Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App (wired.com)
- Reference: 0183665878
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/06/08/1945252/meta-deletes-face-recognition-system-from-its-smart-glasses-app
- Source link: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-removes-face-recognition-code-meta-ai-app-smart-glasses/
> On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag 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.
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> NameTag first surfaced in February, when [3]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 NameTag'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."
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> [...] 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 NameTag 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. [...] A few fragments of the NameTag system remain in the version of latest 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.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/meta-smart-glasses-face-recognition-nametag-connections/
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/meta-smart-glasses-face-recognition-nametag-connections/
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/meta-facial-recognition-smart-glasses.html
Easiest way to delete a feature (Score:5, Insightful)
Is to remove the user's access to it. We can still log the data into the cloud of course.
Re:Easiest way to delete a feature (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, of course Meta is going to remove it from the app ; they don't want the common users to be aware of how much data their smart glasses are collecting and sending to Meta's servers to be processed and monetized. Now all the biometric data will simply be silently uploaded to the cloud, where Meta, having virtue-signaled their 'rectitude' by removing it from the app, will be publicly above reproach.
the problem is (Score:3)
The problem is that this isn't very hard to do these days. It's pretty near impossible to prevent things that are easy to do.
The Meta device is constantly getting a stream of image frames from the camera in the glasses. Probably their device has enough compute horsepower to detect human faces, smartphones sure do. The faces can easily be cropped out of the images and passed along to whatever recognition system you happen to have on hand to develop a faceprint. It all goes into a database, local or remote, and then its a SMOP (simple matter of programming) to correlate a faceprint to a human identity. Gather all of that into a central database and presto.
You could just wander around with your cellphone in your shirt pocket recording everything and an app there could do much of this. Meta is getting some pushback because they are so visible and pervasive, but smaller players could definitely implement a mobile facial recognition system under the radar and probably have.
Re: (Score:2)
Google does it. Google photos identifies people and scans their face, puts it in your album. Matches them up for it's slide shows or other things.
It's not new tech. People just think they're safer because they can tell when someone raises a phone to record them, but completely forget about cameras designed to be discreet.
Re:the problem is (Score:4, Interesting)
You might be able to homebrew a device to recognize a face, but you won't be able to associate that with an identity, short of API access to Facebook or similar data brokers.
It sounds like you might be proposing manually assigning a name to each faceprint, but that's not what people are worried about. They're worried about random people who don't already know their name, getting it, and the associated data, instantaneously.
Re: (Score:2)
Someone has to initially assign a face to an identity, I agree. But once you've done that the pairing can be shared, either by you or by the app that you used to assign the ID, which in this case was Meta.
And then pretty soon you can be getting facial ID's on people you don't know but someone else did.
For now... (Score:2)
Why would anyone think this "deletion" is permanent? As soon as the hubbub dies down, it'll be back.
The only way... (Score:2)
The only way I'm giving AI access to that level of personal information/interaction is if I own - and retain EXCLUSIVE access to the data.
Basically, the AI and data are mine and no one but me ever has access. No spying. No viewing. No data mining, anonymous or not. ZERO access during normal use unless I intentionally share something with a specific person or company. Think zero-knowledge encryption, but for my 'personal AI'.
Granted, companies want you to use AI largely so they can mine your data and it's g
Re: (Score:2)
> The only way I'm giving AI access to that level of personal information/interaction is if I own - and retain EXCLUSIVE access to the data.
It's not the owner/wearer of the glasses that I'm worried about. It's all the poor schmucks they pass by (and photograph) on the street.
How ... (Score:2)
> The newly released version of Meta AI removes nearly all traces of the feature Meta said did not yet exist.
... do you remove something that does not exist?
Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I think he's with the CIA...
To Funny! (Score:2)
"newly released version of Meta AI removes nearly all traces of the feature Meta said did not yet exist." Great! I trust you now, !NOT lol
Re: (Score:1)
if ur BDS u shouldn't be using anything from them anyhow