Meta Deletes Face-Recognition Code From Its Smart Glasses App After WIRED Report

On Thursday, June 4, WIRED reported

that Meta had quietly embedded

an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses

into an app which has been downloaded

more than 50 million times.

A day later, the company removed it.

Meta won't tell us why or whether it's coming back.

Let's start at the beginning and explain why this matters.

We discovered face-recognition code

had been discreetly added to Meta's AI app

over multiple updates as early as January this year

and as part of a system internally called NameTag.

The system, which is not enabled,

was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses

into unique biometric signatures and compare them

against a database of faces stored on the user's device.

If activated, the user could've been alerted

when the system recognized someone.

The code was distributed to millions of people,

all while Meta was publicly saying

that it was still thinking through whether and how

to deploy face recognition in its smart glasses.

NameTag wasn't enabled, but seemed nearly ready to go.

One outside security researcher

we shared our findings with said Meta had, quote,

Created the capacity to turn their customers

into a distributed surveillance machine.

Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications,

dismissed our original report,

writing that Meta couldn't answer questions

about how the system worked because, quote,

The feature does not exist.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer,

called our reporting

incredibly misleading without elaborating.

The following day, Meta deleted the code.

On Monday, June 8 when we asked about the code's deletion,

Stone told us in a written statement

that the feature is purely exploratory and that, quote,

No final decision has been made

on what to do here, if anything.

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