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Eye-level Surveillance: AR Glasses, Entertainment and Facial Recognition
It’s hard to know when you’re living in the future because it happens so gradually. Without distance, it’s hard to objectively recognize the moment the future began; like all progress, it happens little by little, and then all at once. On January 18, 2020, the New York Times published an article that clearly presented our collective future in our present. Kashmir Hill’s “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It” provides one of the most clear-eyed descriptions of a distinct leap forward in technology, digital tools, software, and digital identity. Hill reported on the AI facial recognition company Clearview AI and notes that the company uses all available online data for its sourcing and is currently used by over 600 law enforcement agencies. Clearview’s deployment mark a significant moment in history — we are now in the future and it is creepy.
Early in the Times article, Hill notes that the code analyzed by the paper was a programming language designed “to pair it with augmented-reality glasses” where “users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw.” The article, as a whole, is illuminating and incriminating, profiling how private equity funds authoritarian features of the surveillance state. However, the note about the glasses comes off as footnote in deployment of the technology…
