‘Eyewear not Spywear’ campaign gains momentum
Image: Bakir Custovic @bacust_ via Unsplash
Opposition is growing to Meta’s plans to deploy facial recognition capability to its smart glasses that would allow wearers to use a built-in AI assistant to access personal information about people they encountered in public spaces without their consent.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is spearheading the “Eyewear not Spywear” campaign, says the glasses will make it easier for government agents, stalkers, child abusers, scammers and authoritarian regimes to spy on people, describing the feature as a “massive invasion of privacy”.
Last week more than 70 civic and digital rights organisations sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, calling on the company to abandon the plan because it poses unacceptable risks to everyone, particularly the most vulnerable and historically marginalised.
Meta’s software engineers are reportedly considering two versions. The first would allow wearers to identify anyone with a Meta account, including Facebook and Instagram. The second would limit recognition to people the wearer is already connected to on a Meta platform.
Meta is acutely aware of the risks. Five years ago Facebook scrapped its facial recognition system for people to tag each other on the social media network. Last year, as first reported by the New York Times, Meta quietly revived the plan. According to an internal memo from Meta’s Reality Labs reviewed by the Times, despite the “safety and privacy risks” associated with the product, the company hoped to sneak it through during a time of political tumult in the US when “many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns”.
Meta has told Wired magazine if it were to release the feature, it would take “a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out”.
The “Eyewear not Spywear” campaign wants it scrapped entirely. It warns privacy and safety risks cannot be resolved by opt-outs and incremental safeguards, and there is no meaningful way for people in public spaces to consent to being identified.
ACLU warns that Meta’s smart glasses already pose significant privacy risks because they allow wearers to secretly record the people they interact with, and that “Meta’s plans to add facial recognition to its wearable audio and video recording devices would be a dramatic escalation of that risk”.
The use of Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses with build-in video recorders has already led to a lawsuit in the US and investigations by regulators in the UK and Kenya, with more likely to follow. These were sparked by an investigation by Swedish newspapers that found videos of people unaware they were being recorded – including intimate footage and bank card details – were being reviewed by a subcontractor in Kenya and used to train AI systems.
The Data Protection Commission in Ireland, which overseas personal data protection in the EU, has been asked to assess if the glasses comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.
