Facebook Wants to Live On Your Face

With its new Smart Glasses, the social media giant raises a whole new set of privacy concerns

Stephen Moore
OneZero
Published in
4 min readSep 14, 2021

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Photo: Facebook

If you’re an avid user of Facebook, it likely knows you better than you know yourself. It has access to your data, your friend’s list, your memories, your messages, and a record of everything you’ve ever clicked on, commented on or scrolled past on the platform throughout your history on it.

Not content with the data pool it has built (read: stolen from unwitting users), Facebook now wants to see what you see by living in front of your eyes.

It’s hard not to be cynical about the launch of Ray-Ban Stories, the $299 Smart Glass collaboration between Ray-Bans and Facebook. A whole host of concerns immediately spring to mind; users will become even more distracted and disconnected from society, inappropriate use, more ‘glassholes’ (a term developed after the Google Glasses project) and of course, privacy, both for the user and the general public. The company has a bad track record on that front, and allowing them complete access to everything you look at raises many red flags.

If the glass project seems familiar, that’s because it’s not the first attempt by a company to try and put technology onto our faces. In 2013, Google launched Google Glasses with a…

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Stephen Moore
OneZero

Writer, editor, part-time furniture maker. Subscribe to Trend Mill for critical takes on our dystopian metaverse hellscape future - https://www.trend-mill.com