Meta aims to introduce facial recognition to its smart glasses while its biggest critics are distracted, according to a report from The New York Times. In an internal document reviewed by The Times, Meta says it will launch the feature “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.”
I never understand why a company would put something like this in writing.
I worked at a midsize financial company before and whenever there was something even approaching a legal or ethical grey area, we'd pick up the phone and say come to my office to talk, and then you'd close the door.
We weren't doing anything nearly as nefarious as Meta, yet everyone was always aware that email and phone conversations were recorded and archived.
When you have no fear about repercussions of being caught. Case in point, nothing will happen about this.
Surely though there is some type of survival instinct still awake and alive in the hearts and minds of men and women. We are a very aggressive species. Surely something would awaken and tell you "you should be quiet now" and "your next and only words should be lawyer". Surely...
This could very well still be the case with the people at Meta. It's just that the things that still trigger this instinct in them are far worse than what's being discussed here, so they've become desensitized, this is on the tamer end of the spectrum, and this falls below the threshold that would trigger those instincts.
Exactly, people are distracted by nothing being done about the Epstein files, a genocide being committed out in the open for 2+ years, fascist private army running around abducting DoorDash drivers and shooting people in the head. It's a great time for anyone wanting to do a society-level bad thing.
Maybe, just maybe, Meta bosses aren't even aware that what they're doing is nefarious. Just business as usual.
Now, one wonders what constitutes "nefarious" or a grey zone worth hiding in their minds.
Same reason project 2025 was put in writing. When you have large organizations you need to distribute communication. It's really just about cooperation and logistics
>We weren't doing anything nearly as nefarious
But still nefarious. Thats kinda messed up, to be honest.
>I never understand why a company would put something like this in writing.
Do you believe these companies and individuals will ever see consequences for putting this in writing? I don't think they will, and I assume they believe the same based on their actions. Why waste time being "moral" when you don't lose anything for being immoral and stand to gain something if your gamble wins?
I mean, there's a whole philosophical outlook about being a good person and some people just want to do without needing enforcement, but those people also dont tend to become one of the largest corporations on the planet.
They better invest in frame designs too cause as soon as they're recognizable they're gonna get slapped off faces real quick
Maybe we'll see the revival of the term "glasshole"
We are seeing it. Everyone can help by using it.
The Google glasses were asking to be bullied, but the Meta ones are cooler looking
New makeup, old pig
Sometimes analog solutions are the most effective against digital problems.
You mean record onto tape?
[dead]
But the hand is composed of digits. You could start by pointing at them and laughing, then flipping them off, then holding your hand up to their face so they can talk to it.
The long term goal might indeed be unrecognizable designs. Perhaps augmented reality contact lens. It will take a long time but people tend to slowly get used to giving more and more of their privacy away. Mojo Vision made a prototype of this. It's more the display but you can imagine the camera being somewhere else and streaming to the lens in an unobstructed way.
Are there any less obviously aggressive tactics we can use? Wear something that is blinding to the cameras, or something else to obfuscate?
Slapping a pair of glasses that are recording you, processing your face, sending biometrics and images back to one of the worst privacy offenders on the planet off of the face of someone who is willingly doing all that without asking your permission is a perfectly appropriate reaction. Put your shoulder into it.
I'd rather we normalize that than adversarial fashion.. but that's probably what you were looking for.
Yeah sure you are going to start slapping people on the street mr badass guy. That’s all cool and fun until someone pulls a knife on you.
Look, the previous commenter has legitimate question how can we do it for real. Not just speed run to the gates of afterlife after touching the wrong person.
First wearers are more likely to have a concealed carry. They have the money, and are from the right demographics.
Yeah in any case it will end badly for you if not the first time then eventually. Who lives by the sword dies by the sword.
It just takes one unlucky time where the other person doesn’t subscribe to the idea of proportional response or has military training with muscle memory that takes over.
It’s weird how y’all are so desperate to catastrophize responses, and then want to call other people “internet badasses”. Look in the mirror next time you tell someone they’re going to get shot, bud. You’re the problem.
