Skip to content
Tech News
← Back to articles

Meta Files Patent for Facial Recognition, Automatic Recording of People

read original more articles
Why This Matters

Meta's new patent for a facial recognition and automatic recording system highlights ongoing concerns about privacy and surveillance in the tech industry. As Meta advances AI-powered features in wearable devices, consumers and regulators face increased challenges in balancing innovation with privacy rights.

Key Takeaways

Meta filed for a patent that includes a "memory recall" system that appears to detect people via facial recognition and record them automatically, and show you a highlights real later.

Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses have garnered a reputation as "pervert" glasses, with many reports of them being used to record people surreptitiously using the onboard camera.

The glasses feature a light that's meant to indicate when video is being recorded, but people have been going to great lengths to disable it. Meta has released updates trying to disable the camera when the light doesn't work or is covered. They explain how it works in a press release:

Each pair of our AI glasses has a white light called a capture LED that blinks to signify when content is being captured for your gallery — covering or disabling this capture LED automatically disables the camera.

They even brag about it being superior to smartphones, which lack the same outward-facing indicator light, but smartphones aren't always out and constantly pointed at everyone you're looking at:

While mobile phones and action cameras don’t have this on their cameras, ours have had them since day one.

Later, it came out that a future version of the glasses might record without the indicator light at all, essentially ruining the entire point of the light in the first place.

Combined with this latest news it seems even more creepy. The patent provides illustrations of how the potential feature is mean to work. It would scan and identify people performing actions, then automatically record them.

Source: US Patent and Trademark Office

One example Meta gives is using this feature during a dinner party. The AI says "I've generated some highlights of tonights' dinner party. Would you like to see them?"

... continue reading