Meta plans to add a facial recognition feature to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, reports The New York Times ($). According to people involved in the plans who spoke to the publication, the feature is internally called “Name Tag,” and would let wearers identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly wants the feature to differentiate the devices and to make the AI assistant in the glasses more useful.
How man dads are going to have to go to jail for beating the smartglasses guy ogling his kid before these things become socially toxic.
The internal memo also said the “political tumult” in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.
Absolute nightmare way to think about a product launch.
Counter with your own glasses that have infrared LEDs to blind cameras.
Can also buy infrared blocking sunglasses. I got a pair and it’s worked against everything I’ve tested it on that has facial recognition. I’m curious to test it against this new tech too.
Can also get clear IR blocking glasses from Zenni, they work as well and you can wear them in stores
That seems neat. I’m going to look into that as I do need to wear glasses.
Wonder if it would be possible to make infrared absorbing facepaint.
From my understanding, IR tech is aimed at identifying an individual via the eyes mainly with facial proportions as supplemental. Not all are like this but a lot of the commonly used facial recognition tech is. I’ve been able to do trials with iOS facial recognition, android facial recognition, and some ID cameras at my local gym. I was also able to test against a couple facial recognition features in some security cameras. I have a few friends that work security in a couple places and they let me try it. I used IR blocking sunglasses, regular sunglasses, a mask, and a hat in different combinations.
The majority of the times I was identified correctly I didn’t have my IR blockers on. It didn’t matter what other things I had on to cover my face. So I’m not sure facepaint will work unless it is done specifically in a way that visibly obfuscates and breaks up facial features to look inhuman. I’ve never tried that. The majority of the failures to identify me, I only had my IR blockers on, so I question how much facial proportions weigh on IDing someone. That means IR blockers, a mask, and a hat can potentially do well in keeping you anonymous in normal everyday situations from cameras. You will look suspicious to people with all that on though. I want to emphasize my testing wasn’t exhaustive by any means, so I encourage people to be skeptical of how consistent that will keep you anonymous. I still am.
Something interesting is that iOS and android failed to ID me with only the IR blockers on, every time. That means most current phones rely on using the eyes to ID people. So that stands to reason that ICE agents’ phone hardware they are using to ID people’s face may have trouble with IR blocking, assuming the tools they use leverages the tech in consumer grade phones and they don’t have more sophisticated hardware in the phones they use.
New sunscreen: UV 50, IR 100
Gonna be helpful identifying who punched you in the face for wearing stupid privacy disrespecting glasses.
I mean, how many generations of these glasses until they don’t look like this? I’ve worn glasses for 30 years and don’t like contacts. As someone who HATES this kind of crap and will never wear a pair of these, I dread the day when you can’t tell the difference and everyone with glasses is a potential privacy risk.
Let’s qo for always on mask and sun glasses then
Bringing back that 2020 fashion.
The surveillance state really coming in full force in 2026
As someone terrible with names this would be quite helpful but I just can’t lol, it’s my failing and I deal with it without resorting to wearing terminator vision glasses.
