Meta has quietly added facial recognition tech for its smart glasses to its Meta AI app. A Wired investigation discovered that the code has been added to Meta's AI app over "multiple updates this year." The feature is internally called NameTag, and it can reportedly identity people captured by the camera on Meta's smart glasses, including Ray-Bans and Oakleys, as well as alert the wearer when it recognizes someone. The fact that Meta is looking into this is not new; The New York Times wrote about it last year, with Meta later commenting that it would take a "very thoughtful approach" if it ever were to release something like that.
And while the feature did not, in fact, roll out out to users, the fact that Meta has reportedly added some of the code need for it to run into Meta AI, an app distributed to tens of millions of users, is concerning. The groundwork for the feature includes three AI models – one which detects people's face them, one which crops them, and one which encodes them into biometric data — and all three already reside on the phones of people who have the Meta AI app installed.
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Two security researchers who reviewed Wired's findings both noted that the app is nearly ready to go. A Meta spokesperson reiterated to the publisher that the company is merely "exploring" such a feature, and that these findings are "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," said the spokesperson.
