Harvard students used Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses to demonstrate how easily facial recognition technology can reveal personal details like names and addresses, raising serious privacy concerns.
Dumb, click bait article.
This is about PimEyes, and databases that hoard facial recognition data, not Meta or Rayban or smart glasses.
In my opinion, it’s about both the databases and the hardware. Specifically if/when always-on cameras become socially acceptable to wear in public, then facial databases can be utilised.
Presently, I don’t think it’s socially acceptable to always be pointing a phone’s camera at someone.
Everyone having a FaceTime call does this. Every dash cam does this. Every Ring doorbell and self driving car does this. You can do this with a $10 usb pinhole webcam and an android phone or raspberry Pi.
The problem here is with facial recognition databases, not with people using cameras in public.
As someone who gets greeted alarmingly often by people whose names I ought to remember but don’t (I’m a minor community leader but am bad with names), I’ve wanted a device like this for 20+ years. I’m a little sad about the concept being vilified.
On the other hand, as an advocate for both privacy and Free Software, I always imagined it as being completely self-hosted and only adding people’s names/faces to its database when I’m introduced to them in person. I’m not at all sad about the particular implementation being vilified.
Oh look. Glassholes 2.0
They used PimEyes, nothing new.
Of importance: they do not want to release the tool but use it as a way to raise awareness.
