A coalition of over 70 civil rights organizations has written to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging the company to abandon facial recognition technology in its smart glasses, citing risks to public safety.
The coalition, which includes the ACLU and Electronic Privacy Information Center, warns that facial recognition on Meta's glasses would enable stalking, sexual predation, and harassment at scale.
The groups argue that integrating the technology into wearable devices creates unprecedented privacy risks. Smart glasses equipped with facial recognition could allow users to identify strangers in public spaces in real time, enabling tracking and targeting of vulnerable individuals.
Meta has not yet announced definitive plans to include facial recognition in its Ray-Ban smart glasses, though the company has explored the capability. The organization claims the letter reflects broader concerns about surveillance technology deployed without adequate safeguards.
The warning underscores growing scrutiny of facial recognition systems. Multiple jurisdictions have restricted or banned the technology in law enforcement due to accuracy and bias concerns. Meta's potential consumer deployment would extend these capabilities to millions of devices in private hands.
The company has not publicly responded to the coalition's demands.
Caller ID service Truecaller is pushing back against India's telecom regulator over new anti-spam regulations, claiming users are increasingly blocking calls from the country's dedicated business number series.
Telstra customers faced a second day of disruptions Thursday as a secondary outage prevented some from reaching triple-zero emergency services. Regional train services remained affected following Wednesday's initial mobile network failure.
Australia's government has instructed volunteers to discard thousands of functional test routers despite the devices being capable of being reflashed for continued use.
A lawsuit alleges a man used X's Grok AI to create approximately 7,000 sexually explicit images of his stepdaughter before taking his own life. Multiple young girls are now suing X, claiming the platform failed to prevent the abuse.