A day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unpatched 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 of the code.
The latest version of Meta AI, a companion app for the series of smart glasses, removes the inactive software components that the system calls Meta internally, called nametags. The version published on the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for facial recognition. Friday’s release doesn’t include any of them.
Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, told WIRED on Monday that the feature is purely exploratory, adding: “No final decisions have been made on what to do here.”
On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta has quietly integrated large parts of the nametag system into the Meta AI app. Although 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 to a database of faceprints 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.
The nametag first surfaced in February, when The New York Times, citing internal Meta documents, reported that the company was developing facial recognition for its smart glasses and was planning to launch one as soon as this year. A memo reportedly described its release during a “dynamic political environment” when privacy and civil liberties advocates would be distracted. Last week, WIRED reported that much of NameTag’s machinery was already built into the Meta AI app, which millions of users had downloaded in early January, while Meta had publicly said it had not made any final decisions about facial recognition.
Following WIRED’s report, Stone rejected the findings, writing that the company could not answer questions about how the system would work because “the facility does not exist.” Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth called the reporting “incredibly misleading” and “absolutely dishonest.”
Meta declined to answer 10 questions asked by WIRED ahead of publication on Thursday, including whether it had already created a database of face profiles used by Nametag, how long the app retains photos and biometric data of unfamiliar people stored on a user’s device, and whether that data would ever be sent back to Meta’s servers.
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