The Guardian
Facebook doesn’t seem to care that facial recognition glasses can put women in danger
Facebook is considering building facial recognition features on its smart glasses – which would make life easier for stalkers. “We all know that you can trust Facebook to do the right thing and keep your data safe and secure.” Photo: Jim Watson / AFP / Getty Images Sign up for Patriarchate Week, a newsletter about feminism and sexism sent every Saturday. Technology gains even more on your Facebook Imagine this: you are sitting in a bar and a scary stranger is trying to talk to you. You ignore them. The next day, you receive a message from that stranger. They not only know your phone number, but also where you live; in fact, they know everything about you. They wore Facebook smart glasses, you know? The moment they looked in your direction, the glasses identified you with facial recognition technology. This, it seems, is precisely the kind of Black Mirror-style future that Facebook desires. The technology company (and serial privacy invader) teamed up with Ray-Ban to develop a line of smart glasses. While it is unclear exactly what these devices will do yet, Buzzfeed reported that Facebook is considering building facial recognition capabilities on them. During an internal meeting on Thursday, Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s vice president of augmented and virtual reality, told employees that Facebook is evaluating the legal issues surrounding it. Legal issues are one thing, but what about the obvious ethical and privacy issues? Would you be able to mark your face as “unfathomable?” Asked an employee. What about the potential for “real-world damage” and “stalkers”? Bosworth replied, “Facial recognition … it may be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear and the risks are so clear, and we don’t know where to balance these things.” Excuse? What kind of benefit could offset the risk of making life extremely easy for stalkers and creeps? Well, Bosworth said later on Twitter, it can help people with prosopagnosia, a neurological condition in which it is not possible to recognize people’s faces. More generally, Bosworth said, it would be very useful when you run into someone at a party and don’t remember the name. Oh yes, I can totally see how avoiding a little social embarrassment balances the whole stalker thing! You don’t have to worry too much about privacy, however. We all know that you can trust Facebook to do the right thing and keep your data safe and secure. When a publisher (woman) at Wired raised the concern that you would no longer be able to appease people at parties by giving them a false name and number, for example, Bosworth responded nonchalantly that there would be a technological solution to this. The exchange makes it almost hilariously clear that Bosworth had given very little thought to the implications of this type of technology in the daily lives of women. Which was to be expected, considering that Facebook started out as a site that allowed people to rate hot girls through photos taken without their consent. Facebook, of course, may not end up creating facial recognition on your glasses. However, the fact that I am considering doing so is a disturbing reminder of how little ownership we currently have over our own faces. Several pictures of your face, for example, are probably in the Clearview AI database. The company, which has Facebook board member Peter Thiel as an investor, built a secret facial recognition tool that it trained, in part, on images it pulled from social media. It sells its services to law enforcement agencies, but it also gives you access to its application – which allows you to hold the phone in front of someone’s face and get your personal information – to select people. John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes grocery store, boasted of using the Clearview app to identify a man he saw on a date with his daughter, for example. In addition to being intrusive, facial recognition technology is fraught with problems. For a start, it doesn’t work so well on people with darker skin. At least three black men were mistakenly arrested on the basis of a bad facial recognition match. But as long as the collateral damage involved with this technology is only from blacks and women, who cares, huh? None of the big tech companies seem. Timnit Gebru is one of the leading voices in AI ethics and has done an innovative job around facial recognition technology. Gebru was dismissed from his role as technical co-leader of the Google AI ethics team in December; she claims that they were trying to suppress her research on prejudice. Last week, Google also fired Margaret Mitchell, another leading AI ethics researcher. Great technology loves to be lyrical about its commitment to privacy and ethics, but its actions tell a very different story. Japan’s Minister for Women’s Empowerment It is illegal for couples to have different surnames in Japan. Couples don’t have to use the man’s surname, but they do it 96% of the time. There has been pressure to change this ridiculous law and allow women to keep their birth names after marriage, but conservatives believe it would undermine the traditional family unit. I mean, think of the children! Having parents with different names would be an unspeakable trauma! The Japanese minister for the empowerment of women and gender seems to think so, anyway: she was one of 50 politicians who recently opposed a legal change to shared surnames. We need to talk about the physical cost of childbirth “The transition to a postnatal body, with all its curious and sometimes distressing weaknesses, is as inextricable a part of motherhood as it is invisible,” writes Elicia O’Reilly. And yet, the physical cost of childbirth is rarely discussed. More visibility “can help mothers to better navigate the new realities of their body after birth and give them comfort because they know they are not alone”. Kidnappers kidnap 317 students in Nigeria This is the third mass kidnapping of students in three months. Hunting for men who kill women: Mexican femicide detective Frida Guerrera has spent the past five years looking for missing women and paying homage to the victims of femicide. Guerrera says he has helped the police find more than 40 killers since 2017. Don’t miss this long and incredible read. Gwyneth Paltrow is back The medical director of NHS England begged the actress to stop suggesting that you can treat Covid long with saunas, herbal cocktails and intuitive fasting. The week at Potatoarquia, Mr. Cabeça de Batata is undergoing a gender-neutral transformation so that children can create more inclusive potato families. Some people are very upset about this. After all, Taters gona tate. The real conclusion of this story, however, must be that carbohydrates are just a social construct.