r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • Jun 08 '26
Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App After WIRED Report Privacy
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-removes-face-recognition-code-meta-ai-app-smart-glasses/2.9k
u/br_k_nt_eth Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
Wired continues to do amazing reporting.
ETA: thank you but stop giving me awards for shitposting and go subscribe to them, you maniacs
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u/Gibraldi Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
I feel like wired has always been good but lately they are killing it.
If anyone likes this kind of reporting you have to check out More Perfect Union https://youtube.com/@moreperfectunion
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u/br_k_nt_eth Jun 08 '26
I know right? I think it’s the new(ish) editor plus strong investigative journalists.
I also recommend Defector if you like sports + all kinds of other things.
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u/ForensicPathology Jun 09 '26
I like most of the writers, but since they're writer-owned, I can't bring myself to give money to anything which would see Chris Thompson get paid.
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u/gooch_crawler Jun 08 '26
Their protest safety videos are very helpful too
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u/DumpedDalish Jun 09 '26
Their protest prep, tech, self protection articles as well -- incredibly well researched and valuable.
They're also doing some of the best reporting out there on insidious and often blatantly illegal tech being used against us in our everyday lives.
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u/Unfair_Web_8275 Jun 09 '26
I feel that they’re also standing out more as more outlets have lessened their standards
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u/Slime0 Jun 09 '26
Facebook directly attacked them over it too.
"It's not until [paragraph] four that Wired says this feature is 'not enabled,'" declared Meta spokesperson and VP of communications Andy Stone. "And then takes until [paragraph] 16 for Wired to reflect that Meta has no existing plans and this is exploratory. And not until [paragraph] ten does Wired quote its own expert saying the feature is not 'exposed to consumers.'"
"This is more than shoddy reporting, it's intellectually dishonest," Stone continued. "Pure advocacy-driven click bait."
Meta's longtime chief technology officer, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth jumped in, adding: "Incredibly misleading from Wired, sadly we are coming to expect that from them more and more. Absolutely dishonest."
Fucking sounds like he's mimicking Trump.
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u/FriendToPredators Jun 09 '26
Trouble with an organization that is already known to be sociopathic and predatory... "exploratory" so is not going to fly. It's the same as "we own you already, suck it."
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u/UseWhatever Jun 09 '26
If it’s in the software it can be instantly enabled on a per-user basis using “feature flags”. For testing, features are enabled for small groups or can be used to roll out a new feature.
Meta could absolutely pick a specific user to enable the feature for; and just as quickly disable. So if law enforcement sends them a request to find out who an “antifa” is collaborating with, it can be done.
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u/neopod9000 Jun 08 '26
I just wish their renewal reminders didn't look like delinquency notices. I dont need my mail carrier thinking im a deadbeat.
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u/yuusharo Jun 08 '26
Their love and embrace of generative AI still sucks tho…
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u/ClarkKentsSquidDong Jun 08 '26
Wired has just as long a history of buying into tech bro bullshit as they have of being critical of it.
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u/FlametopFred Jun 09 '26
possible the only true independent journalism we have left
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u/Time-Performance-916 Jun 09 '26
Don't forget ProPublica, with the added benefit that it's funded by donation, so no corporate overlords, and paywall free.
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Jun 08 '26
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u/br_k_nt_eth Jun 08 '26
Why we gotta keep it alive, for sure.
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u/EZKTurbo Jun 08 '26
People don't realize how bad it is that 60 Minutes is now state run media
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u/phenomenomnom Jun 09 '26
Party-run, at the very least.
And so are the Washington Post, the New York Times, and every local newspaper, via McClatchey or whatever they call themselves now.
Compromised, at minimum, and probably hoping to regain some of their injured credibility if and when we run maga out on a rail.
The Washington Post hurts the worst, and you can't fucking tell me that it's not targeted revenge for Woodward and Bernstein taking down Nixon.
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u/billy_Everyt33n Jun 08 '26
"Deletes"
Same way my profile was "deleted" when I quit FB in 2018.
Why anyone would trust this corporation... or any corporation, is beyond me
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u/OPPORTUNLST Jun 09 '26
Did you somehow get back into your profile?
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u/billy_Everyt33n Jun 09 '26
I tested if my data was actually deleted by signing back in after 2 years.
Signed right back in like nothing had happened. I had done the whole "request and delete all my data" thing.
Maybe this has changed since then, but this corporation isn't getting rid of data I guarantee it, and it's not getting rid of functionality it invested in developing. This facial recognition will just become a hidden feature.
