Meta Smart Glasses Face US Senate Scrutiny Over Facial Recognition And Privacy Risks

Meta's Smart Glasses have generally earned high praise as fashionable Augmented Reality glasses, but an upcoming update promises to add facial recognition capabilities, and at least two U.S. Senators are raising concerns. Even if you aren't worried about facial recognition coming to the glasses, a growing number of the people wearing what are effectively concealed, always-on cameras is a move straight out of Orwellian fiction.

In a joint public letter to Meta, Oregon Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley have both spoken out against the addition of facial recognition technology to Meta's Smart Glasses. "Despite Meta's desire to minimize public attention on this product, the deployment of smart glasses equipped with facial recognition technology threatens Americans' privacy rights and civil liberties, and therefore warrants close scrutiny. The widespread deployment of facial-recognition-enabled smart glasses also risks accelerating the normalization of mass surveillance in the United States."


The letter also points out that "Federal agencies are already using facial recognition tools to identify individuals engaged in lawful protest activity and potentially to assemble databases of those exercising their First Amendment rights. This abuse of facial recognition tools demonstrates how easily real-time identification technologies can be repurposed to discourage political expression, targeted vulnerable communities, and chill lawful dissent."

These are real concerns about products like Meta Smart Glasses its competitors. As cool as cutting-edge technology can be, that technology can also infringe on privacy rights with or without any ill intent by the user. Meta has also been quoted by The New York Times stating that the facial recognition is planned to be rolled out within "a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns."

In that light, it's likely a good thing that these Senators are already ringing alarm bells. The full letter is available on Ron Wyden's Senate.gov page.