Snippet: Seven Billion Reasons for Facebook to Abandon its Face Recognition Plans ☇

Mario Trujillo for the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The New York Times reported that Meta is considering adding face recognition technology to its smart glasses. According to an internal Meta document, the company may launch the product “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.”

This is a bad idea that Meta should abandon. If adopted and released to the public, it would violate the privacy rights of millions of people and cost the company billions of dollars in legal battles.

Your biometric data, such as your faceprint, are some of the most sensitive pieces of data that a company can collect. Associated risks include mass surveillance, data breach, and discrimination. Adding this technology to glasses on the street also raises safety concerns.

Adafruit’s blog also had some worthwhile commentary:

Meta says the LED indicator light on the glasses protects bystanders. 404 Media reported that a hobbyist charges $60 to permanently disable it, TikTok & YouTube and Instagram, are flooded with removal tutorials, and you can buy LED-covering stickers on Amazon for $15. iFixit has a teardown. Meta’s also working on “super sensing” glasses that run cameras continuously, and Zuckerberg has questioned whether the LED should even stay on. Fixable in hardware, but not in Mark. Apple hardwires the MacBook camera indicator LED in series with the power circuit so you physically can’t easily disable one without killing the other. Meta did not.

You know, I’m starting to think these Meta folks aren’t very good people.

Snippet: Discord Faces Backlash Over Age Checks After Data Breach Exposed 70,000 IDs ☇

Ashley Belanger for Ars Technica:

Discord is facing backlash after announcing that all users will soon be required to verify ages to access adult content by sharing video selfies or uploading government IDs.

According to Discord, it’s relying on AI technology that verifies age on the user’s device, either by evaluating a user’s facial structure or by comparing a selfie to a government ID. Although government IDs will be checked off-device, the selfie data will never leave the user’s device, Discord emphasized. Both forms of data will be promptly deleted after the user’s age is estimated. […]

On social media, alarmed Discord users protested the move, doubting whether Discord could be trusted with their most sensitive information after Discord age verification data was recently breached. In October, hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 Discord users from a third-party service that Discord previously trusted to verify ages in the United Kingdom and Australia. […]

For bad actors, Discord will likely only become a bigger target as more sensitive information is collected worldwide, users now fear.

I understand that some of this is being pushed by governments as a way to “protect the children,” but it seems that so much of this is done without actually thinking through the data privacy aspect. Even then, this is yet another way one loses anonymity online—and maybe that’s by design. As many of these ID verification services are third-parties, this also shifts accountability and responsibility away from the service you’re actually using.

Maybe I’m a cynic, but too many of these “we’ll delete your data promptly” claims are more of a pinky-swear. Throw in the lack of regulation around data brokers and there’s a lot of ways that this can be used to further build profiles about you without your knowledge and consent.

Snippet: (AI) Slop Terrifies Me ☇

Ezhik:

Mind you, it’s not like slop is anything new. A lot of human decisions had to happen before your backside ended up in an extremely uncomfortable chair, your search results got polluted by poorly-written SEO-optimized articles, and your brain had to deal with a ticket booking website with a user interface so poorly designed that it made you cry. So it’s a people problem. Incentives just don’t seem to align to make good software. Move fast and break things, etc, etc. You’ll make a little artisan app, and if it’s any good, Google will come along with a free clone, kill you, then kill its clone—and the world will be left with net zero new good software. And now, with AI agents, it gets even worse as agent herders can do the same thing much faster.

Developers aside, there’s also the users. AI models can’t be imaginative, and the developers can’t afford to, but surely with AI tools, the gap between users and developers will be bridged, ChatGPT will become the new HyperCard and people will turn their ideas into reality with just a few sentences? There’s so many people out there who are coding without knowing it, from Carol in Accounting making insane Excel spreadsheets to all the kids on TikTok automating their phones with Apple Shortcuts and hacking up cool Notion notebooks.

For me, this post isn’t really about AI at all, but rather the lack of creativity and imagination with a lot of software today. I was recently reminded of the short-lived Sparrow email app that later turned into an acqui-hire for Google in 2012. If you aren’t familiar with it, the idea was to present email more like some Twitter clients at the time. There were all sorts of apps like this and some of this era was probably a byproduct of iOS and mobile apps in general being a relatively new genre of software. Since then, it seems we’ve lost a lot of intentionality and creativity in software design and instead, it’s all become mass-produced fast food.

Maybe the masses don’t care, but for anyone who was an enthusiast during that era, it really felt special.

Article: Leave Me Behind

I was recently listening to a podcast and one of the hosts took the approach that AI is something that we “don’t have a choice” on and if you sit it out, you’re basically opting out of the technology business and will be left behind. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the show and there were some worthwhile counterpoints discussed, but that particular line really stuck with me this week. I don’t want to point ire to the host or the show because it’s more that this is an example of a narrative that has become pervasive. I’ve even heard that notion expanded by other people to include any sort of employment…

Snippet: The Fallen Apple ☇

Matt Gemmell:

It’s a troubling time to be a long-term Apple customer.

The company seems to have lost the one thing it held onto so firmly during all of the ups and downs of its history: its ethos of values-driven, liberal creativity and intentional design. Apple’s past periods of turbulence relating to profitability, marketshare, compatibility, and governance seem quaint now; memories of a better time. The Apple of today has become homogenous with its industry, in terms of its cultural failings.