Meta executives claimed that a controversial facial recognition feature didn’t “exist.” Fast forward a few weeks later, and they’re describing the feature in public — and in detail.
In June, a Wired investigation revealed that Meta had quietly infused unreleased facial recognition tech into its “AI Glasses,” the tech giant’s chatbot and camera-equipped smart glasses. While the feature, dubbed NameTag, was inaccessible to consumers, it was designed to register faces encountered by Meta glasses wearers “into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user’s phone,” according to the magazine.
It’s safe to say that Meta executives were furious after Wired published its investigation. After all, the company has a long track record of data privacy violations. The revelation that its “pervert glasses,” as some have taken to calling Meta’s controversial smart glasses, could soon be using facial recognition tech — not unlike the eyewear being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents — fueled an existing PR disaster.
Andy Stone, the tech giant’s spokesperson and VP of communications, declared on X that Wired’s reporting was “intellectually dishonest” and “advocacy-driven click bait.” What’s more, according to Stone, NameTag was fully nonexistent.
“Here’s a thing: Wired reports Meta didn’t answer several questions about how this will work,” Stone added in a follow-up post. “How could we? The feature doesn’t exist!”
In response to Stone, another Meta executive, chief technology officer Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, jumped in.
“Incredibly misleading from Wired,” he wrote. “Absolutely dishonest.”
Yet despite company leaders reassuring us that the feature doesn’t exist, Bosworth discussed it in detail during an interview with The Atlantic CEO and podcaster Nick Thompson. Bosworth’s comments in the interview, which was published last week, seemingly contradicted his fellow executives, revealing that the feature did, indeed exist.
NameTag, Bosworth told Thompson, would be “encrypted locally to your device,” and would catalog people who smart glasses wearers “met in person, with your glasses on, who introduced themselves, or you said, ‘okay, this is David, remember this person.'”
This information is “only available to you, when you are wearing your glasses,” Bosworth added. He emphasized that the data captured by NameTag wouldn’t be stored in a centralized database.
“This is a person you’ve met before. Here’s their name. They’re right in front of you. That’s… what we call a NameTags feature,” said Bosworth. “I think people get confused because they hear face recognition and they think, ‘oh, there’s a central face database that everyone’s being scanned constantly into.’ It’s not that.”
In addition to supporting blind or low-vision smart glasses wearers, said Bosworth, NameTag could solve what Meta calls “the cocktail party problem,” saving wearers from any awkwardness that may arise when encountering people at parties who they’re sure they’ve met before, but can’t quite place.
“It’s a very universally human problem,” Bosworth said. “Nearly every human I talk to, no matter what their status of their vision or their memory, understands that this is a problem that would help them feel more comfortable in social situations if they had it.”
To be clear, Wired never suggested that the facial recognition feature it uncovered was being used to build a “central face database” by way of Meta’s smart glasses. Indeed, in line with what Bosworth said in the podcast appearance, Wired reported that “code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called ‘NameTag,’ identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone.” The story also repeatedly noted that the feature was unreleased and inaccessible to glasses wearers.
When journalists and others called out the contradiction between Meta’s past and recent statements, Stone — the comms executive who said that Wired couldn’t answer questions about the feature because it “doesn’t exist” — jumped back in the comments section.
“We have said for months we’re exploring such features, even as nothing has shipped to consumers,” the spokesperson said in response to a post by The Intercept journalist Sam Biddle. “No secret there despite the conspiratorial thinking.”
There’s a big difference between a feature not existing and a feature that exists — if still unfinished — and has yet to be released. Meta appears to be arguing that if a feature remains inaccessible to consumers, it’s technically nonexistent, even if the company has gone as far as to issue multiple updates inserting code for the feature into products that are already in consumers’ hands. (Meta quietly deleted the NameTag code after its existence was made public.)
During the podcast interview, Bosworth took care to emphasize that Meta is considering the privacy implications of a facial recognition-powered feature like NameTag. He noted that it’s likely illegal in states like Illinois and Texas, and that it “has to be done in a way that people feel comfortable.”
Meanwhile, Meta continues to fight an ongoing consumer harm lawsuit, prompted by an investigation by a pair of Swedish newspapers. The publications found that Meta collected recordings by smart glasses wearers and passed them along to human data labelers, despite promising consumers that their recordings would be stored only on their devices.
“Designed for privacy,” reads a webpage for Meta’s smart glasses, “controlled by you.”
More on Meta’s smart glasses:Meta Furious Over Bombshell Smart Glasses Revelation
The post Top Meta Exec Describes Controversial Facial Recognition Feature in Detail After the Company Claimed It Didn’t Exist appeared first on Futurism.
Despite a financial situation more reminiscent of a Ponzi scheme than a technological revolution, the data center boom is continuing at a rapid pace, bringing novel kinds of biological contamination, ear-splitting noise, and unprecedented levels of pollution to communities across the US.
Those environmental burdens also come with a financial one: skyrocketing demand for electricity, which is increasing the cost of utilities for renters and homeowners alike.
According to a report by Monitoring Analytics, an independent monitor for the largest transmission company in the US, PJM, data center demand is expected to drive over $23 billion in customer price increases by 2028. That eye-watering figure, first spotted by Fortune, is a direct result of the country’s old and confusing electrical infrastructure, which ultimately leaves regular people, not the tech industry, holding the bag.
