GoKawiilMeta has embedded facial recognition code into software used by its smart glasses, according to an investigation by Wired, which was confirmed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Threat Lab on Thursday. Though the feature isn't yet turned on for consumers, it's sitting in the Meta AI smartphone app.
Wired reports that Meta quietly added the facial-recognition components as early as January over multiple updates to its Meta AI companion app -- which has been downloaded more than 50 million times. The feature, under the internal designation "NameTag," would let the Meta smart glasses biometrically identify anyone in view and notify the wearer with information about that person.
When the feature is activated, Wired reports, "it will transform faces captured by Meta's glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user's phone."
In other words, NameTag would store biometric face data in an embedded database architecture that can compare new faceprints to existing ones. The database is designed to live on a user's phone but is configured to receive updates from Meta.
The EFF says the code was verified through static analysis and argues that Meta is moving ahead with surveillance-capable glasses in a way that normalizes biometric tracking without people's consent.
"Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine," EFF's senior staff technologist Cooper Quintin said in its article. "This is just one more reason to think twice before buying or using Meta's surveillance glasses."
Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Meta was working on these types of features but had not officially announced plans to roll them out.
At the time, CNET's smart glasses and XR expert Scott Stein wrote about his concerns that "Meta's facial recognition is not an if, it's a when," and that the technology would need "to be handled with extreme measures of control and responsibility."
Not long after that, Stein spoke with Meta about its privacy policies for smart glasses and came away "frustrated and uncertain" by a lack of clear guidelines and guardrails.
A new chapter in Meta's privacy scandals
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