if the feature was “exploratory” why are they mad? you explored what the reaction would be by having the code behind a feature flag in prod and the response wasn’t good so you scrapped it? seems like you should be glad wired did you a solid by not having you waste engineering hours developing a feature nobody wanted.
Oh, no. They didn’t scrap the code. It’s there, waiting to be deployed again with an obscured name once the dust settles a bit.
The starkest signal of the MAGAfication of Silicon Valley isn’t this fairly par-for-the-course spyware tech, but their public response.
A short couple of years ago they would have downplayed the whole thing and peppered a few apologies in, but these days the standard response is attack, attack, attack. Call the journalist a liar, call the journal failing, no need for evidence on either, just as long as you keep attacking.
I hope Roy Cohn is burning in Hell 2.
Meta’s Vice President of Communications Andy Stone complained that Wired waited until the fourth paragraph to note the facial recognition feature was “not enabled,” and doesn’t note until the 16th paragraph that the feature is exploratory.
Why is the code pushes to the customer downloadable app of its an internal experiment.
If it was “experimental” and “not enabled”, why the fuck did you push it to the totality of the devices’ user base, fuckerberg?
Listen Meta, all you have to do is make the technology free and available to everyone, prove you aren’t motivated by profit, use your vast wealth and resources to improve society, and be completely transparent with all your business interactions. Then you wouldn’t be getting all this hate
All they needed to do was not be so scummy with people’s data and I think most would have been okay with the tradeoff. I would have bought one of their VR headsets if I didn’t think they were gonna scrape every aspect of its use and sell my gooning habits to advertisers.
Meta deserves all the scrutiny and scorn it is getting for this terrible project. You know who else deserves scorn? Ray-ban. They hitched their brand to this bullshit and should be held just as accountable.
Wait…does this mean every time someone wearing a meta glass looked at me…rather its camera looked at me, meta stored my face for profiling purposes regardless of me being an user of meta Apps or not?? This is so messed up. Initially I thought that only friends of meta users used to get profiled via face recognition…wtf…but again it’s meta…violated multiple privacy laws and as such…so not a surprise tbh
meta will still develop new facial recognition code behind the scenes
“Remove”
Removes™ … the user’s UI part of face recognition?
Why can’t a company do smart glasses with self-hostable or fully local processing?
I’d love a pair but fuck streaming everything I see to a random dude in Nigeria
Well for one thing, it’s creepy and the people around you don’t want to be passively recorded 24/7.
Remember Google Glass? Its users were called “glassholes” for a reason.
The G2 augmented reality glasses fit that. No camera or microphone.
But I want a camera and a microphone.
I just want to use my own hardware to analyse whatever they’re recording.
Self-hosted doesn’t mean “look how nice I am”. When a piece of tech is shit, it’s shit whether it is self-hosted or not.
It’s not about being nice. It’s about me knowing where my data is.
Are you a cybersecurity expert? Can you guarantee that the data you’ll collect with your secret agent glasses won’t end up in the open?
Yes.
Unless someone phyiscally breaks into my house and steals my server. Which would require a very targeted attack which again is WAAY out of scope in my (and everyone else’s) threat model
You’re a smart guy.
