The end of personal privacy has felt imminent for a while now, but a handful of events over the last week suggest that this moment is just about to arrive. For this, no one bears more blame than Mark Zuckerberg.
Last week, Meta, formerly Facebook, held its Connect event where it announced a slate of new virtual and augmented reality products. The star of the show was supposed to be the Meta Quest 3S, which is a headset you strap to your face to enter virtual reality. Instead, Meta’s hi-tech glasses ended up stealing the show.
For the first time, Meta previewed a prototype set of glasses, called Orion, which represents what it thinks is the future of augmented reality. Using a lens material that allows it to project images only visible to the wearer and a bracelet that captures hand gestures, people using Orion can see and interact with a holographic interface that appears as though it’s part of the real world. Demos showed the spectacles conjuring floating screens to make video calls or overlaying labels onto objects in real time. The product remains just a prototype at the moment, reportedly costing $10,000 for each unit, but reviewers who used it were wowed.
The other announcement was some new AI features and a new colour for its Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Unlike the Orion, these glasses have no screen. Instead, people use microphones, a camera, a small touchpad and a button on the arm of the glasses to take photographs, livestream, make phone calls or talk to an AI “assistant”. There were no massive changes to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses but their increasing functionality, combined with a glimpse of the Orion future, seemed to solidify a growing consensus about the future of computing.
For years, people have wondered what comes after the mobile phone. Virtual reality has been earmarked — by companies like Apple, with its much-ballyhooed but soon forgotten Vision Pro, and of course by Meta itself — as its logical successor.
But the momentum behind Meta’s existing augmented reality glasses suggests that the future of computing isn’t fumbling around in virtual worlds, but rather in enhanced versions of what we see in front of us. Key to this vision of computing is the idea that individuals will constantly be capturing the world around them to be analysed by their devices.
The second, related development came from a pair of US college students who developed a way to combine Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses with facial recognition technology. Tech outlet 404 Media reported that they had hacked together a system that allowed them to use the glasses’ camera to take a photo of someone, identify them using facial recognition service PimEyes, and pull information from the web about the person.
They were able to look at a stranger and almost instantaneously know their name, occupation, where they lived and sometimes even what their phone numbers were. For all intents and purposes, the adoption of this technology eliminates any semblance of privacy. Thankfully, the pair of students haven’t released it publicly but it’s only a matter of time until someone does the same thing.
So, why is Mark Zuckerberg to blame? He didn’t create or release this technology. A Meta spokesperson told 404 Media that “PimEyes facial recognition technology could be used with ANY camera, correct? In other words, this isn’t something that only is possible because of Meta Ray-Bans? If so, I think that’s an important point to note in the piece.”
If anything, some might argue there’s a case that Zuckerberg has been a bulwark against this happening. Both Google and Facebook have reportedly had the ability to combine facial recognition with a camera feed but decided against releasing it. Meta has previously rolled back facial recognition capabilities in their products, at least in their consumer-facing form.
It’s true that Zuckerberg did not personally release something that would allow anyone to surreptitiously identify anyone in public. But it is inarguable that there is nobody who has done more to make it possible and probable.
He’s behind a product that is making individualised surveillance both intuitive and mainstream. The creep of ubiquitous CCTV and the normalisation of filming in public with smartphones were precursors to these smart glasses that strap a camera to your face that begs to be used constantly. Meta may not be the only company pursuing this form factor but, so far, it seems to be at the forefront of popularising it.
More significantly, Zuckerberg is responsible for making it possible to link people’s appearance to their identity. Meta has been instrumental in making a culture where publicly uploaded photographs of yourself, and others, are attached to identifying information about you. The world it created is one where people for the better part of a decade would happily share everything that was needed for a computer to figure out who you are, all for the dopamine hit of online engagement.
This isn’t purely an ineffable, cultural impact. Many facial recognition products — although notably not PimEyes, which was used in the students’ demo — literally scraped images directly from Facebook and Instagram. One of Zuckerberg’s major legacies is creating a honeypot of identifying information that unscrupulous companies like Clearview AI purloined. (Stealing this data from Meta’s platforms is against their rules and it does take efforts to stop it, but is responsible for failing to thwart these efforts).
Simply put, Zuckerberg is responsible for building the hardware, the software and the culture which means that there’s no hiding anymore. It doesn’t matter that this was an unintended consequence of his actions, or that he’s even taken some basic steps to avert this. If someone set up the dominos and opened the door, would we blame the wind for knocking them over?
All of this was made possible because Meta wants to capture the world and its attention for the purpose of knowing more about you so it can sell you things. It wasn’t a grand plan by someone who wanted to make sure everyone could be held accountable for their actions. It was the side effect of someone who wanted more spots to place advertisements. It just so happens that paving the way for the end of privacy was a price that Mark Zuckerberg was willing to pay.
