Meta has licensed face-recognition software from Rank One Computing, a Denver-based company that derives roughly 80 percent of its revenue from government clients, for use in its smart glasses, according to a software license obtained by WIRED. The license, tied to a test version of the Meta AI app, allows use of Rank One's face recognition alongside its liveness detection, which checks whether a camera is seeing a real person rather than a photo or mask. The software supports up to 10 million facial templates and remains active.
Rank One’s face recognition has been adopted by the US Marshals Service and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, among other law enforcement agencies. The company developed long-range face recognition for US Special Operations Command under a government research contract, claiming its software could identify a face from as far as a kilometer away. Police departments across the country also use its algorithms, embedded in tools they buy from other vendors. The license is the first known evidence of a business relationship between Meta and Rank One, offering a rare look at the technology Meta is considering for a mass-market consumer device.
The license Meta acquired authorizes use of Rank One's face recognition along with its liveness detection, which checks whether a camera is seeing a real person rather than a photo or mask. It supports up to 10 million facial templates and remains active. Code reviewed by WIRED shows that remnants of Rank One’s integration—the routines that load its license and initialize its software—remained in a version of Meta’s app that shipped this month, dormant, to millions of consumers, alongside the company’s own face-recognition system. None of the face-recognition systems tied to Meta's smart glasses were ever active for users. Meta deleted them from the app entirely on June 5, a day after WIRED revealed the company had quietly built an unreleased face-recognition system, internally called NameTag, into the Meta AI app.
Source: wired
