Literally my thoughts. That would be so helpful, but I will not give any data-hungy company access to people around me.

I recently heard the best way to explain faceblindness: Apples.

Can you tell apples apart? Yes, sure, if you put two apples next to each other, they look similar, but there are differences.

But could you recognize that specific apple among 50 similar ones?

If an apple addressed you on the street, could you remember where you've seen it before?

That is how it feels to be faceblind.

There are workarounds, but they are context-dependent and error-prone.

That apple with red hair and a beard? Sure, that's the colleague from the office next door. But was that the same apple that waved to you in the city yesterday?

The only green apple among red ones? Easy to recognize. But only after some awkward misunderstandings you realize that there are two of them.

And changes of hairstyle are a real problem. I once wondered who that new colleague was during lunchbreak. I was about to ask her, when she said something (unrelated) and I recognized her voice. I had worked with her for 10 years, she had colored her hair.

I find myself asking this every time a new software product is released. "Nice, but why can't this be usable without an account and a tether to the developer's cloud?"

Apple is the only company doing this sort of processing

Meta has to release the hardware, then we can get started on alternate OSes.

It's a shame open source hardware isn't a thing in this area, but we've been here before. (Buying locked down devices and installing alt OSes.)

Probably quite feasible. Immich on my little raspberry pi is able to do facial recognition for 50k images over night.

What ever model digiKam is using for face detection seems to be very accurate in my experience. It is open source and works fully offline.

Sorry that you have to deal with this condition. What method do you use currently to help with recognising them?

Honestly, if any big tech would implement it this way, it's likely Apple. Their image face recognition in Photos currently is fully on device from what I understand and it is set by who you associate it with locally.

This shouldn't be hard to do, facial recognition is pretty easy to run locally.

Yeah, but Meta is the stalker that planted the bushes outside your house so they can have a place to hide while they're fapping as they're getting more data from you so they can... I mean, they don't know what they want to do with the data, but they have it. They also said they like the way you smell.

Only because they couldn't figure out how to sell ads doing it tho

What if these existed, but Facebook sold them?

Nearby Glasses on Play Store does this

(not affiliated, I did a simple search before writing an app myself)

It should be socially normalized to eject people wearing these from your premises and/or life.

I don’t care what convenience feature this possibly has, if you’re wearing a data miner you have no place near me. Fuck off.

That pertains to collecting biometric info, not end users of facial recognition services. From your link:

> The BIPA requires companies doing business in Illinois to comply with a number of requirements pertaining to the collection and storage of biometric information. These include a requirement that companies:

> Obtain consent from individuals if the company intends to collect or disclose their personal biometric identifiers.

> Destroy biometric identifiers in a timely manner.

> Securely store biometric identifiers.[6]

> A key area of focus is that an entity must use a "reasonable standard of care"[7] in managing biometric information and identifiers.

$1k/per with no exponential horsepower? Barely a tax.

Lawyers operate on exciting laws. What happens when the laws change?

Surely there’s gotta be some narrow frequency band that disrupts it from working, right? I’m getting really tired of all the cameras and ALPRs around us.

I expect cameras will start to come with built-in IR filters in that case.

This. Projects like this already exist to blind surveillance cameras.

My understanding is that those laws cover audio, not video.

To make matters worse, I’ve seen threads where people with these glasses discuss how to circumvent/disable the “now recording” light, so people won’t know when they’re active.

I think it's important to keep in mind the difference between metadata versus full video as well as the difference between centralized versus device local solutions. I don't want BigTech tracking my every interaction any more than the government but I don't mind if the dash cam on my neighbor's car logs when I walk by his driveway so long as it isn't uploading that data to a third party. But of course most people don't want to self host and most services aren't E2EE so I won't try to pretend that any of this is important in practice at present. But if we're thinking about possible regulations and the world as we'd like it to be then it becomes relevant.

The tech's there. The genie can't be put back in the bottle, and it will only get cheaper and more invasive. Only question we have any control over is... do we want everyone to have it, or only govs and corps?

There's a second-amendment-like argument here, imo, that is very hard to push back on - because at least this stuff doesn't kill people. I want every cop to be surrounded by five or six recording devices that they don't control at all times - it's the least worst option.

(Obviously I'm not a fan of the "everying goes to facebook" architecture. I'm hoping we get past that).

while I agree with you I can definitely see women wearing it to "feel safe". during dark months women wear vests with lights on them. admittedly I have not seen any of them wear bodycams yet.

Unscrupulous guy who stole the idea from other guys in university, then used tribal nepotism to make sure his fabric of society destructive platform is the one who gets big-finance VC funding in order to destroy society to make money?

Pretty common pattern in the business racket if you look at history.

HN was positive on him at one point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157445

>I really applaud Zuckerberg for positively embracing all the attention that's been shouldered on him, really. I think stuff like this SNL skit or him taking his core team at Facebook to watch "The Social Network" together at a movie theatre just shows tremendous inner strength and maturity on his part. It's great to see him be able to laugh it off and joke about it.

He's come a long way in his public speaking skills too, he was pretty natural and comedic during his talk at Startup School. I think he's only going to get better from this point on too.

