Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App After WIRED Report
Key takeaways
- The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag.
- On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app.
- NameTag first surfaced in February, when The New York Times, citing internal Meta documents, reported that the company was developing face recognition for its smart glasses and weighing a launch as soon as this year.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms.Photograph: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.
The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.
On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user's device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.