It doesn’t seem like catastrophizing when discussing how people might react to a stranger attacking them. Hitting someone in the face hard enough to knock off their glasses isn’t exactly some silly little thing that people would be ridiculous to respond to. It is an attack and people would likely perceive it as such. Plenty of people would just be stunned and do nothing, but plenty of people carry and go to the range every weekend just waiting for someone to try something.
When stranger assaults you, every person with some practical military training is going to want to neutralise target as fast as possible because this is the survival strategy that is hammered into your muscle memory.
There is no thinking or musing whether they just want to slap you or I don’t know what. You don’t know your attacker and their intentions.
This is the real world. I don’t know why you would think this is some kind of stupid game to go around and slap people. It will cause problems.
Not sure why you're being downvoted, except that you might be overgeneralizing on former military. Some people can kick your ass badly without a knife or gun, like military/ex-military.
Shooting someone for breaking your glasses would be an act of murder. Even shooting someone for slapping you in the face would be an act of murder. Clearly you don't have experience with firearms or the legislation around them, or you would be aware of this.
I am sure there will be plenty of time for legal musings after the funeral. You could watch trial from above if afterlife exists and has good internet connection
Okay — but it’s effective:
Now the discussion is about how Facebook glasses are offensive and worn by murderous psychos who take creep shots of their neighbors.
> Look, the previous commenter has legitimate question how can we do it for real.
I gave parent the term "adversarial fashion" as an answer to their query, they should look that up.
While I'd like to agree with you, and do in some cases, there are many cases where this just isn't a feasible approach. For example, a peer coworker has a pair of these. I just don't interact with her while she is wearing them. If my boss were to get a pair there is no way I can justify slapping them off his face.
It’s also at least simple assault, and quite possibly aggravated assault on someone that has a sophisticated camera pointed at your face that’s sending biometrics, images, and probably video back to one of the worst privacy offenders on the planet.
Feels great to say it. Would feel great to do it. Morally defensible to anyone that knows anything about privacy if the person isn’t low-vision or something. In reality, a terrifically stupid idea.
[flagged]
This is trolling at best. If you touch a wrong person, you will not live to tell the tale. People aren’t some NPC in a video game my friend. This isn’t a movie.
Even I, average looking girl, walk with a knife everywhere and I am trained how to use it to kill, it’s muscle memory. In US, a lot of people stroll around with guns.
> Even I, average looking girl, walk with a knife everywhere and I am trained how to use it to kill
I can guarantee you that if you ever end up getting sucker punched by an adult male, you will at best get dazed and not know what's going on, and at worst knocked out cold. The knife is giving you a false illusion of safety. It would only ever be really effective if you were the attacker that pulled out the knife on a victim with the intention to inflict harm. The first to strike usually comes out on top.
Yeah you really have to make sure you do not miss, the punch doesn’t glance off, and has enough power to knock out the meta glass wearer in one go.
There is still the footage question though, probably saved live to the cloud.
That’s a lot of things to go as expected and a lot of unavoidable trouble anyway.
It’s just such a stupid idea to go around punching people. It gets you in trouble, it gets the defender in trouble if their training/emotion/nastiness takes over and they do severe harm to you.
You better make sure to knock someone out in one go and then what go to jail if they die?
I didn’t expect this amount of stupidity here
I don't think you could justify slapping them off of anybody's face unless you really just like to assault people.
Streaming someone live to Meta, potentially the most evil company in the world (not "per employee" but by "damage done per day") without their permission, especially in a place where this is not at a expected - like an office rather than a football stadium - is great justification. It ticks all the boxes.
Yeah, it ticks all of the boxes that HR loves to tick before firing you with cause
They're incredibly popular in the blind community, and for good reason.
I think even the political activists will be extremely divided on this one. You have privacy on one hand, accessibility and a genuinely life-changing technology on the other.
Yeah, this could be the "lost dog" approach that Ring was trying. I feel for the blind. But in weighing their concern against everyone else's... they should get a different supplier.
Do blind people not care about data privacy? Most likely they do and should ask for good TOS now while still possible.
Blind user here. Reality is, we are so disadvantaged in this world that we will gladly accept any tool that is useful. Almost nobody would ever read the TOS. Its a bit like with cars... Sure, there are some urban exceptions, but truth is, if you ask someone to give up their car, they will laugh you out the door.
