Hoping that Meta’s ‘New Year, New Me’ resolution included respecting your personal space? Well, I have some truly unfortunate news for you: while the rest of the country is too busy screaming at their televisions about the latest political dumpster fire, Mark Zuckerberg is hard at work trying to turn your face into a line of code.
You read that right; the social media behemoth is trying to smuggle facial recognition software into its AI-powered smart glasses, relying on the fact that we’re all too busy watching the world burn to notice that they’re building a literal panopticon on the bridge of our noses.
The "Distraction" Strategy
Meta isn’t even bothering to try to be ethical anymore; they’re just playing strategy. According to internal documents leaked to The New York Times, the company deliberately timed this rollout to coincide with a “dynamic political environment.” In other words, they know that the activists and privacy advocates who usually give them hell are currently busy with actual literal wars and election cycles. It’s like a teenager trying to sneak a boyfriend into the house while the parents are in the middle of a divorce settlement. If the world is ending, who cares if a pair of Ray-Bans just cross-referenced your LinkedIn profile and home address while you were waiting for a latte?
A Very Long Receipt of Bad Behavior
But let’s be fair; we shouldn’t be surprised because the idea of Meta looking out for your privacy is like asking a shark to go vegan. This is the same firm that, back in the old days, decided to play God with your emotions by secretly altering the news feeds of 700,000 users just to see if they could get them to be depressed.
And who could forget 2019, when they were caught bribing teens with gift cards to install “research” software that basically sucked up every text, image, and search query on their phones? Or 2023, when a Harvard disinformation project suddenly disappeared after Zuckerberg “donated” half a billion dollars to the school? The trend isn’t “oops”; the trend is a business model founded on the grave of anonymity.
The Death of the “Stranger”
The point of these glasses is always some marketing nonsense about “seamless connection,” but the truth is much, much worse. We’ve already seen a preview of this with the two Harvard students who proved that with a little bit of Python and a pair of Metas, you can dox a stranger on the subway in under ten seconds.
Meta is now trying to integrate this directly into the hardware. They’ve already been caught training their AI models on massive databases of pirated books, so why not train them on your face without your consent?
They are banking on your fatigue and also betting that you’ve reached “outrage exhaustion” and will just shrug as the idea of being a private citizen in a public space becomes officially extinct. Don’t be fooled by the hardware; it’s just the same old surveillance, but with better branding.
