Schmidt said.Īdvertently or not, the tech giants also helped hold the technology back from general circulation by snapping up the most advanced start-ups that offered it. “As far as I know, it’s the only technology that Google built and, after looking at it, we decided to stop,” Mr. Months later, Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, said in an onstage interview that Google “built that technology, and we withheld it.” ![]() Tech giants had developed the ability to recognize unknown people’s faces years earlier, but had chosen to hold the technology back, deciding that the most extreme version - putting a name to a stranger’s face - was too dangerous to make widely available.Īs early as 2011, a Google engineer revealed he had been working on a tool to Google someone’s face and bring up other online photos of them. What these start-ups had done wasn’t a technological breakthrough it was an ethical one. With these tools, available to the police in the case of Clearview AI and the public at large in the case of PimEyes, a snapshot of someone can be used to find other online photos where that face appears, potentially revealing a name, social media profiles or information a person would never want to be linked to publicly, such as risqué photos. In recent years, the start-ups Clearview AI and PimEyes have pushed the boundaries of what the public thought was possible by releasing face search engines paired with millions of photos from the public web (PimEyes) or even billions (Clearview). Leyvand has departed for Apple to work on its Vision Pro augmented reality glasses. However, six years later, the company now known as Meta has not released a version of that product and Mr. Leyvand’s head, Facebook could prevent users from ever forgetting a colleague’s name, give a reminder at a cocktail party that an acquaintance had kids to ask about or help find someone at a crowded conference. Facebook’s previous deployment of facial recognition technology, to help people tag friends in photos, had caused an outcry from privacy advocates and led to a class-action lawsuit in Illinois in 2015 that ultimately cost the company $650 million. The person-identifying hat-phone would be a godsend for someone with vision problems or face blindness, but it was risky. But when the phone started correctly calling out names, he found it creepy, like something out of a dystopian movie. Howard, a mechanical engineer.Īn employee who saw the tech demonstration thought it was supposed to be a joke. Two seconds later, a robotic female voice declared, “Zach Howard.” Leyvand’s forehead like a Cyclops eye as it took in the face before it. The smartphone’s camera lens - round, black, unblinking - hovered above Mr. Leyvand turned toward a man across the table from him. The room went silent the demo was underway. ![]() ![]() The handful of men in the room were laughing and speaking over one another in excitement, as captured in a video taken that day, until one of them asked for quiet. ![]() The absurd hat-phone, a particularly uncool version of the future, contained a secret tool known only to a small group of employees. Rubber bands helped anchor it in place with the camera facing out. One afternoon in early 2017, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., an engineer named Tommer Leyvand sat in a conference room with a smartphone standing on the brim of his baseball cap.
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