Well, Well, Well: Meta to Add Facial Recognition To Glasses After All

On Wednesday, The Information reported that Meta is working on facial recognition for the company’s Ray-Ban glasses. This sort of technology—combining facial recognition with a camera feed—is something that big tech including Meta has been able to technically pull off, but has previously decided to not release. There are serious, inherent risks with the idea of anyone being able to instantly know the real identity of anyone who just happens to walk past their camera feed, be that in a pair of glasses or other sort of camera. 

The move is an obvious about-face from Meta. It’s also interesting to me because Meta’s PR chewed my ass off when I dared to report in October that a pair of students took Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and combined them with off-the-shelf facial recognition technology. That tool, which the students called I-XRAY, captured a person’s face, ran it through an easy to access facial recognition service called Pimeyes, then went a step further and pulled up information about the subject from across the web, including their home address and phone number.

When I contacted Meta for comment for that story, Dave Arnold, a spokesperson for the company, said in an email he had one question for me. “That Pimeyes facial recognition technology could be used with ANY camera, correct? In other words, this isn't something that only is possible because of Meta Ray-Bans? If so, I think that's an important point to note in the piece,” he wrote.

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