I'm sorry that you are in this predicament. Many rely on these tools. When something finally works, few are going to walk away because of a long terms of service most of us will never read. That doesn't mean you don't care about privacy though, it just means you are forced into a tradeoff.
With AI glasses like the ones Meta is pushing, the device is not just helping you. It is recording. Photos and videos can be sent back to company servers. Reports show that human reviewers can see very private footage users never meant to share. That includes sensitive personal moments. The device is basically an always-on camera tied to a giant data company.
If you depend on that device to understand the world, that makes you more vulnerable, not less. If ads, errors, or AI hallucinations start shaping what you hear about your surroundings, that affects your only channel of perception. If your daily life is constantly captured and stored, that affects your autonomy.
So yes, many of us will still use the tech. But that is exactly why pushing for strong, clear privacy terms now matters. Accessibility should not mean giving up control over your own life.
Sure, every interaction in society is a tradeoff... However, I must destroy your dreams. Being disabled almost always means surrendering control over your own life to others. Or, better phrased, constantly fighting to keep control from being taken away from you by external, mostly well meaning, forces. But I get it, really. No need to ELI5. I hope the "you" in your explanation was rethorical... because if it wasn't, I definitely feel talked down to. I read the article we are commenting. I am well aware about the problem of hallucination, especially when image LLMs get used to describe the world. I have even done my own empirical tests to get a feel of the extent of the problem. All my comment was trying to say is, that when it comes to assistive technologies which actually provide value, idiology and privacy concerns pretty much go out the window very very fast, much faster then the average HN reader might assume. That is why Meta glasses are very popular amongst the visually impaired. Or do you seriously suggest they (we) are all so naiv as to not know what kind of deal we just struck with the devil?
Full disclosure: I don't own Meta glasses (yet), but I know some users and observe rollout amongst assistive technology resellers.
I don't have much of an objection to Blind people wearing these, but there are all kinds of things that are OK to do with a disability that aren't OK to do if you don't need special accomodation.
They shouldn't be divided, they should (wo)man up and say the thing they well know out loud: the harms to society are not worth it, the societal consequences of Meta being in control of this are severe and will, as always, hurt the weak and poor the most. Unfortunately the blind community will have to wait a few more years to get a local version, which is guaranteed to appear with how things are going.
High end phones these days run smaller LLMs sorta fine.
And?
Accessibility never really prevented anyone to do shit which breaks it. Remember CAPTCHAs?
(and I am blind, I know what I am talking about)
Have you tried bringing it up with HR? If you explain why you try to avoid her while she's wearing them, they might ask her to stop wearing them to work.
Meta's own guidelines[1] say that you should "Power off in private spaces."
You can't always tell if you're being recorded since they can be tampered with to disable the LED. And from what I gather, the LED only serves to indicate of video recording, and not necessarily audio.
[1]: https://www.meta.com/ai-glasses/privacy/
does your workplace allow recording coworkers without their permission?
In the office? No. But at lunch or outside of the office is not controlled by work place policy.
You could always say you're not comfortable being processed and uploaded to Meta. If they wear the glasses at their desks replacing their screen , that's fair game.
Lololol that's really good.
I would acquit
It's also an assault, with intrinsic video evidence of the crime committed.
Exactly, not only you agree to any sort of harm (potentially fatal) in return by any sort of weapons that person has you can’t see, they can just do nothing and record you and you have problems with police and serve short sentence even.
This is all children talk here. Seriously people stop being so edgy on the internet and what you wouldn’t do. Use your god damn brain
Yes, cops will jump right on someone getting slapped. That definitely sounds like reality. Good call.
Do you guys ever like, go outside?
Plenty of places in the US are not large dense urban cities, and the cops will absolutely respond to a battery call. Like every time.
Plenty of places this would be the most interesting call of the day for a police force and you'd have 5 squad cars show up.
