Facebook to Consider Facial Recognition For Upcoming Smart Glasses

Technology

March 2nd, 7:19am

San Francisco - Asharq Al-Awsat

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks at his company's annual F8 developer conference in 2017. AP

Facebook is expected to launch its first pair of smart glasses this year, but there's one issue company employees are still discussing: whether to add facial recognition technology to the product. BuzzFeed News, citing remarks from an internal meeting, reported that Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, who oversees the company's augmented and virtual reality efforts, told employees that the company is looking at the legal and privacy issues that come with facial recognition. A Facebook employee reportedly asked the executive about facial recognition and raised concerns about potential harms. "Face recognition ... might be the thorniest issue, where the benefits are so clear, and the risks are so clear, and we don't know where to balance those things," Bosworth told the employee, according to BuzzFeed. In a series of tweets, Bosworth confirmed he made remarks about facial recognition during an employee meeting. "I specifically said the future product would be fine without it but there were some nice use cases if it could be done in a way the public and regulators were comfortable with," he said in a tweet. Facial recognition, for example, could be used to identify the name of a person you can't remember. He also mentioned a neurological condition known as prosopagnosia in which a person has a hard time recognizing familiar faces.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2836006/facebook-consider-facial-recognition-upcoming-smart-glasses