Zuck’s new glasses are a fashionable privacy nightmare

He was an ordinary boy, nothing special at first glance. I didn’t notice when he passed me on the way to the metro and blended into the busy street like any Madrileño in his morning rush hour. He was wearing a sustainable Ecoalf hoodie, instead of the Zara equivalent that half the city wears, a worn-out backpack and those sleek horn-rimmed glasses you’d expect from someone who spends weekend mornings in El Rastro bargain for vintage vinyl and watch public transport movies in the evening Renoir cinema. A solid eco-hipster retro punk mix.

The subway was packed. Rush hour on line 6, The Circularis always the same. It runs gently around the tourist spots of the city –Retiro, Sol, Gran Vía, La Puerta de Alcalá, El Prado– bringing together all kinds of people. It’s an unpleasant reminder that we share this planet with eight billion others, but also a good reminder: those who look nothing like us exist, too. Opposite me, on the other side of the platform, a young woman looked at me. Probably university age, with Z-gen coded baggy trousers, Ray-Ban glasses and the long dark brown wavy hair typical of this corner of Europe.

I love seeing how people dress up when they go out. Their appearance reveals so much, without saying a word: what they want from life and how far they will go to express their cultural identity. Lost in thoughts, I finally reached my office, just in time for another annoying meeting. The day went by as usual: emails, phone calls, writing a first draft to collect dust on my virtual shelf. By lunchtime I had long forgotten both the retro guy and the college girl.

They had not forgotten me.

I came home and was greeted by a total mess. It seemed as if a small hurricane had swept from the hall to the kitchen and bedroom. The door was ajar, the lock was splintered. Inside, papers fluttered in the wind, remnants of a hurried search. Broken glass littered the floor and the smell of cigarette smoke lingered, sharp and out of place (I don’t smoke). Clothes were in disarray, furniture overturned, a scene of intrusion that left no room untouched.

As I surveyed the chaos, something on the floor caught my eye: a crumpled subway ticket. I barely looked at it until I saw the time stamp: from this morning, a ride on the 6 line. I walked further into the room and caught a glint near the overturned chair. It was a small zipper pull, free-standing, with the kind of minimalist brand logo you’d see on eco-friendly gear. I turned it over in my hand and felt a sense of déjà vu.

Fortunately, that is a made-up story, but one that may be closer to reality than we think. At least once Meta’s Orion smart glasses entering the market as a refreshing wave of innovation, flooding our intimate worlds possibility and connection. Yes, like everything the company sells.

Orion was the pinnacle of Meta’s Connect 2024 keynotepraised by Mark Zuckerberg himself as “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen”. A new means for us humans to communicate with the digital and the analogue at the same time: the future of consumer technology. That’s Zuck’s vision: he believes his new fashionable accessory will do just that to replace the smartphone by 2030 as the computing platform.

But if things don’t go as planned – which happens more often than Zuck would like to admit – Orion could turn into a fashionable privacy nightmare.

That’s the impression I got from a story 404 Media handled just days after the Connect conference. It’s a curious case of “I broke it before it even had a chance to start moving” (for the uninitiated, that’s a play on words on Facebook’s old mantra: “Move fast and break things”).

We’ll dive into the details, but first I need to get something off my chest: Have you seen Zuck lately? If you think that Ecoalf guy with his vinyl collection or that Z-gen girl with her enviably luscious Spanish mane were trendy, just wait for Zuck’s “Aut Zuck aut nihil” custom oversized black shirt, or his tousled chic wavy hairstyle.

He really has changed everything – and added a newfound willingness to make sure we all know he’s one of the cool kids now – except his relentless, relentless pursuit of making the world a better world. connected connected place. Whether we like it or not.

That’s why, after his recent image overhaul, he has once again embraced the infamous motto. He moves quickly. He breaks things. After a long series of hearings in Congress, public apologies and continued backlash, he has finally had enough. He wiped the slate clean. People like him. He can do whatever he wants. The world bows to his style and swagger because it doesn’t judge attractive people. Funny how long it takes nerds to figure that out.

