alt Hacker NewsFormer Facebook wanker, who worked in research.
1) we were always told and legal always pushed back hard on anything face detecting.(ie haar cascade "this is a face" let alone actual this is dave/sally)
2) the FTC would audit us to make sure we weren't doing that kind of stuff
3) all of the research prototypes had inbuilt/inline face removers up until 2024(I left after that so I don't know when/if that changed)
3.1) One of the very first things I worked on was face removal, it was a central core of the entire fucking project. Like if we didn;t have any of those constraints we'd have been 2 years ahead.
4) Stella is the name for v1 rayban stories, so its very odd that they get the update when they've not had any new features since for a long time(unless I am mistaken).
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now, I will say that Boz was pushing to have facial recognition when I was were, and some of the early storyboards for XROS were pretty reilant on it (ie in an office having the sims like diamonds above your head that indicated who you were and if you were busy)
I assumed that Zuck said no because he'd had enough time with the lawyer and the FTC sniffing about to not bother.
However the glasses based AI lifelog stuff (which was basically a really effective personal assistant) would be a lot more effective if it could use facial recognition (we weren't allowed to use speaker diarization as that would allow us to record individual audio from users and recognise them like with facial recognition)
I recall that Facebook asked me to identify faces of my friends in order to "verify" myself about 15 years ago. Do you know whether Facebook still stores that data?
Pure speculation, probably they finally figured out the correct legal ToS and privacy policy and everything else that made them feel confident + some regulatory/lawmaker discussions reached a certain point that they finally decided they could do it? Does that add up?
“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,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-re...