Meta Removes Facial Recognition Code from Ray-Ban Smart Glasses App

Meta has reportedly removed a controversial facial recognition system, internally known as “Name Tag,” that was discovered in the code of a companion app for its line of Ray-Ban smart glasses.

An internal company memo, uncovered by The New York Times in February, revealed that Meta is preparing to add facial recognition technology to its range of smart glasses. The feature, reportedly known inside the company as Name Tag, would allow wearers to identify people in their field of view and access information about them through Meta’s AI assistant. Engineers have supposedly considered two versions of the tool: one that would recognize only individuals already connected to the user on Meta platforms, and another that could identify anyone with a public account on social media services such as Instagram.

The reports about the Name Tag feature prompted more than 70 advocacy organisations to urge Meta to abandon reported plans to introduce facial-recognition technology into its Ray-Ban smart glasses, warning of serious risks to privacy and public safety.

Despite this, in a report on June 4, WIRED revealed it had uncovered suspicious code for a facial recognition system designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users’ phones. In short, WIRED’s report claimed that the same app used to connect Meta’s smart glasses to a phone via Bluetooth was also capable of collecting data on every face the wearer encountered while using them.

The news outlet discovered the dormant facial recognition system while reviewing code for a Meta AI app which handles some core features of smart glasses. The dormant code contained algorithms that would have converted photos of faces into biometric signatures (commonly known as “faceprints”) and compared them against a database of facial scans stored on the user’s device. WIRED also found that faces that the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.

However, in a new report published on Monday, WIRED revealed that Meta has now quietly deleted the unactivated code explicitly named for face recognition. Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, tells the publication that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

Stone dismissed the news outlet’s findings, writing that the company couldn’t answer questions about how the system would work because “the feature does not exist.”

WIRED says Meta declined to answer 10 questions it posed, including whether it had already created the database of face profiles NameTag uses, how long the app retains photographs, and biometric data of unrecognized people stored on a user’s device, and whether that data would ever be sent back to Meta’s servers. Additionally, WIRED says Meta did not respond to criticism from privacy advocates who have warned the system could let stalkers and abusers identify strangers in public.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.