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Quietly dead Planted Face recognition Its technology Smart glasses In an app that has been downloaded on millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company’s software.
Code that was secretly added to Meta’s AI app via multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies People captured by glasses camera When activated, it alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone.
The discovery of NameTag in Meta AI’s live app shows that Meta had begun shipping facial recognition code to users’ phones while publicly describing it as something the company was still “thinking about.” In April, Meta said that if she was going to use facial recognition, she wouldn’t roll it out without taking a “very thoughtful approach” first. But WIRED found that as early as January, core components of the system had been integrated into software distributed to millions of people.
Although not yet enabled, the NameTag resides within the companion Meta AI app that has been downloaded more than 50 million times and is essential for using key features of its smart glasses, including Ray-Ban and Oakley models. If activated, it will convert the faces captured by Meta’s glasses into unique biometric signatures, known as faceprints, and scan each one against the faceprints stored on the user’s phone — a database that is currently configured to receive updates from Meta. Recognized faces will trigger notifications, while the rest will be cropped, indexed, and saved to a folder marked “Pending.”
NameTag will bring back a type of technology that Meta said was discontinued in 2021, when the company announced it would delete more than a billion facial fingerprints belonging to Facebook users after years of controversy over its photo tagging system. Meta eventually paid $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by users in Illinois, and in 2024, it agreed to a separate $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over allegations that it illegally collected biometric data from users.
Its renewed efforts come amid growing opposition to consumer-level facial recognition, which privacy advocates say will give anyone, from stalkers to immigration agents, easier access to dangerous technology. Internal meta documents published by The New York Times in February showed that the company planned to roll out the feature during a “dynamic political environment,” when Meta thought its biggest critics would be busy.
Three AI models powering NameTag have already been deployed from Meta’s servers and are now on its customers’ phones, according to a WIRED analysis, which was independently reproduced by outside experts. One model detects faces, another crops them, and a third encodes them into biometric data.
There are currently only traces of the UI, indicating how the feature will eventually work. The May version of the app renames the feature for users as “Connections,” and invites them to “remember people you’ve met.” It is still unclear whose faces will be included in the system’s recognition database, how these profiles are created, or how many people will eventually be identified by them.
WIRED shared its findings with two external security researchers who separately examined the app and reproduced key aspects of the analysis: Cooper Quentin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab, and an independent security and privacy researcher who uses the pseudonym Buchodi and has spent more than a decade reverse-engineering consumer software and surveillance technologies.
“This feature hasn’t been revealed to consumers yet, but it looks almost ready to go,” Quentin says. “Despite billions of reasons not to, Meta appears to have created the ability to turn its agents into a distributed surveillance machine.”