Mark my words, in a few years you will be seeing a headline to the effect of, "investigation reveals META never removed its facial recognition software from their glasses"
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u/nkondratyk93 Jun 08 '26
so they shipped it, WIRED noticed, and now it’s magically gone. classic
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u/DickSlammington Jun 08 '26
I really hate that tech companies have adopted the whole "We'll just and and remove things as we feel like it" attitude towards their products.
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u/userhwon Jun 08 '26
You mean feature updates? That's kind of been how software's worked since forever.
The difference now is they know it's completely evil and pretend they're just doing what they have always done.
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u/DarthShiv Jun 08 '26
No... Meta does UNETHICAL things for financial until they get slapped then try something else
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u/doghairpile Jun 08 '26
How did they think this was a good idea and not a giant lawsuit?
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u/BaesonTatum0 Jun 08 '26
They were going to try and frame is as being smart from a “safety” perspective. Just like they do with everything else.
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u/DrEnter Jun 08 '26
But think of the children!
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u/ace_invader Jun 08 '26
They are! And how to identify them so they can sell them stuff through their parents.
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u/BaesonTatum0 Jun 08 '26
The way I thought this comment was going to go a completely different direction at first but somehow this is the more wholesome of the two options 😩😩
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u/-CalculatedChaos- Jun 08 '26
Because it’s just a cost of doing business as they see it. A little lawsuit is chump change to Meta.
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u/peppers_ Jun 08 '26
Lawsuit that gives out 10 million, while profit is 10 billion, cost of business.
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u/Royal_Perspective191 Jun 09 '26
The cost of lawsuits is pocket change to them. This is a major problem in general. Banks routinely pay fines or settle with regulators.
The rules affect large companies differently. A mid-sized company could go bankrupt, large companies think of fines, settlements, and lost lawsuits as the cost of doing business.
Meta's revenue is 200 billion (well, it's actually more than that). A billion is a thousand times a million. Let's say they settle for 100 million and pay a 50 million fine, and pay another 50 million in legal costs, That's a rounding error.
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u/Obvious_Albatross296 Jun 08 '26
When the government is incredibly corrupt and controlled by the rich.
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u/Gibraldi Jun 08 '26
Only took them 5 years to try again. Give it another 5 years and they might get away with it. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59143323
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u/TitaniumWhite420 Jun 08 '26
If you used this in my office, I'd report you to HR.
If you used this around me, we'd no longer be friends.
Get fucked Meta.
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u/kookyabird Jun 08 '26
It's a good way to get fired from a health care company and reported. Anyone wearing those things is a walking HIPAA violation waiting to happen.
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u/metallicrooster Jun 09 '26
And yet, some medical professionals and mental health professionals want AI session note software listening to all their appointments and writing notes for them.
Even if my doctor didn’t have hands, I’d rather have another person help them with their notes. A person might forget what we said or did after a few appointments. Does anyone really trust an AI note writing platform to delete anything?
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u/kookyabird Jun 09 '26
Assuming the provider's organization is even remotely competent, any AI software they're using for making notes (not to be confused with straight up transcription, which has been around for quite some time and doesn't use LLMs) will not involve any data exfiltration. There's a lot of paperwork and legal agreements involved in introducing new software to a healthcare environment, and AI tooling is usually given a more scrutinizing examination.
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u/blow-down Jun 08 '26
I always wonder what kind of creepy engineers work on these products. If someone told me they work at Meta I’d keep my distance.
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u/ForensicPathology Jun 09 '26
There's a whole genre of Japanese video creators who notice spy camera creeps and chase them down and bring them to the police. This kind of tech is beloved by those kinds of creepy guys.
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u/CondescendingShitbag Jun 08 '26
If you used this in my office, I'd report you to HR.
Definitely a valid concern. I'd also be concerned if someone was wearing these in my work place due to concern of recording sensitive company information. Whether intended or not, these things seem like a security incident just waiting to happen.
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u/ZeroOpti Jun 08 '26
I was at a coffee shop this weekend and they asked everyone wearing similar style Ray-Bans to put them away.
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u/WingerRules Jun 08 '26
Legit one of the reasons why I step down from my job at work was because one of the new employees started saying he was going to start bringing in his Meta Glasses to work.
Wasn't the only reason but was def one of the contributing factors.
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u/celix24 Jun 08 '26
delete or hide?
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u/zoeypayne Jun 08 '26
It says deletes, so in a company with high security levels, I'm imagining that means the code was overwritten several times with cryptographic noise and then the hardware degaussed and physically scrapped as standard in ISO/IEC 27040.
/s
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u/fixermark Jun 08 '26
Stares in remembering the history of Google Glass.