Other places won't even bother responding to the call. Your mileage will greatly vary.
while noble, basically any western system will punish such behaviour as assault ... perhaps this point could be expressed as a prefererence for the law to change such that deprivation of privacy becomes a valid self defense argument ... in the meantime there do exist passive defenses such as face masks designed to interfere with facial recognition
Take out your phone, hold it up, and record them back. Get others to do it too for extra comical effect.
Honestly I’d love to hear from someone who actually owns one of these things how doing this is any different than using the glasses.
This seems like the most obvious, legal, and direct way to stigmatize use of these glasses. Put a phone up to their face and say “I might be recording you.”
Exactly. If you do this and the wearer says something like “I’m not even recording bro” the perfect response is “I’m not either”
and turn on the flashlight while recording
I've always wanted to sew very bright IR LEDs into a hat that would blind a camera. Your face would naturally be shadowed by the bill of the hat as that's its intended purpose. The IR would hopefully make the camera want to adjust shutter speed and gain/ISO while assuming a fixed aperture lens.
There was a fictional version of this in the Artemis Fowl books. My old camcorder picked up a lot of IR outside of visible range, but I think newer sensors are much less susceptible to this.
IIUC bright IR LEDs can harm your eyes if you stare at them too long.
Wasn't there something about how the LIDAR in self-driving cars destroys camera sensors?
https://old.reddit.com/r/MVIS/comments/1i6zryi/reports_of_15...
Now to find a way to make 1550nm lidar glasses to burn out any cameras pointed directly at your face
Depends what your threat model is, but this will literally turn you into a glowing signal that says "hey, look at me!" Your face might be protected but anyone manually reviewing security footage will be paying way more attention.
When did we change the subject from fucking the Meta to hiding from security cameras?
Meta isn't the only camera that might be pointed at you at any given time.
> Are there any less obviously aggressive tactics we can use?
If you are in the US, and hopefully in a state that is open to blocking this sort of thing, be very vocal and persistent with your state reps about the issue. Get others to join. I am curious if this will be legal within the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act or a couple other states with similar laws
Email corporate security and the chief privacy officer with logs of who is wearing spy glasses. Remind them Facebook controls where that data is stored and who has access to it. Ask how to respond to auditors inquiring about it leave off, "in the future audits".
- Or -
Walk around with a vlogger camera that has a large microphone. If anyone takes issue, say "I'm the 5th person here walking around recording everyone today. The others are using a spy camera in their glasses."
- Or -
Borrow a pair of them when in public at a restaurant and loudly say, "Oh my god! These AI smart glasses really do remove everyone's clothing, even on the children!" be ready to run.
_________________
Only do these things if you typically rock the boat regardless. i.e. often try and fail to get fired or arrested.
water to the face ?
Would that work ?
Seems benign enough that its not going to earn you a visit to the judge, but should disable most electronics, no?
Who of us hasn't accidentally performed a spit take of a mouth full of beer into someone's face?
For android users: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.pocketpc.ne...
I'm not the kind of person to wear those, but if I was and someone tried to slap them off me I might feel really threatened if you catch my drift. And since I won't be able to see too well, it will take some extra effort... Was that remaining movement the next punch, or death throes? Can't see too well, better safe than sorry!
While I don’t disagree, with the sentiment, is this not incitement of violence?
Yes. The company is inciting violent behaviour with socially disturbing products.
I really cannot comprehend how someone can work for a company like that and maintain possession of a soul. I feel like the older I’m getting, the further away I am from understanding.
Gen Z doesn’t seem to carry the millennial “making the world a better place” sensibility. They are all hustle culture, all the time. While I appreciate a lot of their culture this is the aspect that makes me nervous about the future.
The person responsible for high level corporate strategy at Meta is surely not Gen Z but boomer or millennial.
That person is surely a lizard person, generation or wider societal norms don't matter.
The point I was trying to make is it's becoming easier to staff companies with dubious moral standings.
Gen X
The soulless kids who used to go into finance joined tech and are inspired by the current crop of tech billionaires in the way that their predecessors were inspired by Gordon Gecko.
> The soulless kids who used to go into finance joined tech and are inspired by the current crop of tech billionaires in the way that their predecessors were inspired by Gordon Gecko.
Yep. Once a couple of nerds got rich, it's what that segment pointed their money finders at. Advertising / marketing went with them.
