Meta won’t let morality get in the way of a product launch

There’s never been a better time to add facial recognition to everything! The public at large is gradually becoming numb to our Palantirized surveillance state, and American communities are responding to the militarization of federal law enforcement with their own increasingly intricate webs of sousveillance.

The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are sleek, unobtrusive wearables with front-facing cameras and a passthrough display in the right lens that can show maps, texts, social media posts, and more. Name Tag is a new feature that uses facial recognition to identify people you see in real life through the glasses. Perhaps the glasses would have sounded way too creepy in the past; perhaps they still sound creepy now. But who has the energy to complain? A dangerously mercurial president, the blatant profiteering and corporate give-and-take, the expansive use of government surveillance, a supine Fourth Estate owned by billionaires, the rampant tyranny of ICE: These are the best preconditions to introduce Name Tag, brought to you by Meta and Ray-Ban.

After months and months of ceaseless whining about the doxxing of ICE agents, there hasn’t been a single peep from Attorney General Pam Bondi about the future of facial recognition in Meta glasses. If frictionless facial recognition becomes commonplace, theoretically, ICE is vulnerable to the technology as well. But the government is remarkably complacent on this front. Maybe it thinks that Meta is at the beck and call of Washington, DC, and will change its product to suit the needs of ICE. Maybe the screaming over “doxxing” was never actually about doxxing. Or maybe a little bit of both?

As The Verge’s Victoria Song notes, even though smart glasses “aren’t inherently evil,” the Ray-Bans are automatically suspicious due to Meta’s established history of carelessness and ongoing demonstration of its totally demagnetized moral compass. Meta knows that the glasses are controversial, and that combining them with facial recognition poses serious privacy risks. But the time is ripe to spring the combination on a distracted, jaded public. According to an internal memo from last year, reviewed by The New York Times, the company claimed the feature will be launched “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.”

The sentence is remarkably self-serving, even for Meta. The “dynamic political environment,” one presumes, is the chaotic Trump administration, the very same regime with which Meta and its CEO has curried favor — using slobbering praise and ideologically motivated policy changes and ballroom donations that went toward demolishing the historic White House East Wing. The “civil society groups” would be any of the civil liberties organizations, such as the ACLU, that take an interest in privacy rights; the “other concerns” distracting them would be the rampant surveillance and repression of Americans by the aforementioned “dynamic political environment.”

Lina Khan’s FTC would have probably had something to say about it; the newspapers would have had a field day in an era before The Washington Post was bought and sold for parts by a Trump-enamored Jeff Bezos. But this is a new world, and the ascendance of fascism can really pave the way for a product launch!

The social violation posed by Meta’s glasses is unusually stark. The front-facing cameras combined with a smart interface and a low-profile appearance make them harder to clock. The ease of surveillance combined with additional computing features, all bundled inside a wearable that isn’t immediately detectable as a recording device, makes for a novel kind of a wiretap. This is not tricky to understand, the way that NSA bulk collection of metadata might be. A judge will grasp in an instant the danger these devices pose to the sanctity of jury proceedings; internet commenters instinctively despise their use in public spaces like the New York City subway.

Just because you are outside of your home doesn’t mean you have consented to having a random bozo collect your face and your name, the latter of which can enable them to search for your digital presence or even home address. The act of existing in public should not carry those risks. You do not want Name Tag to haunt you just outside the synagogue, gay bar, or abortion clinic.

Americans’ increasing addiction to filming each other adversarially is a symptom of the erosion of trust in our society; we broadcast each other breaching social norms, and we record law enforcement breaking the law. The institutions that are supposed to solve collective action problems have been hijacked or subverted. The forces that are supposed to keep the peace and curb violence instead sow discord and dole out death. Hostility is the basic mode in which we engage with each other and our government, and filming has become a hostile act. Meta’s glasses are a sleek version of the weapon everyone already has in their pocket; the addition of facial recognition will accelerate the ongoing breakdown in public trust.

The notion that any individual creep can get their hands on these glasses should be chilling: Even a mildly antisocial personality can wreak serious harm with the technology. But ultimately, it is not the regular old stalker who poses the greatest threat when it comes to Meta’s Ray-Bans. Fundamentally, the glasses are collecting data about the whereabouts of other people all over the world while calling back home to computers owned by a corporation with a track record of collecting far too much information about its users and being far too permissive about what others do with it. As with all data collected by third-party corporations, it is highly vulnerable to subpoenas by the government, which is presently engaged in an expansive war on unmasking its critics on the internet. How will Meta safeguard that data, when it wouldn’t even safeguard its fact-checking program in the face of a White House that is hostile toward facts?

We are no longer operating in a world where we judge technology by what would happen if it landed in the “wrong hands.” It is already in the wrong hands. Industry and government have been captured by the worst people you know. The federal government of the United States is run by white supremacists who believe in the “great replacement” theory, and is currently engaged in a project of forced demographic change through mass deportation enabled by racial profiling blessed by the Supreme Court and enacted by an agency flush with billions of dollars. To be blunt, the work of ICE is the work of ethnic cleansing. And all centralized repositories of data that connect the identities and real-life locations of individuals, if exposed to ICE, will become tools of ethnic cleansing. Even without a formal relationship — that we know of, anyway — some feds have embraced the glasses: A Customs and Border Protection agent was photographed last year wearing Meta glasses at an immigration raid.

Tech is never neutral; it is owned, created, and maintained by people with specific points of view, priorities, and vested political interests. The benefits it bestows on the powerful and the powerless are not equal or proportionate. As with the removal of the ICEBlock app from Apple’s App Store, Silicon Valley is at the beck and call of Washington, DC. Meta will tweak and adjust the rollout of Name Tag to best appease the “dynamic political environment” that made the launch possible in the first place. Bondi knows the score, and so do the rest of us. Surveillance is their tool, not ours, and Meta belongs to them, and not to us.