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

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…