Meta has ripped face-recognition code from its AI app after the tech press found NameTag lurking inside the software.
Wired reported last Thursday that Meta had embedded large chunks of an unreleased facial recognition system called NameTag into the Meta AI app installed on millions of phones.
The feature was never publicly switched on, but it was designed to turn faces captured by smart glasses into biometric signatures, better known as faceprints. Those faceprints could then be compared with a database stored on the user’s device. Wired found that faces the system failed to recognise were cropped, indexed and stored locally for future processing.
NameTag first surfaced in February when The New York Times, citing internal Meta documents, reported that the company was developing face recognition for its smart glasses.
The documents said Meta was weighing a launch as soon as this year. One memo reportedly suggested releasing it during a “dynamic political environment”, when privacy and civil liberties advocates would be distracted.
Last week, Wired reported that much of NameTag’s machinery had been built into the Meta AI app, downloaded by millions of users, as early as January. That looked a bit awkward, given Meta had publicly said it had made no final decision about face recognition.
Meta communications director Andy Stone dismissed the findings, writing that the company could not answer questions about how the system would work because “the feature does not exist”.
Meta chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth called the reporting “incredibly misleading” and “absolutely dishonest”.
The freshly released version of Meta AI now removes nearly all traces of the feature Meta said did not exist. Gone is the face-recognition software itself, along with the code that ran NameTag and the “Person recognised” alert the app would have shown.
The update strips out a folder where the app would have stored cropped images and biometric signatures of faces it captured but could not identify. A few bits of NameTag remain in the latest Meta AI app. These include an internal debug menu label and a dormant link meant to open a recognised person’s profile.
