Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta quietly embedded facial recognition tech in its smart glasses, sparking concern from privacy watchdogs, according to a report.
The tech, which Meta hasn’t activated yet, came in an app that was downloaded to millions of phones, according to Wired, which analyzed the software.
Known internally as “NameTag,” the feature has the capacity to identify people captured by the glasses’ camera and alert the wearer when it recognizes someone, Wired reported.
The smart glasses already came under criticism for enabling creeps and wannabe pickup artists to record their unwanted advances toward unsuspecting women and posting the cringe-inducing content online.
“NameTag” is embedded in Meta’s AI companion app that’s been downloaded over 50 million times and helps users use key features of its smart glasses, including Ray-Ban and Oakley models.
The tech giant discreetly added the code to the AI app over multiple updates this year, according to Wired.
If Meta opts to enable the tool, faces captured by the smart glasses will get turned into unique biometric signatures, known as faceprints. Meta’s tech will then check each faceprint it encounters against faceprints already stored on the user’s phone, and even send notifications if it recognizes a match. New faceprints the glasses encounter would be indexed and saved, too.
Meta Vice President of Communications Andy Stone emphasized customers can’t actually turn on the facial recognition tech yet.
“This is more than shoddy reporting, it’s intellectually dishonest. Pure advocacy-driven click bait,” he wrote on X.
Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels told The Post, “We’ve said before we’re exploring these types of features, and what you’re seeing is just evidence of that exploration.
“Nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything,” he added. “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.”
Meta took concrete steps to put facial recognition capacity in devices while saying publicly it was only something the company was “thinking through,” Wired noted.
The company said in April if it were to utilize facial recognition, it wouldn’t be rolled out without first taking “a very thoughtful approach.” But Wired found that as early as January, key components of the system had been integrated into software distributed to millions of people.
The “NameTag” project appears to revive technology that Meta said it had discontinued in 2021. Back then, the company stated it would delete more than a billion faceprints belonging to Facebook users after years of uproar over its photo-tagging system.
Meta even paid $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by users in Illinois. It also agreed to a separate $1.4 billion settlement with the Texas attorney general over allegations it unlawfully collected biometric data from users.
Privacy and tech watchdogs slammed Meta over the “NameTag” revelations.
“Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are using their products to build a future where they control and operate 24/7 surveillance, and they thought no one would notice,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of Tech Oversight Project.
“We can’t trust this company to responsibly protect our children or our data, so why would we trust them with facial recognition or biometrics?”
Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a non-profit focused on tech’s impact on kids, echoed the remarks
“Meta clearly plans to use its AI glasses to surveil everyone and everything,” he told The Post. “That may be a boon for Meta shareholders, advertisers, and predators, but it’s a disaster for the rest of us. Regulators and lawmakers must stop this surveillance scheme before it takes hold.”
Golin added that children could be at particular risk if anyone could instantly access a dossier on them by simply scanning their face.
Joseph Jerome, a former policy official with Meta’s Reality Labs who worked on privacy reviews for the company’s AR and VR products, slammed his former employer.
“You’re setting norms and standards by putting technology into the ecosystem,” he told Wired. “I don’t know how Meta can responsibly deploy a technology like this.”
Additional reporting by Thomas Barrabi
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