Whether they’re data centers, factories, or other large facilities, Fortune points out that local regulators and transmission companies like PJM have a hard time figuring out who’s responsible for rising energy demand. While a small power line from a data center campus to a nearby substation is easily billed to the data center, figuring out who to invoice gets harder further on down the line, particularly with shared infrastructure like the substation itself, or the long-distance transmission lines connecting to it.
Though utility companies can and do charge data centers for the electricity they use, Fortune observes that the facilities undergirding the AI boom can “fine tune” their electricity use minute-by-minute, gaining an edge that the average consumer could only dream of.
Because many utility companies charge based on a system of “peak demand” — a measure of a customer’s energy usage at the exact moment the collective grid hits peak demand — data centers have gotten into the habit of scaling down right when the grid measures highest demand. That’s not because they’re actually trying to use less power, but because that narrow window is what determines how high their bill will be. In reality, their overall usage remains the same.
This is more or less the scenario that played out in a Bitcoin mining operation in Texas, where the company Riot Platforms agreed to cut its power use on hot summer days, only to ramp back up massively at night. In exchange, the company negotiated for a lower flat electricity rate overall, and even snagged some state subsidies meant to encourage responsible energy use.
Load-shifting like this can genuinely help the grid, but it also means companies with the ability to game the system get rewarded with subsides that an average household will never get. And because companies are merely changing when they suck their juice — not how — subsidized load-shifting ends up being a poor strategy for reducing electrical use overall.
And while data centers are just the most contemporary example of this practice, the shrewd manipulation of US energy markets by for-profit corporations dates back decades. That may not be comforting news for citizens scrambling to hold data center firms accountable in the here-and-now, but it should at least give them an idea of where to start looking for inspiration.
More on data centers:New York Becomes First State to Ban AI Data Centers
The post Data Centers Are Making Electricity Brutally Expensive for the Public appeared first on Futurism.
Meta patented AI tech that constantly analyzes your voice and surroundings in order to detect your emotional state. Finally, exactly what we were all asking for: Meta being granted constant access to our offline lives.
As first caught by Patentlyze, a patent published on July 2 describes a system that records all the user’s “audible communications” and combines it with “contextual factors” like “time of day, location, user activity, or digital interaction.” Audio may be “transcribed, and an emotional-state machine learning model may interpret verbal and nonverbal cues to determine emotional indicators.”
In other words, the system listens to you and everything you do, combines it with other data, and feeds it all to a mood-predicting AI.
“The system increases the precision and reliability of emotional inference by aligning multimodal sensor inputs on synchronized timelines, which creates a novel data structure that supports richer emotional analysis,” reads the patent. “These combined features deliver a technical improvement in automated audio interpretation, enabling continuous emotional monitoring on everyday devices.”
According to the patent, the goal of this extraordinarily intrusive system would be to better tailor users’ workouts to their emotional state, as “personal trainers cannot provide the level of precision in guidance, such as correcting a pose and/or body movement,” as well as Meta’s imagined device could.
It’s not surprising to see Meta pitch this kind of surveillance technology as a fitness device. Health-tracking wearables have become wildly popular, despite the extraordinary amount of physical data about individual consumers they collect and store.
The key difference in Meta’s case, is that rather than crunch biological metrics, it’s an AI-powered fly-on-the-wall attempting to measure a person’s emotional state by listening in on the world around them, and possibly then connecting that information to all other available data.
“The AI assistant may listen to a user(s) at predefined times to hear various types of communication, such as sighs, laughter, and/or the tone(s) of a voice(s),” reads the patent. “The AI assistant may use these inputs to quantify the user’s emotional state or generate other insights about the user.”
The patent also discusses connecting audio inputs to information like when a user takes their medicine, proposing that “the AI assistant may take multiple inputs in addition to audio inputs (e.g., of a user’s voice) to provide a summary of emotional trends based on various inputs (e.g., a happier emotional state associated with a particular time of day or at a time when medication is taken, etc.)”
It’s worth noting that fellow tech giant Amazon tried and failed to market a similar system. In 2020, the company launched the Halo Band, a fitness band with a built-in microphone that was designed to listen in on users and conduct what Amazon described as a “tone of voice analysis.” Following public backlash in 2021, Amazon nuked the microphones when it launched a next-generation version of the band. It discontinued the product line altogether in 2023.
Whether we’ll ever see Meta attempt to launch a similar mood-tracking device is unclear. In a statement to 404 Media, a Meta spokesperson said that “like other companies, patents at Meta are often filed to disclose concepts that may or may not be implemented, and a granted patent does not guarantee that Meta has pursued or will pursue the technology described.”
The existence of the patent, though, shows that such a device is certainly on Meta’s mind — and is yet another Meta-made product that stands to strengthen the bridge between our online and offline worlds.
More on Meta products:The Backlash Is So Strong That People With “Pervert Glasses” Are Afraid to Use Them in Public
The post Meta Patents Technology to Detect Your Mood by Constantly Analyzing Your Tone of Voice appeared first on Futurism.
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