It was a much nicer place for everyone when it was just the nerds who "had love for the game" :(
The same can be said about those working in the weapons industry etc.
I'm 37, single, no family or extended family b/c of an...interesting...childhood.
Every day I understand more and more that I have something really priceless and rare, complete luxury of choice, and 99% of people don't. (as with all things, it has its downside: nothing matters!)
I refused to get "stuck" in my hometown, which motivated me from college dropout to FAANG. Once I got there, it was novel to me that even rich people get "stuck" due to inability to imagine losing status, and also responsiblities that come with obvious, healthy, lifestyle choices (i.e. marriage and kids)
Of course they have a choice, just like you do. You're making excuses for them that they don't need. They're actively choosing the "work at Meta and maintain lifestyle" rather than "don't work at Meta and maybe slightly change lifestyle". Every day, they make that choice.
Take all the people who get and got laid off. Their life goes on.
> responsiblities that come with obvious, healthy, lifestyle choices (i.e. marriage and kids)
99.9999% of people in the world who are married with kids, don't work at Meta.
Unfortunately, because 99.999% of people in the world are “customers” of Meta, making profit for Meta, the 0.001% of people who do work at Meta are paid like relative kings.
I think you're arguing with a point I didn't make. I'm not excusing anyone. I'm describing a mechanism in response to "I cannot comprehend why." Here, why people stay in situations they might privately find distasteful. That's a different project than assigning moral grades.
"They have a choice" is of course literally true. It's also not very interesting? Everyone always has a choice in the tautological sense. The question the parent raised was how do people live with it, and the answer is: the same way people live with all kinds of things. Incrementally, surrounded by context that makes it feel normal, with stakes that feel high relative to their baseline, not yours.
Your 99.9999% stat kind of makes my point for me. Those people also didn't get a $400k offer from Meta. The trap isn't marriage+kids, it's young + don't know better + land there + marriage + kids+a lifestyle calibrated to a specific income, plus the identity that comes with it. The golden handcuffs thing is a cliché because it's real.
None of this is a defense of working on things you find unconscionable. It's just that "they could simply choose not to" has never once in history been a sufficient explanation of human behavior.
Your phrasing just didn't match your point.
> I have something really priceless and rare, complete luxury of choice, and 99% of people don't
People working at Meta are almost without exception, people who have more luxury of choice than nearly anyone on the planet. It's very important to keep repeating this, and not say the direct opposite as you did. You can make your point without doing so.
You keep restating that Meta employees are enormously privileged as though that contradicts me. It doesn't - it's the premise. The entire phenomenon I'm describing, in response to "I cannot comprehend why", is that privilege and felt optionality are different things, and the gap between them is where people get stuck.
So what you have over them isn't freedom of choice, it's knowledge of your freedom of choice. That's a very important difference.
Partly, but that flattens it. It's not just awareness, the actual cost of exit is different. Me walking away from a job means I’m a little more lonely, that’s it. I never sold any stock until I left, I’m down $5K total in 3 years. A Meta engineer with a family walking away means pulling kids out of school, selling a house, a spouse's life getting upended. Those aren't the same choice with different levels of self-knowledge. They're materially different choices.
> how someone can work for a company like that and maintain possession of a soul
I mean, they don’t. There isn’t a single decent person who has ever worked at Meta, and that started long before this nonsense. The entire company is about the social destruction of its users. Everything anyone there works on drives towards that goal.
The lack of self awareness is pretty fascinating.
The individuals making these decisions are 100% aware of what they are doing. Driving for and implementing stuff like this is for profits, bonuses, and internal recognition.
Suck has made his mind up about which side he’s on with his money. I recall a time when people on the Forbes list were quietly political.
Right, this is socipathy, kleptocracy and pure madness that having more money than need generates.
Accurate description of META.
What do you mean? They're fully aware this would be received poorly by "certain groups" and are applying all that highly-praised brain power to getting around that undesirable issue to keep their RSUs growing.
care-less people, etc...
This is unironically what happens when society rewards sociopaths
I'm curious how the engineers justify this. I'm generally interested.
