The Electronic Frontier Foundation says Meta has stuffed facial recognition code into millions of surveillance glasses in a move which will turn them into a privacy nightmare.
EFF’s Threat Lab said it confirmed the code was present through static analysis of the application.
The feature stores faceprints as a series of 2,048 numbers that uniquely represent the position of a person’s facial features. When activated, it turns every new face in the glasses’ sightline into numbers. It then compares those numbers with existing faceprints in the user’s database.
The EFF confirmed the code is present and active, although it is not yet exposed to consumers.
Another researcher confirmed that manually adding a face to the app database made the glasses detect that face when it came into view. That was done by connecting the phone to a computer in debug mode and issuing a few commands.
Meta has already paid $650 million to settle a BIPA lawsuit challenging mass facial recognition of every photo posted to its platform. That feature has since been shut down.
Despite the billions of reasons not to go near this stuff again, Meta appears to have built the plumbing for distributed surveillance.
EFF said this was “just one more reason to think twice before buying or using Meta’s surveillance glasses.”
The outfit pointed to a previous Meta internal document about launching facial recognition “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”
EFF said the invasive feature is not a surprise. But it warned that Meta’s surveillance plans will not dodge public scrutiny that easily. The group said it would monitor whether the feature is rolled out to the public.
