Not-Yet-Enabled Code Added to Meta A.I. App for Glasses-Based Facial Recognition Feature ⇥ wired.com

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron, Wired:

Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company’s software.

[…]

Three AI models powering NameTag have already been deployed from Meta’s servers and now reside on its customers’ phones, according to WIRED’s analysis, which was independently reproduced by outside experts. One model detects faces, one crops them, and a third encodes them into biometric data.

Facial recognition, as Mehrotra and Cameron repeatedly note, is not yet enabled. But according to an Electronic Frontier Foundation researcher who tried the existing code, it appears to be partly functional.

Meta communications troll Andy Stone is really mad about this story and, on X, even claimed the “feature doesn’t exist” (Xcancel). Last time I spilled water across my keyboard, I was just happy my laptop still worked properly, but it seems that in Meta’s case, it resulted in writing an entire facial recognition feature and pushed it to production. Incredible stuff.

The New York Times reported on Meta’s rollout strategy for the feature earlier this year ([previously linked][pl]), while Ryan Mac, then at Buzzfeed News, wrote in 2021 that Andrew Bosworth said facial recognition in smart glasses was something the company was exploring. On X, Bosworth built upon Stone’s reply (Xcancel) to this article claiming it is “incredibly misleading” and “dishonest”, for no particular reason.

Some companies are irredeemably bad and rotten to the core. The sooner Meta runs out of money and closes up shop, the better the world will be.

See Also: Buchodi’s technical breakdown.