Please don't respond with how you think people justify, I want to hear the actual reasons. I'm tired of speculative responses to questions like these.
Please do share if you've had to deal with similar situations too. And feel free to respond with green accounts.
I legitimately want to understand why this happens. Not why from management, why from engineers.
Probably a mix of naivety, ignorance, and apathy.
Most people are just trying to get through their day and not worry about ethical questions.
I'd say that's terrible, but I'm not confident I'd be a better person if my livelihood depended on doing that sort of work, though I hope I'd be better.
The actual source article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...
It could auto blur faces... but people wouldn't use that feature.
That shouldn't be too difficult with the current US administration. Maybe another reason Bezos and Trump get along so well
Why is it always this accusatory “while you were distracted”-style rhetoric?
Who has been distracted from Facebook’s shenanigans? Who are they talking about? Is it me? Because I can tell you I have certainly not been distracted on that front. Am I supposed to feel guilty? Am I supposed to hold somebody accountable who should’ve been paying attention?
I do actually understand why it’s done, but I just find it very grating and if your goal is to actually raise awareness, shaming people is generally not the way to go about it.
Also the classic “we can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time” thing
This is Meta claiming in their internal communications that they plan on doing it while people are distracted with other concerns.
It isn't really "rhetoric", they're talking like they believe this actually happens, this is strategy.
And I tend to agree with them that things like attention and political capital are ultimately finite resources.
I've found that the "we can do two things" and "we can walk and chew bubblegum" line of argument to be simplistic and just wrong (and pretty incredibly patronizing). I think the world works exactly the way Meta thinks that it does here.
It might blow up and turn into a Streisand effect, but more often than not this kind of strategy works.
Much like how people think they can multitask and talk on the phone and drive at the same time and every scientific measure of it shows that they really can't.
If I were Meta's lawyer I would advise them to definitely put into writing how they are fully conscious that this is wrong.
> I've found that the "we can do two things" and "we can walk and chew bubblegum" line of argument to be simplistic and just wrong
It's painfully obvious to me society cannot do two things at once. You focus on one shared goal as a culture or everything falls apart very rapidly - as we are seeing today. It's why a common external "enemy" (e.g competitor, nation state, culture, whatever) has historically been so important.
The shared goal can be complex in nature, which requires many disciplines to come together to achieve it via a series of many parallel activities that might look like they are all doing something random, but it's all in the service of that singular shared goal.
This holds true from my experience at the national level all the way down to small organizations.
Damn you’re right. I got so annoyed at the headline I didn’t even read the article so that’s on me
Yeah its more like "quick, its friday night and someone just got bombed, toggle that feature on"
> Who has been distracted from Facebook’s shenanigans? Who are they talking about? Is it me? Because I can tell you I have certainly not been distracted on that front.
On September 11th 2001 a UK government department's press chief told their subordinates it was a "good day to bury bad news".
The idea is pretty simple - you might be obligated to announce something that you know will be poorly received, like poor train performance figures, but you can decide the exact day you announce it, like on a day when thousands have died in a terror attack. What would otherwise be front-page news is relegated to a few paragraphs on page 14.
Facebook proposes a similar strategy: Get the feature ready to go, wait until there's some much bigger news story, and deploy it that day.
The facebook execs literally plotted to relaunch their unpopular product while people were distracted by other bad news.
> “We will launch 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,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
American society has a finite aggregate supply of attention. Politicians and megacorporations often exploit this fact. This Verge article is a leak that verifies that Meta is actively and brazenly continuing to exploit it.
Is that a good enough explanation to reduce your feelings of being personally targeted?
I feel the same way every time I read that someone did something "quietly" in a headline.
Less attention on you, less negative press, better sales.
Well to an extent, it does work. Flood the zone.
interesting (respectfully!) take that the "while you were distracted" rhetoric is coming from investigative journalists/commenters - i read this more as Meta's admission that they're betting on critics being distracted than an admonition by outside observers. it's probably easier to sneak up on a person to rob them when it's foggy; that's not victim blaming.
I usually hate this kind of click bait, but I think in this case it's warranted, since their explicit policy was to do this "while they are distracted". Verbatim.