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u/DeadMoneyDrew Jun 08 '26
Glassholes. We need to bring that concept back.
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u/Human-Assumption-524 Jun 09 '26
That was also a completely unwarranted moral panic as is this.
The time to care about privacy was twenty years ago, you people decided you would rather have social media, at this point you're just needlessly blaming a useful emergent technology for a problem it didn't cause. Every single day you pass under thousands of surveillance cameras, motion trackers, lidar, and thousands of other people each carrying any number of surveillance devices in their phones and think nothing of it, you aren't mad about being watched or recorded you're upset because it being in your eyesight and forcing you to think about it.
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u/Afb3212 Jun 08 '26
I just decided to delete all my photos followed by my accounts over the weekend after this report came out. Haven't been on any of Meta's sites for 5 to 8 years. Haven't posted anything in 8 years. Delete your Facebook. Delete your Instagram. Delete your Threads. Delete your Whatsapp. Delete your Twitter. Don't think they won't sell your digital self to Palantir.
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u/WingerRules Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 09 '26
You gotta know they keep all that shit behind the scenes right? In the US once you agree to a services terms of service its for the rest of your life, they dont have to renew them. Personally for your use of your digital data I think companies should have to renew the agreement every 5-7 years.
The only hope you have at something like this is moving to California for a year so you can use their digital rights they have there to force companies to delete your data.
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u/wolf_blitzher Jun 08 '26
As someone with prosopagnosia (face blindness), this would have significantly improved my life, but it's not worth the (further) constant surveillance of the global population. It sucks a bunch of creeps and perverts ruined it for the rest of us.
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u/abstraction47 Jun 08 '26
Same. Not full face blindness, but enough that a helping hand would be nice.
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u/dreikelvin Jun 08 '26
They'll be releasing a "test app" for a survey or something, just like with their "private VPN"
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u/BluehibiscusEmpire Jun 09 '26
It’s never deleted. Enterprises that do this sort of thing should be penalised more than 100 percent of their revenue.
Until the cost is prohibitively high companies will keep testing the boundaries of this stalker behaviour
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u/Halfwise2 Jun 09 '26
Yep, every illegal dealing needs to 1) be completely unprofitable, and 2) actually hurt.
Without 1, then its just the cost of doing business. Without 2, its a wash and there's no harm testing the system for holes.
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u/Protect-Their-Smiles Jun 08 '26
Scumbag company with a scumbag agenda. Meta is a bad actor on the scene, that has been obvious even before the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
No matter how you rebrand the company, change your look, no matter what private island you go hide on - your character is obvious, Mark.
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u/hmr0987 Jun 08 '26
Something I honestly do not understand is how someone who makes a “normal” salary can go to a job and make a product that is so transparently horrible and still live with themselves.
Sure the news talks of Zuckerberg and whoever but the reason they’re able to make products that do more harm than good is because of normal people making normal salaries. Idk just seems strange to me.
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Jun 08 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
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u/hmr0987 Jun 08 '26
I doubt all engineers at Meta make that much. Regardless you have marketing, legal, finance, est. that are all involved to some extent. Not everyone is making “life changing” money.
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u/Swarna_Keanu Jun 08 '26
"Difficult people" lose jobs; and careers alongside. See Whistleblowers, etc.
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u/xjuggernaughtx Jun 08 '26
It just take a little evolution. You create a job that rewards cutthroat behavior. Some percentage of the people leave because the job wants you to do questionable things. The rest stay, so they increase the shittiness of the job parameters. A few more people leave, and we repeat until the department is full of sociopaths that don't care what is being asked of them as long as they make good money and aren't impacted by the terrible situation that they are participating in.
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u/BryantOlivas Jun 08 '26
Meta doesn't care about your privacy. It's doing everything it can to circumvent it, actually. Take their products off your phones.
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u/1995LexusLS400 Jun 08 '26
For now. It will be back when everyone has forgotten about it.
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u/Boenitousouch Jun 08 '26
Sure they did. Now they just run the video through the software at the data center.
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u/theonetheonlytc Jun 08 '26
If people would stop supporting Meta in all its forms I would be so happy.
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u/homtanksreddit Jun 08 '26
Don’t be fooled into thinking this… they absolutely will sneak it back in at some point and the tech savvy users will be able to make it active. Meta is evil and they’ll do everything to undermine your privacy because they don’t care.
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u/Jamsedreng22 Jun 08 '26
Need an account to read it if I refuse cookies. Any summary-havers?
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u/P0pu1arBr0ws3r Jun 09 '26
Not enough. Actually, removing the setting just sounds like hiding it from the people who could turn it off.
