people’s safety, liberty, and civil rights.”
More on the glasses: We Can’t Even Imagine the Eating Disorders This New Meta Smart Glasses Feature Will Cause
