Facebook is trying to add facial recognition to its long-awaited smart glasses that are planned to hit the market next year.
In a meeting with all employees, Facebook Reality Labs director Andrew Bosworth said the company was examining the legal and privacy ramifications of the technology, reports BuzzFeed.
He warned that the benefits and risks were obvious, ‘and we don’t know where to balance these things.’
Facial recognition would help a user to recognize someone whose name he forgot, Bosworth theorized, or if he has facial blindness.
Scroll down to see the video
Facebook Reality Labs director Andrew Bosworth said the company was examining the legal and privacy ramifications of adding facial recognition technology to its next smart glasses.
During the company-wide meeting, an unidentified employee asked Bosworth about privacy issues raised by facial recognition, including stalkers.
‘[That] it may be the most thorny problem, ‘replied Bosworth. “Where the benefits are so clear and the risks are so clear, and we don’t know where to balance those things.”
Privacy has been a sensitive issue for Facebook, which is spending $ 650 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it violated the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act by using member data to tag people in photos.
“Facial recognition is an extremely controversial topic and for good reason,” Bosworth posted. ‘… I was talking about how we will have to have a public discussion about the pros and cons.’
Facebook’s Ray-Bans smart glasses are expected later this year. Bosworth said the company would need to have ‘a very public discussion of the pros and cons’ of adding facial recognition tools to the device
While Facebook’s smart glasses would look ‘fine’ without the ability to identify faces, he added, there are some ‘interesting use cases’, like forgetting someone’s name at dinner.
He also referred to people with prosopagnosia, or facial blindness, a neurological condition that makes it difficult to recognize familiar faces.
Facebook’s director of diversity, Maxine Williams, added that the company may need to develop its own privacy guidelines in areas where technology is not regulated by law, BuzzFeed reported.
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in September that Facebook was partnering with Luxottica Group on a pair of smart Ray-Bans.
In addition, however, the social media giant has been intentionally vague about its plans, even when wearables will be available.
In a January blog post, Bosworth teased the devices “will arrive sooner or later”.
He told Bloomberg that smart glasses can improve a person’s life in a way that a smartphone cannot, like capturing a moment with your kids.
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in September that Facebook has partnered with Luxottica Group on a pair of smart Ray-Bans. In addition, however, the company was intentionally vague about what it will offer
The moment you turn on the phone, you not only probably lost it, but if you didn’t, you’re probably watching the actual event, but over the phone, ‘he said. ‘If you have the right technology, it can get out of the way.’
This suggests that the glasses will include a camera or other way to capture and save moments.
They may not include augmented reality (AR) technology, which superimposes digital objects in real word environments.
‘These are certainly connected glasses, they certainly provide a lot of functionality, [but] we are being very shy about exactly what functionality we are providing, ‘said Bosworth.
‘We are excited about this, but we don’t want to overdo it. We are not even calling it augmented reality, we are just calling it ‘smart glasses’.
Another product from Facebook Reality Labs, Oculus Quest 2, has just added a new feature: users can interact with the headset by saying the phrase ‘Hey Facebook.’
‘This will be a gradual release,’ the company said in a blog post, ‘but you can find and enable the activation word via our experimental feature settings – and then say’ Hey Facebook, take a screenshot ‘ , ‘Hey Facebook, show me I’m online,’ ‘Hey Facebook, open Supernatural’ or any of our other voice commands to get started. ‘
The wake-word feature is optional and does not work when the microphone is off or when the headset is hibernating or off.
It started shipping on Quest 2 headsets on Thursday and will be added to the original Quest over time.