Meta scrubs facial recognition code from smart glasses app after WIRED expose

Meta Scrubs Facial Recognition Code From Smart Glasses App After WIRED Investigation

Meta has quietly removed facial recognition code from its AI companion app for Ray-Ban smart glasses after an investigation by WIRED exposed the feature’s existence, raising fresh questions about the company’s surveillance ambitions and its willingness to deploy biometric tools without public disclosure.

The code, internally dubbed “NameTag,” was discovered by WIRED through analysis of Meta’s AI app — software downloaded more than 50 million times and required to operate the company’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. Within days of WIRED’s inquiry, the code vanished from the latest app update, but Meta has declined to explain whether the feature was experimental, accidental, or intended for future deployment.wired

What NameTag Could Do

According to WIRED’s reporting, NameTag consisted of three AI models designed to detect faces, crop them, and convert them into biometric “faceprints” — numerical signatures representing the unique positioning of a person’s facial features. When activated, the system would match faces captured by the glasses’ cameras against a database stored on the wearer’s phone, a database set up to receive updates from Meta’s servers. Recognized individuals would trigger notifications; unrecognized faces would be indexed and stored in a folder labeled “pending”.eff

The Electronic Frontier Foundation independently confirmed the code’s presence through its own static analysis. “Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine,” said Cooper Quintin, a senior public interest technologist with the EFF’s Threat Lab. Another researcher found that manually adding a face to the app’s database caused the glasses to subsequently detect that face when it came into view.thenews

Meta’s Combative Response

Meta executives pushed back forcefully on the reporting. Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, called WIRED’s story “more than shoddy reporting” and “intellectually dishonest,” labeling it “pure advocacy-driven click bait”. Meta’s chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, echoed the criticism, calling the report “incredibly misleading”.nypost

Spokesperson Ryan Daniels offered a more measured statement: “We’ve said before we’re exploring these types of features, and what you’re seeing is just evidence of that exploration. Nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything”. He added that Meta is “not building a central face database.”engadget

Privacy Concerns and Broader Context

Privacy researchers who examined WIRED’s findings said the code appeared functional, not vestigial, with specific API calls and data structures consistent with active development. WIRED also reported that an internal Meta memo discussed launching NameTag during a “dynamic political environment” because “civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns”.techbuzz

The discovery drew condemnation from civil liberties organizations including the ACLU, Fight for the Future, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which warned the feature could enable stalkers and abusers to identify people in public. Meta shut down its Facebook facial recognition system in 2021 and paid $650 million to settle a biometric privacy lawsuit — making the reappearance of similar technology in a wearable product all the more striking.aclum

Whether the code’s removal represents a genuine retreat or a temporary response to public scrutiny remains an open question Meta has so far refused to answer.