One day after discovery, Meta pulls facial recognition code from its smart glasses - Ars Technica
Overview
One day after discovery, Meta pulls facial recognition code from its smart glasses
One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.
Details
The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called Name Tag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them.
Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”
On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the Name Tag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user’s device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.
Name Tag first surfaced in February, when The New York Times, citing internal Meta documents, reported that the company was developing face recognition for its smart glasses and weighing a launch as soon as this year. One memo reportedly described releasing it during a “dynamic political environment,” when privacy and civil liberties advocates would be distracted. Last week, WIRED reported that much of Name Tag’s machinery was already built into the Meta AI app, downloaded by millions of users, as early as January, even as Meta publicly said it had made no final decision about face recognition.
After WIRED’s report, Stone dismissed the findings, writing that the company couldn’t answer questions about how the system would work because “the feature does not exist.” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, called the reporting “incredibly misleading” and “absolutely dishonest.”
Meta declined to answer 10 questions WIRED posed before publishing on Thursday, including whether it had already created the database of face profiles Name Tag 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, Meta did not respond to a question about whether it was building Name Tag specifically for blind or low-vision users, and did not respond to criticism from privacy advocates who have warned the system could let stalkers and abusers identify strangers in public. It did not respond when asked whether it planned to let users opt in or opt out of the system.
The newly released version of Meta AI removes nearly all traces of the feature Meta said did not yet exist. Gone is the face-recognition software itself, along with the code that ran the Name Tag recognition process and the “Person recognized” alert the app would have shown if someone were identified. The update also strips out a folder where the app would have stored the cropped images and biometric signatures of faces it captured but could not identify.
Meta did not answer WIRED’s questions about why the code was removed or whether the changes were planned before WIRED’s story was published.
A few fragments of the Name Tag system remain in the latest version of Meta AI, including an internal debug menu label and a dormant link meant to open a recognized person’s profile. The leftover code points to parts of the system that are no longer there.
Kade Crockford, director of the technology for liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, says the removal didn’t undo the original decision to ship the code, and pointed to it as evidence that consumer privacy needs stronger legal protection than Congress has been willing to provide. Crockford notes that the Massachusetts House of Representatives last week unanimously passed a consumer privacy bill that, if enacted as written, would impose strong enforcement provisions, and urged other states to follow, especially with a private right of action that lets aggrieved users sue. “State lawmakers need to do their job and step up to protect consumer privacy,” they say.
“Meta’s sneaky tactics in slipping the face-recognition code into its smart glasses show exactly why data privacy bills need the teeth of strong enforcement,” Crockford says. “Companies like Meta prioritize their bottom line, so lawmakers need to speak in the only language its C-suite understands.”
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Key Takeaways
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One day after discovery, Meta pulls facial recognition code from its smart glasses
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One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code
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The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called Name Tag
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Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything
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On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the Name Tag system into the Meta AI app