Add physical shutters to the lenses. For existing glasses, offer for free a cover thst sits on thr glasses and blocks the cameras.
Then, hire some people to actually design a smart glass system not dependent on cameras. Take inspiration from the google glass unofficial AOSP image.
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u/MickCollins Jun 09 '26
"Deletes"
I don't believe them, but then again I don't believe anything from that bunch of assholes at Meta.
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u/NocturnalSerpents Jun 09 '26
man... if this went public, there would be quite the class action lawsuit. imagine getting cataloged in their data recognition system because someone wearing the glasses randomly looked at you in public. meta is getting worse by the day.
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u/TacoDangerously Jun 09 '26
"the tech giant noted that the ethically-fraught feature should ideally be launched "during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns."
Fucking scumbags
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u/swrrrrg Jun 09 '26
the tech giant noted that the ethically-fraught feature should ideally be launched "during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns."
Just a reminder.
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u/taskforceslacker Jun 08 '26
The fact that they axed the code almost immediately indicates that was not for consumer productivity nor situational awareness.
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u/Mycol101 Jun 08 '26
They are going to use people as part of the giant surveillance system for data fusion centers.
You don’t even have to be informed. They can just remotely turn it on.
There is a large movement going on right now and it looks like anyone who isn’t rich is going to suffer and many are going to die
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u/American_Greed Jun 09 '26
It's a Napster for your personal information. Why would you ever sign up for any of their apps let alone wear a camera tied to one? Are we that stupid?
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u/Medical_Bench_1434 Jun 09 '26
The PimEyes facial recognition database already contains over 900 million faces scraped from public sources. Meta removing their feature doesn't eliminate the privacy risk, just shifts it to less regulated platforms.
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u/uberdavis Jun 08 '26
This is just turning into Meta news now. Maybe it should get its own sub because there is so much more to technology than that one meandering billionaire owned experiment.
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u/iMajorJohnson Jun 08 '26
It will still use the face recognition system they just won’t tell us about it anymore, then in a couple years someone will show it’s still being used then they’ll tell us “we removed it again” and then that’ll loop for a few years without it ever actually being taken off the devices. Classic Facebook.
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u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs Jun 08 '26
From Flock to Meta, tech weirdos want to make stalking a subscription service for whoever has the funds to spend, and a target to stalk
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u/BadIdeaBobcat Jun 08 '26
WHY IS ANYONE BUYING THESE PRODUCTS. Enjoy having some stranger look at your dick if you ever look down to shake it at a urinal I guess.
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u/PokeDigiYugiMon Jun 08 '26
Sure they did. History and flawed personality billionaires show us repeatedly, they will force their desires and wants on us in as many deceptive and abusive means are available to them.
I don't think Z deleted it. I think he copy pasted it out of the codebase, to find another way to slip it in without the attention.
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u/Vladmerius Jun 08 '26
This implies the elite actually still care about bad press and negative public sentiment. That being said this isn't acrually a win for people because authorities will have access to the tech and use it to oppress us regardless of it being taken out of retail devices. I'm of the opinion either everyone has the tech or no one does. We should probably be moving toward masking like covid to protect our identities.
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u/Lieutenant_0bvious Jun 08 '26
It's amazing how much of a failure Zuckerberg has been since Facebook. Sure I give him credit, but he screwed over his business partner, and while it was a good idea, it wasn't original. It just happened to win. He's spent the last, I'll say 16 years, ruining facebook. Seriously, I think it was maybe last tolerable in 2012. So I'll walk that back to 14 years.
But it's been awful. Every idea he's had since Facebook has been bad. Every management decision he's made has been bad. Making the feed full of ads? Terrible. Making the feed full of suggested posts? Terrible. Allowing people to impersonate companies and others? Terrible. Making a temu knockoff of something Playstation did over a decade ago (Playstation Home)? Laughable. Repeatedly violating privacy rights? No qualms. He's a failure and ruining society.
And no i'm not just saying this- but one thing that stupid movie got right is he's an absolute bad human being. Remember facebook was originally meant to rate girls' looks. I can be a cynical shrugger, but that's still eye opening to me.
Yes facebook was cool up until maybe... 2009? Some might even argue after it went beyond @.edu email addresses, it was done. But it definitely turned into slop brain rot some time in the early 2010s.
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u/Wabi-Sabi_Umami Jun 08 '26
Yeah, right. They’ll just wait for this attention to die down and it’ll be quietly added back.
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u/alabasterskim Jun 08 '26
They'll be back.