Code reviewed by WIRED uncovered an unreleased face-recognition system embedded in Meta’s smart glasses platform. It’s designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users’ phones.
I can’t for the life of me imagine that this is legal. Maybe in the U.S., since the legal system there is so completely broken, but in Europe, the mass surveillance of millions of people by a private company seems likely to be a criminal offense.
The latest attempt at chatcontroll was rejected as recently as April 3 mainly due to massive public opposition. They will try again, and someday they will succeed if too many people succumb to defeatism.
So it’s pretty counterproductive to say that it wouldn’t make any sense anyway, because that’s not the case.
Yeah. In Europe, the government is in charge of all the mass surveillance of millions. Europe and an overabundance of “big brother is watching” are synonymous of each other.
That is fundamentally true, yet European law and the respective national constitutions set limits on unwarranted mass surveillance. Lobbyists for tech companies—especially American ones, led by Palantir—are working tirelessly to erode these limits, thought.
Under the status quo, however, the scale of surveillance is currently in no way comparable to that in China or the U.S., as there are still legal limits in place—at least for the moment—that are also enforced, albeit only in a basic sense.
This makes it all the more important to preserve these rights and to advocate for them. It is not helpful to equate conditions in Europe with those in the US, as this creates the impression that insisting on existing law is a futile endeavor.
That is precisely why regulations such as the GDPR are so important; among other things, they set limits on automated facial recognition at the European level.
As I said, these regulations are under constant attack, especially from the U.S.
Nevertheless, all is not lost here, and these regulations are indeed being enforced, since the European legal system actually still functions quite well. Here, too, it makes no sense to draw a comparison with the U.S.
Just because the U.S. system is so obviously corrupt that it can no longer fulfill its purpose doesn’t mean it’s the same in other parts of the world. U.S. billionaires have a keen interest in this, and they’re supported by the corresponding elite in Europe as well, but the world in Europe is actually quite different. While you can buy a lot of things here too, European nations are not an obvious oligarchy. The US, on the other hand, has been a de facto oligarchy for several decades. The current regime, through its utter unscrupulousness, simply makes this fact much more obvious than previous administrations did.
So Meta wants its own army of unsuspecting spies?
I can’t for the life of me imagine that this is legal. Maybe in the U.S., since the legal system there is so completely broken, but in Europe, the mass surveillance of millions of people by a private company seems likely to be a criminal offense.
The EU leadership surrendered to tech after the prez of the US got back in.
They are busy doing their biddng, chatcotrol and all that rot.
The latest attempt at chatcontroll was rejected as recently as April 3 mainly due to massive public opposition. They will try again, and someday they will succeed if too many people succumb to defeatism.
So it’s pretty counterproductive to say that it wouldn’t make any sense anyway, because that’s not the case.
They are trying, over and over, to take the trojan horse behind the walls of liberal democracy.
Yeah. In Europe, the government is in charge of all the mass surveillance of millions. Europe and an overabundance of “big brother is watching” are synonymous of each other.
That is fundamentally true, yet European law and the respective national constitutions set limits on unwarranted mass surveillance. Lobbyists for tech companies—especially American ones, led by Palantir—are working tirelessly to erode these limits, thought.
Under the status quo, however, the scale of surveillance is currently in no way comparable to that in China or the U.S., as there are still legal limits in place—at least for the moment—that are also enforced, albeit only in a basic sense.
This makes it all the more important to preserve these rights and to advocate for them. It is not helpful to equate conditions in Europe with those in the US, as this creates the impression that insisting on existing law is a futile endeavor.
We’ve all gotten to see how fast legal limitations collapse. You have a million cameras and facial recognition. The law part is skin deep.
That is precisely why regulations such as the GDPR are so important; among other things, they set limits on automated facial recognition at the European level.
As I said, these regulations are under constant attack, especially from the U.S.
Nevertheless, all is not lost here, and these regulations are indeed being enforced, since the European legal system actually still functions quite well. Here, too, it makes no sense to draw a comparison with the U.S.
Just because the U.S. system is so obviously corrupt that it can no longer fulfill its purpose doesn’t mean it’s the same in other parts of the world. U.S. billionaires have a keen interest in this, and they’re supported by the corresponding elite in Europe as well, but the world in Europe is actually quite different. While you can buy a lot of things here too, European nations are not an obvious oligarchy. The US, on the other hand, has been a de facto oligarchy for several decades. The current regime, through its utter unscrupulousness, simply makes this fact much more obvious than previous administrations did.
Also, Luxottica Group SpA (the company that owns the Ray-Ban brand) is Italian. They abide to European laws.