One day when he is found, Meta pulls the facial recognition code into his smart glasses

One day later WIRED has revealed that Trim had quietly entered the unreleased face recognition System in an app that was installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest code.

The latest version of Meta AI, the companion software in its line smart glassesremoves the defunct software component that ran Meta inside named NameTag. The brand published the same day a WIRED report included several well-known facial recognition libraries. Friday’s release does not include any of them.

Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the matter is an investigation, adding: “No final decision has been made yet, if there is one.”

On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta has quietly integrated many of NameTag’s features into the Meta AI software. Although not in public use, the feature is designed to convert faces captured by mirrors into unique biometric signatures, known as faceprints, and compare them to a database of facial records stored on the user’s device. WIRED also found that faces the system didn’t recognize were cropped, saved, and stored locally for later editing.

NameTag first appeared in February, when The New York Timesreferring to Meta’s internal documents, he said that the company is developing facial recognition for its smart glasses and is trying to launch as soon as this year. One memo reportedly described releasing it at a time of “high political pressure,” where privacy and civil rights advocates would be threatened. Last week, WIRED reported that many NameTag systems were already built into the Meta AI software, downloaded by millions of users, in early January, as Meta said publicly that it had not made a final decision about facial recognition.

After the WIRED report, Stone denied the findings, writing that the company could not answer questions about how the system would work because “the product does not exist.” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, said the report was “grossly misleading” and “completely dishonest.”

Meta declined to answer 10 questions that WIRED asked before going to press Thursday, including whether it had already created a database of the facial profiles that NameTag uses, how long the app keeps photos and biometric data of anonymous people stored on a user’s device, and whether that data will be sent back to Meta’s servers.