2026-02-14 03:29:01
Meta’s smart glasses have an outward facing camera pointed at what you’re looking at. This lets you record video and take photos. As they integrate AI deeper into the product, Meta plans to bring facial recognition with that camera. The New York Times viewed an internal memo on how Meta hopes to launch this feature.
Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
It’s not surprising they were having such discussions. But still. They’re not exactly making it easy to trust them to do right with your data, information, and privacy.
Tags: facial recognition, glasses, Meta, privacy
2026-02-14 02:26:42
The Amazon-owned security system Ring was planning to partner with Flock Safety, who supplies security footage and contracts with law enforcement. Ring has canceled the partnership.
In October 2025, Ring and Flock Safety announced our intention to work together on an integration with Community Requests. Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. As a result, we have made the joint decision to cancel the planned integration. The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.
At Ring, our mission has always been to make neighborhoods safer. That mission comes with significant responsibility—to our customers, to the communities we serve, and to the trust you place in our products and features.
If Flock sounds familiar, maybe you’re remembering them as the ones who send license plate information to immigration agents. That was in August 2025.
This comes shortly after Ring’s Super Bowl commercial for dog-finding. Ring owners were already rumbling, but it seems cute dogs were not enough to calm things down. Trust is already lost.
Tags: Flock, privacy, Ring, surveillance
2026-02-13 16:27:02
xkcd drops the knowledge with a proper classification for the stapler. The pairwise matrix, a favorite xkcd mechanic, is used to show the groups.
2026-02-13 01:45:05
During the Super Bowl, Ring ran a commercial that shows how everyone’s doorbell camera can be joined in a single system to find a lost dog. For 404 Media, Jason Koebler points out the privacy implications for when that system is used to find people.
It does not take an imagination of any sort to envision this being tweaked to work against suspected criminals, undocumented immigrants, or others deemed ‘suspicious’ by people in the neighborhood. Many of these use cases are how Ring has been used by people on its dystopian “Neighbors” app for years. Ring rose to prominence as a piece of package theft prevention tech owned by Amazon and by forming partnerships with local police around the country, asking them to shill their doorbell cameras to people in their neighborhoods in return for a system that allowed police to request footage from individual users without a warrant.
Chris Gilliard, a privacy expert and author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, told 404 Media these features and its Super Bowl ad are “a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement and other equally invasive surveillance companies.”
Well that doesn’t sound very good.
The commercial for your viewing pleasure:
Tags: 404 Media, privacy, Ring, surveillance
2026-02-12 22:06:39
This week is about visual echoes. Charts often show snapshots in time, but when we visualize the present in the same space as the past, we get better context for the data.
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2026-02-12 19:32:53
ProPublica updated their explorer for money flowing into 527s.
Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars flow through political organizations known as 527s. These organizations are not regulated by the Federal Election Commission and are not subject to FEC-style restrictions on who can contribute or how much they can give, though donations are not tax deductible. These groups are spending more and more, topping $1 billion in 2022. Use our database to explore who funds these organizations and how they’re spending the money.
Tags: contributions, elections, politics, ProPublica