A lot of people are face blind (including me), and it's extremely embarrassing, especially when I'm supposed to remember a person's name. Wouldn't wear survialiance tech to try to fix it though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia

(not that i think meta is doing it for accessibility reasons...)

I'm great at recognizing faces, but I'm pretty bad at remembering who they are. If this was offline only and the UX was reasonable, I might consider asking people I know if I can take their picture so my glasses can help me remember who they are. Of course, that's a pretty awkward conversation, so there's always the strategy of half introductions, hoping the people you half introduced fully introduce themselves and then you remember who they are. :P

Someone posted a tool that does this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140042

Yes actually. You can poll for nearby Bluetooth devices and cap the packets advertising the manufacturer.

Yes that would be great. Right now, there are many applications that use pinned certificates to communicate to servers meaning there is literally no way to see the data your own device is sending/receiving from the internet. It's an insane thing that should be banned.

i was hoping that it's a good book to suggest to the "i have nothing to hide" folk...

sadly, it's "only" about the sickos at fb. don't get me wrong, it's a good thing that it's written, but hardly anyone needs it who lived through the past few years with an open eye...

I have a feeling people using these don't read many books.

I had the exact same thought about the brand crashing due to association with Facebook. Gotta juice them numbers, I guess.

Smartglasses, NFTs, getting ai to write your emails, always talking to Alexa, taking photos of everything constantly for social media.

People who do these things must think the tech makes them more likable and interesting. But, in fact, I immediately deeply dislike these people and would never want to be friends with them. Its a paradox.

Its actually like watching a dude pissing themselves in public and thinking "Ah yeah, I'm covered in pee now! I'm so cool, look how jealous those non-pissers are!"

It worked well for the Terminator, so why shouldn't it work for us too? Being able to identify target/foe is of course how this will be used.

However, I'd be much more inclined for the Black Mirror use of being able to block someone literally not just a number in your phone.

now, I will say that Boz was pushing to have facial recognition when I was were, and some of the early storyboards for XROS were pretty reilant on it (ie in an office having the sims like diamonds above your head that indicated who you were and if you were busy)

I assumed that Zuck said no because he'd had enough time with the lawyer and the FTC sniffing about to not bother.

However the glasses based AI lifelog stuff (which was basically a really effective personal assistant) would be a lot more effective if it could use facial recognition (we weren't allowed to use speaker diarization as that would allow us to record individual audio from users and recognise them like with facial recognition)

“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.[1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...

I recall that Facebook asked me to identify faces of my friends in order to "verify" myself about 15 years ago. Do you know whether Facebook still stores that data?

Pure speculation, probably they finally figured out the correct legal ToS and privacy policy and everything else that made them feel confident + some regulatory/lawmaker discussions reached a certain point that they finally decided they could do it? Does that add up?

The number of times the grabber gets a beatdown will be equivalent, signs will be ignored

At what point does civil disobedience become justified? Expected even? Also let's be clear - this is not violence, not assault, it is simple destruction of property.

By looking at my face you agree with EULA take explicitly says "don't look at my face"

I don’t think it’s reasonable to think that privacy regulation is coming with the current admin and weak “opposition”, and lack of capacity to care or understand the stakes by the populace. We need some very effective political organizing, yesterday. And normalized, cheap, scramble suits wouldn’t hurt either.

The US courts have almost always held that anything in public can be recorded. The only expectations of privacy relevant to 'smart glasses' that the courts recognize, I think, are gonna be restrooms and your own home. I guess what I'm getting at is I don't expect regulation or the courts to do anything about the privacy and recording issues. IMHO, the only potential regulation might be around how the recorded data is handled, but honestly, I don't expect anything there, either. I mean, apparently, the US DHS wants to build their own 'smart glasses' to record and do facial recognition for ICE.

i'm afraid it's about much more than just money... it's about retaining power/dominance over the very game that is being played.

(i.e. if you control the money printer, then all you care about is that your subjects continue playing. fb is just one cog in a big machine.)

Or they all left or were fired. It's safe to assume anyone still working there at this point in time after everything they've done is in favor of this.

There's this degradation over the last ~30 years from "wow it's like a kind of capital-equipment anyone can own that'll empower them with agency and serve their own individual interests" to "you're renting this product from a supranational corporation so that it can exploit you".

The problem isn't that I'm being recorded by cameras everywhere, the problem is when those silos are broken down to create a panopticon.

> have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids

"How much outsourcing of your mind do you want to give to technology?" "Yes"

If you really can't remember all the details of people that you want to remember, you can always write those details on your phone or trusty Rolodex after you meet them and then check them out before you meet them again if you must.

Remembering someone's birthday and the names of their kids signals that you care about them. If Meta short circuits that then the signal evaporates.

>>Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids

Here is some feedback for you: plain dumb and stupid

I don't want superficial interactions with people pretending to remember my birthday or children using details from a fucking glasses summary.

If I wanted to chat with someone pretending to be interested in me I could just answer the door when salesmen come knocking.

Imagine a world in which you could use facial recognition, have an instant summary in front of you you reminding you of someone's birthday, the names of their kids ...

I already have that. It's called a memory. Came free with my brain.