this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024

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Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers (www.404media.co)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 131 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I mean sort of.

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Soon smartglasses will look like regular glasses though. Miniaturisation isn't about to stop.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

New style: Frameless glasses or you are creeping.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Frameless glasses AND clear temples

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Yea the ray bans in question are completely discreet unless told or you've seen them already

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If it's a billionaire it's just a combat marker.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

We can use augmented reality to turn them into a chicken drumstick or a nice juicy steak.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Still gonna taste like pork tho.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Didn't know Watch Dog was becoming a reality!?

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

at this point, masking up in public provides protections for both health and privacy reasons

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago (12 children)

Facial recognition works better on white people because, mathematically, they provide more information in real world camera use cases.

Darker skin reflects less light and dark contrast is much more difficult for cameras to capture unless you have significantly higher end equipment.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

No, your honour, I did not wear blackface to trivialise the suffering of people who came from Africa. I wore blackface to hide from Facebook Glasses.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I mean, you definitely want to wear a mask and some goggles at a protest. If only for the purpose of pepper spray. I totally don't have a thin gaiter, goggles ,and a beanie and have definitely not heard great things about mountain biking helmets (the ones with faceguards) and totally am not considering grabbing one next time I do an REI run.

But also be aware that, with protests, you are almost always up against the groups who have access to all those "traffic" cameras and the like. And computer vision makes it fairly trivial to identify when a bunch of unmasked people walked into a dark alley and came out with their faces fully covered by tracking them back from the 4th street protest. It isn't Enemy Of The State levels of asking Baby Busey and Jamie Kennedy to generate a 3d model from a single shot of Big Willy Style ogling some ta-tas, but most of the ways surveillance is used during that sequence are shockingly realistic and feasible.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In most cases there isn’t much you can do to fool the government without a lot of prep time such as scouting routes to find cameras, destroying them, or being really good at changing into bloc in the middle of a crowd and not getting caught.

But the important thing is threat modeling. The past dozen or so protests I’ve been at haven’t had the government as a big threat, it has had fascists as the primary threat. While a fascist cop would be a problem, it is much less likely than fascists combing through protest footage to try and doxx people, or a fascist at said action trying to get good photographs. That’s why I masked up.

The last real dicey action that I went to I still masked up, even knowing that the government could still try to track me if needed because I knew it would be time consuming to do so, and that they would only go through the process of doing that if I make it worth their while. Bloc is still effective, but quite hard under this heavily surveillanced police state.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

The thing is? Ignoring the apparent void that black skin creates on all cameras (oy), it doesn't take much time. It takes computing power.

As poops and giggles a few friends and I took the public (rumble...) traffic camera feeds that a nearby county has online. Set up a simple python script to scrape those and then configured an off the shelf tool to track a buddy's general car (green hatchback) and told him to just drive around for an hour.

We were able to map his route with about 70% accuracy with about two hours of scripting and reading documentation. And there are companies that provide MUCH better products for the people who have access to the direct feeds and all the cameras we don't have access to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (3 children)

And then masks become illegal.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Right?! That is all it takes to save your privacy is just not having social media but noone is willing to do that.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Do not share the image in a private Facebook group. Don't post it on popular direct messaging services.

The only way (which I still don't trust), some privacy-preserving E2E encrypted file storage server or (which I trust) via your own Matrix server.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

private Facebook group

Does such a thing actually exist? Seems that "private" and "Facebook" really shouldn't be in the same sentence together.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I remember this happening with google glasses as well

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/03/google-glass-facial-recognition-ban

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Ahh, Glassholes

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Recording and even more so profiling people without their explicit consent is completely not okay.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

In private you are correct. In public it is a lot more complicated.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

No, it is not. Keep your camera out of my face.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (9 children)

Stay home. 🤷‍♂️ When you are in public, people can see you. You don't get to tell me what I can and can't look at or take a picture of. (Note that I said this was complicated, and this is where the complications start - I should be able to record you in public if I am not specifically monitoring or harassing you, or trying to obtain pictures of things under your clothes, for instance, which IS a violation of your privacy. But just walking around in public recording things? You can't take my rights away just because you think you should have complete privacy even when out in public.)

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Time to get myself a scramble suit.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Surely the original "someone" is Meta. Good to have a redundant system I guess /s

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

This headline would have carried a ton more weight if it wasn't so extremely click-baity.

The ends do not justify the means?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Anyone got non paywall

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=AnhPhu%20Nguyen&iar=news&ia=news

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