Meta Glasses and the Danger of Facial Doxing

​For years, big tech companies – Meta and Google in particular – have developed but declined to commercialize facial recognition technology that could dox people in real time.
 
The media is now agog about reports that two Harvard students conducted an experiment by rigging a pair of Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses with facial recognition software. Combined with automated social media analysis, the glasses identified people on the subway. Joseph Cox in 404 Media writes such glasses can “identify a stranger on the street, where they work, where they went to school, where they live, and their contact information.”
 
One of the students told Cox: “We would show people photos of them from kindergarten, and they had never even seen the photo before.”
 
While we don’t expect any reputable company to offer this product, someone will undoubtedly combine these off-the-shelf technologies, just as vendors supply kits to turn semi-automatic weapons into fully automatic weapons or offer silencers for guns. Armed with this technology, your neighborhood creep could easily spot a woman walking down the street and be there when she arrives at her front doorstep.
 
For all the valid concerns about how such creeps, perps, stalkers, and assorted snoops might use this technology, the current danger comes from our own government. By 2021, facial technology company Clearview AI had scraped 10 billion images off the internet to identify people in fulfilling contracts with more than 3,000 law enforcement organizations. This is enormous power that allows federal, state, and local agencies to instantly know everything about you at a glance.
 
With a few clicks, an agent can know how you voted, who you date, where you’ve been, and where you’re going.
 
Action is needed to keep this technology out of consumer’s hands, just as Congress has done with machine guns and other fully automatic weapons. Laws to restrict and punish facial doxing may not fully stop it, but such laws would be an important start. Beyond that, guardrails must be put in place to prevent government agents from doxing people at a glance. A probable cause warrant requirement would be a good start.