Meta Removes Unreleased NameTag Face-Recognition Code From AI App One Day After WIRED Report

One day after WIRED reported that Meta had embedded an unreleased face-recognition system called NameTag in its Meta AI app, the company removed the code from the latest version. The Meta AI app is the companion application for Meta’s line of smart glasses and has been installed on more than 50 million phones.

The version published the day of WIRED’s Thursday report contained several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition.

Friday’s release contains none of those libraries. The NameTag system was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures known as faceprints and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user’s device. Faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.

NameTag first surfaced in February when The New York Times reported that Meta was developing face recognition for its smart glasses and weighing a launch as soon as this year. One internal Meta memo reportedly described releasing the feature during a “dynamic political environment” when privacy and civil liberties advocates would be distracted.

WIRED reported last week that much of NameTag’s machinery was already built into the Meta AI app as early as January, even as Meta publicly said it had made no final decision about face recognition.

The app had been downloaded by millions of users by that point. ” Meta declined to answer ten questions WIRED posed before publishing on Thursday. The newly released version of Meta AI removes nearly all traces of the NameTag feature.

Gone is the face-recognition software itself, the code that ran the NameTag recognition process, the “Person recognized” alert the app would have shown, and the folder where the app would have stored cropped images and biometric signatures of unrecognized faces.

A few fragments remain, including an internal debug menu label and a dormant link meant to open a recognized person’s profile. Kade Crockford, director of the technology for liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said the removal did not undo the original decision to ship the code.

Crockford pointed to the episode as evidence that consumer privacy needs stronger legal protection than Congress has provided. The Massachusetts House of Representatives last week unanimously passed a consumer privacy bill that, if enacted as written, would impose strong enforcement provisions.

Crockford urged other states to follow with similar measures that include a private right of action allowing aggrieved users to sue.

Meta did not immediately respond to questions about why the code was removed, whether the changes were planned before WIRED’s story, or whether the company still intends to pursue NameTag. Reached for comment on Monday, Stone said Meta had nothing new to add.