Meta has quietly removed code discovered around the ‘NameTag’ facial recognition feature in its Meta AI app for its smart glasses, claiming that they have not made a final decision on what to do regarding the use of these technologies.
Last week a report revealed that the technology company had been discreetly including facial recognition technology for its smart glasses in the companion application to the Meta AI device, downloaded on more than 50 million smartphones, when used as support for Meta AI.
This technology, known internally as ‘NameTag’, allows people captured with the camera included in the glasses themselves to be identified, transforming the captured faces into unique biometric signatures. Thus, it began to be implemented in January, although it has never been activated, according to WIRED.
Now, said medium has shared that, one day after announcing this technology, Meta released an update to eliminate the code that referred to the ‘NameTag’ function, eliminating the function from its application.
This was announced in a new report in which, after reanalyzing the code of the latest version of the Meta AI application, it has confirmed that the non-activated software components related to the ‘NameTag’ system have been removed.
Specifically, the facial recognition ‘software’ has disappeared, in addition to the code that executed the ‘NameTag’ recognition process and the ‘Recognised Person’ alert that the application would display if someone had been identified.
In relation to this change, Meta’s vice president of communications, Andy Stone, has reaffirmed in statements to the aforementioned media that the function was only for testing purposes and that “no final decision has been made about what to do” regarding the introduction of this type of facial recognition technologies.
It must be taken into account that the discovery of ‘NameTag’ collides with the statements of Meta’s own managers, who in various previous interviews have acknowledged that facial recognition in the glasses was only a possibility that they were reviewing.
In fact, in April, when a group of 75 human rights and consumer privacy organizations asked Meta to suspend its plans to integrate facial recognition features into its glasses, including the ‘NameTag’ feature, a Meta spokesperson told WIRED that if they were to launch such a feature, they would take “a very thoughtful approach before integrating anything.”
In line with all this, Meta has already found itself in the middle of several scandals related to its smart glasses, such as the journalistic investigation that uncovered how human contractors in Kenya manually watched videos with highly sensitive content recorded to train multimodal AI.