I think I made a mistake about the fictional intro story. Some people don’t dress to show their identity, they hide it. Looking at the updated version of Zuck – younger, sympathetic, modern, not a millionaire but a millennial – I am reminded not that there are also people who don’t look like me at all, but that the word “looks” has two meanings has.

Anyway, the 404 Media story.

Journalist Joseph Cox reports that two Harvard students – AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio – have managed to jailbreak them in possibly the scariest privacy mistake a tech company can make. Maybe jailbreak isn’t even the right verb; they faced no obstacles in doing what they did. They just added to it a few software packages on top of Meta’s pile and transformed a useful tool into a facial scanner that can recognize passersby on the street just by looking at them. But it gets worse.

The students have also gone one step further. Their custom glasses also pull other information about their subject from the Internet, including their home address, phone number and relatives.

Here’s a glimpse of what that looks like:

Suppose I happen to encounter a couple of burglars wearing those glasses on the way to work. They know where I live, that I’m not home, etc. – everything we put on the Internet in supposedly safe places that are not so safe from smart cybercriminals. Breaking into my house would still require some other advanced thief skills, but the ease with which this thing collects your name and phone is already terrifying.

Despite my snarky comments to Zuck, I would like to make it clear that Meta is in no way responsible for this project (for obvious reasons, Meta has not integrated facial recognition into the glasses). Holding them responsible for that would be like saying Apple is responsible for every hack, scam, scam, and fraud involving an iPhone. On the other hand, it’s also worth noting that Zuck might not care that much after all. He’s not humanity’s best friend – he never was – and I don’t think he added a kindness trait to the package that improved his muscles and his wardrobe.

Nguyen and Ardayfio are not releasing the code or tool. Instead, they want to raise awareness and warn the world about what’s possible with off-the-shelf open source software and new high-tech glasses. If a student on a budget can do it, imagine what an organized mafia could do.

Cox asked Meta what they thought of the project and unsurprisingly (and rightly so) they said “it could be done on any camera.” To underscore the point, Cox says, “I mean, yeah. But it was done on Ray Bans. And Ray Bans look like normal glasses.”

That’s the crux.

We are used to cameras. When I see someone pointing one at me, I immediately assume he or she is taking a photo. I will consider that unusual and possibly, depending on the level of neuroticism in my blood at the moment, a threat to my intimacy and privacy. But glasses? That’s new. I don’t expect people to be able to steal my information or identity just by looking at me. We don’t have to pay attention when we cross the street.

There are two ways to look at this.

On the one hand, we might not adapt to it in the same way we adapted to phones that double as cameras (yet many people don’t mind). When someone points their phone at me, I know they’re taking a photo, just like when someone points a camera. Bad. It’s clear. But telephones started out as simple metal plates! We saw them with fresh eyes, without any ties to older devices. However, as a simple accessory, glasses are already so ingrained in our perception that they do not arouse any suspicion.

That is, in a way, Orion’s most powerful and dangerous quality: they are so normal that people want to wear them; they are so normal that people won’t notice them.

On the other hand, Meta has created a new gadget that, like all the previous ones, can be improved or adapted for other purposes, for better or for worse. Should Meta stop building technology because a small number of people will use it for evil? If they had served this use case on a silver platter, then yes, they should be held accountable. They didn’t. Sure, Zuck isn’t a friend, but he’s not the one sneaking into your privacy.

So what do we do?

Are we going completely crazy?

Do we protest against the risk that the glasses entail?

Do we stay home forever just to avoid suspicious glasses wearers?

Do we assume that most people are good and wouldn’t do anything to threaten our privacy?

Are we waiting until this has become so common that we unknowingly hide its intrinsic flaws under the carpet of the ‘cultural norm’?

Do we forget it all and join the “everyone is doing it now” and “you’re not important, who would want to rob you” normalizing crowd?

Do we accept that most people are so technically illiterate that the chance of encountering a street hacker in the middle of Madrid is virtually zero?

Don’t know. I only ask the hard questions.

Society will have to answer them.