en.Wedoany.com Reported - Meta has quietly embedded facial recognition for its smart glasses into a mobile app with over 50 million downloads. According to an analysis of Meta's companion software by WIRED, the feature, internally codenamed "NameTag," can identify faces captured by the smart glasses camera and alert the wearer when someone is recognized.

Code added through multiple updates to the Meta AI app this year shows that NameTag converts faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures (i.e., facial fingerprints) and compares them against an existing database of fingerprints stored on the user's phone. Recognized faces trigger a notification, while others are cropped, indexed, and saved to a folder labeled "Pending." Currently, the database is configured to receive updates from Meta's servers.

Three AI models driving NameTag have been deployed from Meta's servers and reside on the user's phone. One model detects faces, one crops faces, and the third encodes faces into biometric data. Currently, only traces of a user interface exist, hinting at how the feature might ultimately function. A version of the app from May renamed the feature "Connections," aiming to help users "remember people you meet."

This effort will revive facial recognition technology that Meta claimed to have phased out in 2021. At that time, following years of controversy over its photo-tagging system, the company announced it would delete over 1 billion facial fingerprints and settled class-action lawsuits in Illinois and Texas for $650 million and $1.4 billion, respectively. According to internal Meta documents published by The New York Times in February, the company planned to launch the feature in a "dynamic political environment," believing at the time that its biggest critics would be too preoccupied to respond.

Privacy advocates have expressed concern, arguing that it could allow stalkers or abusers to quietly identify strangers in public. In April, over 70 advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, urged Meta to abandon NameTag. Joseph Jerome, a former policy official who oversaw privacy reviews for Meta's augmented and virtual reality products, said that by introducing the technology into the ecosystem, Meta is setting norms and standards, but he is unsure how the company could responsibly deploy such technology.

Two external security researchers independently replicated WIRED's analysis. Cooper Quintin, a threat lab researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, noted that the feature appears nearly ready, and despite numerous reasons why it should not be, Meta seems to have created the capability to turn customers into distributed surveillance machines. Independent researcher Buchodi's tests showed that after pre-storing facial fingerprints in the user's gallery, NameTag successfully produced a "person identified" notification. Buchodi stated that there are few obstacles left before a working feature is achieved.

Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels responded that the company has previously said it is exploring these types of features, and what is currently seen is only evidence of exploration. Nothing has been rolled out to consumers, and no final decision has been made on the matter. He noted that the company will not build a central facial database, and the current design of the NameTag system indeed pulls facial fingerprints from Meta's servers and stores them locally on the user's device.

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