GoKawiilStella is the companion app for Meta's smart glasses. Inspecting version 273.0.0.21 of the Android build ( com.facebook.stella ), I found the entire computational and storage stack for on-device facial recognition: three face models, a local database schema, a cosine-similarity vector index dimensioned to match the models, a write path that stages biometric records to disk, a fully wired notification surface, and a user-facing "Connections" widget.
I want to be precise about what that does and does not mean, because the gap between the two is important.
What I can demonstrate: the machinery is present, it is wired together. Several facial extraction and facial fingerprinting models are present and I was able run the recognition pipeline end-to-end on a test image and it detected a face, generate a 2048-dimension biometric embedding, searched a local index, and on a match fired an Android notification stating to the user "Person Recognized".
To get the pipeline to run I invoked its existing handler directly with a test photo.
What I cannot demonstrate: that any of this is active for ordinary users. On a stock, unenrolled account the user-facing UI does not appear, and the screen the recognition notification deep-links to is missing from the build. I also did not observe Meta server-pushing identity data to the relevant database on my test account.
So this is not "Meta is secretly identifying the people you look at." It is: the complete apparatus to do exactly that is sitting on the device, assembled and functional, gated by Meta.
All findings below are reproducible against com.facebook.stella v273.0.0.21.
Three face-recognition models ship on the device (~100 MB)
Three ExecuTorch ( .pte ) models arrive on the device via NMLML, Meta's asset-delivery system, downloaded from Meta.
Asset name (Meta's naming) File Size Function android_facerec_scrfd SCRFD.pte 3.4 MB Detects faces in an image android_facerec_kps_aligner KPSAligner.pte 117 KB Crops and aligns each detected face android_facerec_sface SFace.pte 96 MB Converts a face into a 2048-number embedding (the biometric fingerprint)
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