Facebook intends to add facial recognition to the highly anticipated smart glasses, which are planned to enter the market next year.
At a staff meeting, Facebook Reality Labs director Andrew Bosworth said the company was examining the legal and privacy ramifications of the technology, BuzzFeed reported.
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 recognize someone whose name they have forgotten, theorized by Bosworth, or if their face is blind.
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Facebook Reality Labs director Andrew Bosworth said the company is examining the legal and privacy ramifications of adding facial recognition technology to its future smart glasses.
During the company-wide meeting, an unnamed employee asked Bosworth about privacy issues raised by facial recognition, including stalkers.
‘[That] “It might be the thorniest issue,” Bosworth said. “Where the benefits are so clear and the risks are so clear and we don’t know where to balance these things.”
Privacy has been a painful topic for Facebook, which exceeds $ 650 million to settle a lawsuit, claiming it violated the Illinois Biometric Privacy Act by using members’ data to tag people in photos.
“Face recognition is an extremely controversial topic and for good reason,” Bosworth wrote on Twitter. “… We were talking about how we will have to have a public discussion about the pros and cons.”
Ray-Bans smart glasses from Facebook are expected at the end of this year. Bosworth said the company will need to have a “very public discussion about the pros and cons” of adding facial recognition tools to the device.
While Facebook’s smart glasses would be “good” without the ability to identify faces, he added, there are some “nice use cases,” such as forgetting someone’s name at a dinner party.
He also referred to people with prosopagnosia or facial blindness, a neurological condition that makes it difficult to recognize familiar faces.
Facebook diversity director Maxine Williams added that the company may need to develop its own privacy guidelines in areas where the technology is not regulated by law, BuzzFeed reported.
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in September that Facebook had partnered with Luxottica Group for a pair of smart Ray-Bans.
Beyond that, however, the social media giant was vaguely intentional about his plans, even when laptops become available.
In a January blog post, Bosworth teased the devices “will arrive sooner rather than later.”
He told Bloomberg that smart glasses could improve a person’s life in a way that a smartphone can’t, such as capturing a moment with your children.
Mark Zuckerberg revealed in September that Facebook had partnered with Luxottica Group for a pair of smart Ray-Bans. Beyond that, however, the company was intentionally vague about what it would offer
By the time you pick up the phone, not only have you probably missed it, but if you don’t lose it, you’re probably watching the actual event, but through your phone, he said. “If you have the right technology, it can get in the way.”
This suggests that the glasses will include a camera or other way to capture and save moments.
It may not include Augmented Reality (AR) technology, which overlaps digital objects in real-world environments.
“These are definitely connected glasses, they definitely offer a lot of functionality, [but] we are quite discouraged about the functionality we offer with precision, ”said Bosworth.
“We are pleased with this, but we do not want to exaggerate it. We don’t even call it augmented reality, we just call 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 “Hey Facebook”.
“This will be a gradual launch,” the company said in a blog post, “but you can find and activate the word awakening through the settings of our experimental features – and then say ‘Hey Facebook, take a screenshot,'” Hey Facebook, I show, who are online, “Hey Facebook, open Supernatural” or any of the other voice commands to get started. ”
The alert function is activated and will not work when the microphone is turned off or when the headset is asleep or turned off.
It started being released on the Quest 2 headphones on Thursday and will be added to the original Quest in time.