Meta has removed face-recognition code from its Meta AI app following a report by WIRED that revealed the feature had been embedded in the software for over five months. The most recent version of the app, released on Friday, no longer includes the code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. The update strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system internally called NameTag, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code.
The feature, designed to convert faces captured by Meta’s smart glasses into unique biometric signatures, was never publicly enabled. WIRED found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing. The system was first reported in February when The New York Times, citing internal Meta documents, described the company’s development of face recognition for its smart glasses and its consideration of a launch as early as this year.
Meta declined to answer 10 questions WIRED posed before publishing, 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, and whether that data would ever be sent back to Meta's servers. The newly released version of Meta AI removes nearly all traces of the feature, including the face-recognition software itself, the code that ran the NameTag recognition process, and the 'Person recognized' alert the app would have shown if someone were identified.
Source: wired
