The strategy of ‘disappearing into the trees like Homer Simpson’ is a bold decision.
Just a day after a silent code that appeared to be a facial recognition algorithm was found in the app that accompanies its smart glasses, Meta released an update that removed the code, It has strings report. The publication first uncovered the suspicious code, called Name Tag within Meta, while reviewing the code of the Meta AI application that manages some of the main features of the glasses. In other words, the same app needed to pair the Meta smart glasses to a user’s phone via Bluetooth was also ready to start harvesting every face you pass by while wearing them.
It has strings discovered the silent device on June 4. It contained algorithms that would convert facial images into biometric identifiers that are stored on the device and identified against each new face scan. On June 5, an update was released that removed it completely. In February, The New York Times had reported that Meta was working on bringing facial recognition to its glasses. As the Times heard the internal moniker Name Tag being compiled at that time, the code received by It has strings they were probably the fruits of those efforts.
The tool’s functionality suggests it may have been intended as a way for users to easily identify people they’ve met. A useful feature for forgetful people, no doubt, but also a terrible and invasive solution to a very common problem among people. Most people would rather have someone just admit that they forgot their name than have their face covered by a camera.
Meta smart glasses are made in collaboration with famous Luxottica brands including Ray-Ban and Oakley. Already raising hackles, social media influencers close to the manosphere are using it to harass and film women. In December, a woman was accused of breaking a man’s Meta glasses on the New York subway. Meta was also hit with a class action in March after a Swedish newspaper investigation revealed that employees in Kenya were reviewing photos taken on the company’s smart glasses – including sex and toilet use – that appeared to have been taken without the owners’ knowledge.
In the statement given It has strings On Monday, Meta’s vice president of communications Andy Stone was quoted as saying that the feature was only a pilot effort and that the company had not made “the final decision on what to do here, if anything.” That may be true, but the actual Meta staff were paid real money to spend their time writing, reviewing, and shipping that code to a live product. That it didn’t work might be cold comfort not only to owners who might not want to be held accountable for mobile data-gathering tools, but also to the people in those users’ lives who might not want their faces analyzed unknowingly. The very fact that the code was removed so quickly and the PR statements issued suggests that Meta knows it’s running on a wire with these kinds of offensive features.
