The project is designed to raise awareness of what is possible with this technology.
This has nothing to do with smart glasses, and everything to do with surveillance capitalism. You could do the same thing with a smartphone, or any camera + computer. All this does is highlight how everyones most sensitive data has been aggregated by numerous corporations and is available to anyone who will pay for it. There was a time when Capitalism used to equate itself as the “free” and privacy preserving antithesis to Soviet style communist surveillance, yet no KGB agent ever had access to a system with 1/100th the surveillance capabilities that 21st century capitalism now sells freely for profit. If you need proof, a couple of college students were able to create every stalking victims worst nightmare.
I mean sort of.
It does mean that walking around with smart glasses will have people potentially reacting to you like you are waving a recording smartphone in their face.
Which is not great for product adoption, if you get my drift.
Soon smartglasses will look like regular glasses though. Miniaturisation isn’t about to stop.
Pretty much no phone is directed at everyone else’s face all the time, that alone is the huge difference. It’s the differences between someone using their phone and someone actively holding it upright to record the crowd. Surveillance cameras might be out there too but they aren’t sighted by everyone (different by country, some even have to deleted after 24h, unless there was a crime).
People quickly would tell you to stop recoding, if you’d hold up your phone all the time, even in situations where you’re closer to each other, like in public transport.
Im sure you could find a usb c camera that could easily be obscured or pinned to a lapel or otherwise disguised for cheaper than the price of a pair of smart glasses, or even just wear your phone on a lanyard around your neck with the screen facing your chest. People might think its weird but noone is going to second guess it unless your phone is in your hands actively pointing at them.
Now we just need to use the user information to check their net worth, and if it’s above a certain amount it needs to hover a quest marker above that person. I’m curious to see how long before privacy laws get stronger.
We can use augmented reality to turn them into a chicken drumstick or a nice juicy steak.
They’ll probably just end up making a (very expensive) method of obscuring themselves from the recognition tech. That way they won’t need to pass any laws, and ad companies (or cops or anyone else who knows how to jailbreak their hardware. Probably) can still take advantage of the technology in some way.
Because 💰
at this point, masking up in public provides protections for both health and privacy reasons
Apple already demonstrated that you can still get pretty darn close from eyes and hair. Combine that with a bit of logic (There is a 40% chance this is Sally Smith but she also lives three streets over and works on that street) and you still have very good odds.
Well… unless you are black, brown, or asian. Since the facial recognition tech is heavily geared toward white people because tech bros.
Facial recognition works better on white people because, mathematically, they provide more information in real world camera use cases.
Darker skin reflects less light and dark contrast is much more difficult for cameras to capture unless you have significantly higher end equipment.
For low contrast greyscale sequrity cameras? Sure.
For any modern even SD color camera in a decently lit scenario? Bullshit. It is just that most of this tech is usually trained/debugged on the developers and their friends and families and… yeah.
I always love to tell the story of, maybe a decade and a half ago, evaluating various facial recognition software. White people never had any problems. Even the various AAPI folk in the group would be hit or miss (except for one project out of Taiwan that was ridiculously accurate). And we weren’t able to find a single package that consistently identified even the same black person.
And even professional shills like MKBHD will talk around this problem during his review ads (the apple vision video being particularly funny).
I think it would be funny to normalize wearing bloc in order to retain privacy. It’s why some people might wear accessories they normally don’t wear, such as beanies and sunglasses at protests, even if they aren’t in full bloc, covering hair and eyes (in addition to a surgical mask) can make it really hard to doxx someone.
I mean, you definitely want to wear a mask and some goggles at a protest. If only for the purpose of pepper spray. I totally don’t have a thin gaiter, goggles ,and a beanie and have definitely not heard great things about mountain biking helmets (the ones with faceguards) and totally am not considering grabbing one next time I do an REI run.
But also be aware that, with protests, you are almost always up against the groups who have access to all those “traffic” cameras and the like. And computer vision makes it fairly trivial to identify when a bunch of unmasked people walked into a dark alley and came out with their faces fully covered by tracking them back from the 4th street protest. It isn’t Enemy Of The State levels of asking Baby Busey and Jamie Kennedy to generate a 3d model from a single shot of Big Willy Style ogling some ta-tas, but most of the ways surveillance is used during that sequence are shockingly realistic and feasible.
A company called Clearview AI broke that unwritten rule and developed a powerful facial recognition system using billions of images scraped from social media. Primarily, Clearview sells its product to law enforcement. Clearview has also explored a pair of smart glasses that would run its facial recognition technology. The company signed a contract with the U.S. Air Force on a related study.
Just another reason to not post all your images to social media. Share with family/friends who care but thats it.
Right?! That is all it takes to save your privacy is just not having social media but noone is willing to do that.
The main concern I have is unavoidably having my picture taken. Say I go to a family gathering, of course they will take my picture if it’s a big event. They then will probably share it everywhere. I can’t reasonably say “don’t post this picture on the internet” they probably will.
Do not share the image in a private Facebook group. Don’t post it on popular direct messaging services.
The only way (which I still don’t trust), some privacy-preserving E2E encrypted file storage server or (which I trust) via your own Matrix server.
private Facebook group
Does such a thing actually exist? Seems that “private” and “Facebook” really shouldn’t be in the same sentence together.
I remember this happening with google glasses as well
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/03/google-glass-facial-recognition-ban
