Surely the original “someone” is Meta. Good to have a redundant system I guess /s
It’s literally the first line of the article you guys, fucking read it instead of speculating:
A pair of students at Harvard have built…
Whoosh
Edit: My point was that a couple of kids doing this on a small scale pales in comparison to Meta’s reach. The students didn’t do anything particularly novel, and Meta, which has a much more comprehensive dataset of faces linked to personal information, personal communications, etc, is already using every means available to do the same thing. The college students simply demonstrated what Meta is already doing on a global scale.
This headline would have carried a ton more weight if it wasn’t so extremely click-baity.
The ends do not justify the means?
If I could get glasses that told me “that guy enthusiastically greeting you by name right now is Marty, you last met him in university in such-and-such class eight years ago” I would pay any amount of money for that.
“Doxing people” and “recognizing people” have a pretty blurry border.
Imagine never having to go through “the effort” of just knowing someone.
I’m starting to get a feel for the “society is fucked” crowd.
Edit: I’m leaving this up because y’all are making good points.
That’s not what they’re saying. Nuance is important here.
Some people have a legitimate condition where they can’t remember faces. Moreover there’s a lot of different brains out there and some people have very poor memory when it comes to other people’s names or other details, especially if they’re introverted and have anxiety in social situations. It can be helpful to have reminders, like keeping birthdays attached to people in your contacts so your calendar can remind you when it is someone’s birthday. Everyone is different and what you call “effort” might be a physical or mental deficiency or differently wired brain for someone else.
Yeah, I’m neurodivergent and have a terrible memory. My life is full of alarms and notes and reminders for everything, otherwise nothing gets done.
While I’m well aware of the insidiousness of tech’s ever increasing privacy violations, I also look forward to things like AI being able to function as a full blown personal assistant to help me run my life.
Recording and even more so profiling people without their explicit consent is completely not okay.
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.
I remember this happening with google glasses as well
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/03/google-glass-facial-recognition-ban
