"Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance mac
Code uncovered by journalists revealed that Meta quietly embedded facial recognition tech into its AI-enabled smart glasses — and top Meta executives are fuming.
Last week, Wired reported that Meta discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its popular smart glasses, as evidenced by a piece of code discovered in the Meta AI app by the magazine's journalists. The unreleased feature, internally dubbed "NameTag," would "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 — a database that's currently configured to receive updates from Meta," as Wired put it.
The report made clear that NameTag isn't activated yet, nor is it accessible to consumers in its current form. But the prospect of consumer-facing smart glasses equipped with facial recognition tech has long had privacy advocates on edge — and with public adoption of Meta's smart glasses on the rise, privacy concerns have become more pertinent than ever. If a company has gone about building out the infrastructure to roll out a wildly controversial feature of this kind, consumers might want to know about that, even if the feature currently remains inaccessible.
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oh? Meta didn't mention THAT facial recognition infrastructure? /sarcasm