Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses
Key takeaways
- Rank One developed long-range face recognition for US Special Operations Command under a government research contract, saying its software could identify a face from as far as a kilometer away.
- It also shows how thin the line has grown between the surveillance technology sold to law enforcement and the military and the consumer products sold to everyone else.
- Increasingly, the same companies, and the same underlying algorithms, serve both.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Meta is testing face-recognition software built by a company that sells surveillance tools to police departments and the United States military, as it explores bringing the technology to its smart glasses, WIRED has learned.
The arrangement is documented in a software license, obtained by WIRED, that was issued by Rank One Computing—a Denver-based company that derives roughly 80 percent of its revenue from government clients—and is tied to a test version of the Meta AI app that powers Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.
Rank One’s face recognition has been bought by the US Marshals Service, which uses it to confirm prisoners’ identities without fingerprinting them during transport, and by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service—the Navy’s police force—which purchased the company’s video tool, ROC Watch. Rank One developed long-range face recognition for US Special Operations Command under a government research contract, saying its software could identify a face from as far as a kilometer away. Police departments across the country use its algorithms too, embedded in tools they buy from other vendors.