If you’re a comedian, timing is everything. But not so much if you’re SOBs who don’t give a damn about anything other than feathering your own nest at the expense of everyone else’s safety and privacy. Or if you have employees who leak memos to the press.
The New York Times has a report on Meta’s second attempt at launching facial recognition, this time with smart glasses. The idea is sketchy enough, but according to a memo that the NYT obtained Meta thinks our political and social turmoil might just provide the right timing. Here’s the money quote:
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
I’m not so sure civil society groups will take their eye off of the ball now, no matter how much Meta helps the administration continue to stir things up.
There are already reports of people using smart glasses photography for what sounds very much like the reason Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook as Facemash in the first place as a “hot or not” game. It doesn’t take any leap of imagination to know what kind of mischief this will cause once facial recognition is added into the mix.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation says, There are Seven Billion Reasons For Facebook To Abandon Its Face Recognition.
But as we continue to see, but never learn, some prepubescent boys with toys will never grow up, always remaining prebubescent boys, even if they accumulate wealth enough to do better things.
There might be money in smart glasses, but if you ask me there might be more money in creating some sort of gadget that we can all carry or wear that blurs our faces and interferes with this kind of photography.
(Photo by Alireza heidarpour on Unsplash
You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 