When Meta sees an opportunity for a bad idea, it tends to run with it, and unfortunately, that fly-to-sh*t strategy may encompass adding facial recognition to its smart glasses. According to a report from Wired, latent code found inside the Meta AI app shows that Meta has been actively building a facial recognition tool that could be deployed through its Ray-Ban and Oakley-branded smart glasses, and that tool is already technically on people’s phones.
Per the report:
“Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone.”
The code inside the app isn’t active yet, but according to Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab, who was asked to review the code by Wired, it’s “nearly ready to go.”
As Wired notes, that state of almost readiness seems contradictory compared to previous messaging by Meta, which previously stated it would take a very “thoughtful” approach to face recognition before rolling anything out. The thing is, that statement was given to Wired in April, but its recent investigation shows some code was already added as early as January, before Meta made an official comment.
As for the code itself, it’s as bad as it sounds. Wired reports that, in its current form, NameTag would vacuum up faces through smart glasses’ camera and create “unique biometric signatures” or “faceprints” and check those faceprints against faceprints saved on a user’s phone to identify them. Wired says that faces that are recognized will “trigger notifications” while others are “cropped, indexed, and saved to a folder marked ‘pending.’”
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because Meta has already been caught doing something similar on Facebook, when it collected the faceprints of a billion users and stored them in a database. That endeavor eventually got the company sued by the states of Texas and Illinois in a landmark case, and Meta said it deleted the face scans in 2021. At the time, Meta claimed its terms of service for using Facebook were enough to constitute consent for collection, but that defense, clearly, did not hold up.
In a statement to Wired, Meta mostly reiterated its previous position on facial recognition, with spokesperson Ryan Daniels stating:
“Regardless of any sensational reporting, the facts are simple: 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. If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency. One decision we can be clear about—we are not building a central face database.”
As Wired notes, code reviewed suggests that NameTag would be pulling information from Meta servers and storing it on a user’s device, so TBD on Daniels’ assertion of “not building a central face database.”
No matter which way you spin it, “Meta” and “facial recognition” are not words that most people want to hear in the same sentence, and lawmakers are included on that list. Some U.S. Senate Democrats have already called on Meta publicly to elaborate on its plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses, though those efforts don’t seem to be yielding a whole lot of results. In this case, it seems Meta is interested in learning the same way it always does: at the expense of everyone’s privacy.
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