Facebook/Meta has announced a new feature for its surveillance glasses, which look just like ordinary Ray-Ban glasses: they will soon use facial recognition to identify anyone standing nearby. Surveillance scholar Chris Gilliard returns to Techtonic to discuss the latest horror from Mark Zuckerberg - and how we can resist.
On Wednesday, The Information reported that Meta is working on facial recognition for the company’s Ray-Ban glasses. This sort of technology — combining facial recognition with a camera feed — is something that big tech including Meta has been able to technically pull off, but has previously decided to not release. There are serious, inherent risks with the idea of anyone being able to instantly know the real identity of anyone who just happens to walk past their camera feed, be that in a pair of glasses or other sort of camera.• Police secretly monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras (Bezos-owned Washington Post, May 19, 2025): “Following records requests from The Post, officials paused the first known, widespread live facial recognition program used by police in the United States.”
The move is an obvious about-face from Meta. It’s also interesting to me because Meta’s PR chewed my ass off when I dared to report in October that a pair of students took Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and combined them with off-the-shelf facial recognition technology. That tool, which the students called I-XRAY, captured a person’s face, ran it through an easy to access facial recognition service called Pimeyes, then went a step further and pulled up information about the subject from across the web, including their home address and phone number.
The New South Wales education department was caught by surprise when Microsoft began collecting the voice and facial biometric data of school students using the Teams video conferencing app in March.(Thanks to listener Michael for the pointer.)
Late last year, Microsoft announced it would enable data collection by default, commencing in March, for a Teams feature known as voice and face enrolment.
Voice and face enrolment in Teams creates a voice and face “profile” for each participant in Teams meetings, which the company said improves the audio quality, reduces background noise and enables the software to tell who is speaking in meetings by recognising their voice and face. The data is also fed into Microsoft’s large language model CoPilot . . .