A recent report by BuzzFeed News claims that the social media giant Facebook is considering building facial recognition technology in its next smart glasses product.
In a recent report entitled “Facebook is considering facial recognition for its next smart glasses,” BuzzFeed News writes that social media giant Facebook is discussing the construction of facial recognition in its next smart glasses product and is evaluating the implications tech executives at an internal meeting this week.
BuzzFeed News writes:
During a scheduled company-wide meeting, Andrew Bosworth, vice president of augmented and virtual reality at Facebook, told employees that the company is evaluating whether or not it has the legal capacity to offer facial recognition on devices that are supposed to be launched later this year year. Nothing has been decided, he said, and he noted that current state laws may make it impossible for Facebook to offer people the ability to search for others based on photos of their faces.
“Facial recognition … can be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear and the risks are so clear, and we don’t know where to balance those things,” said Bosworth in response to an employee question about whether people would be able to “mark their faces as inscrutable” when smart glasses become a prevalent technology. The unidentified worker specifically highlighted fears about the potential for “damage in the real world”, including “stalkers”.
After publishing this story, Bosworth wrote on Twitter that “we have been open about our efforts to build [augmented reality] glasses and are still in the early stages. “
“Facial recognition is an extremely controversial topic and for good reason, I was talking about how we are going to have to have a public discussion about the pros and cons,” he said.
Bosworth told employees on Thursday: “The real question is whether we will be able to recognize any face, and we don’t know. Legally, the answer may be no, if you are familiar with BIPA in Illinois … people are making facial recognition illegal. Bosworth added: “Okay. We can do this as a society and this product will survive and thrive without it. But I think there are some missed opportunities. “
Facebook’s director of diversity, Maxine Williams, allegedly noted during the conversation that the company may need to develop its own principles of facial recognition that would take precedence in places where there are no laws governing the technology; such as the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which ordered Facebook last year to pay $ 650 million to Illinois citizens for violating BIPA with the company’s photo tagging feature.
Williams reported that: “Just because you can [build something,] it doesn’t mean you will, ”noting that the company would have to consider the product’s potential to cause harm and discrimination.
Read more on BuzzFeed News here.
Lucas Nolan is a Breitbart News reporter who covers issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at [email protected]