TL;DRMeta stripped NameTag facial recognition code from its AI app one day after WIRED exposed it on 50 million phones. Meta says no decision has been made.
Meta removed nearly all traces of an unreleased facial recognition system from its smart glasses companion app on Friday, one day after WIRED reported that the software had been quietly embedded in an app installed on more than 50 million phones. The feature, which Meta internally called NameTag, was designed to convert faces captured by the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses into unique biometric signatures and compare them against a database stored on the user’s device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognise were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.
Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is “purely exploratory,” adding that no final decision has been made on what to do with it. That characterisation sits uneasily with the evidence WIRED documented. The version of Meta AI published the day of WIRED’s Thursday report contained several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition, a process for running the NameTag recognition pipeline, and a “Person recognised” alert the app would have shown if someone were identified.
