One day after WIRED revealed Meta had embedded an unreleased facial recognition system called “NameTag” into the Meta AI app, Meta silently removed the code from its latest update but refused to explain why.
NameTag was designed to convert faces captured by Meta’s smart glasses into biometric signatures and compare them against a locally stored database, with unrecognized faces being cropped, indexed and stored.
Meta is facing a class action lawsuit alleging it unlawfully collects sensitive healthcare data through Meta Pixel, a tracking code found on 33 of the top 100 U.S. hospitals’ websites and in seven password-protected patient portals.
Meta has been accelerating its healthcare ambitions by hiring health algorithm specialists and former American College of Cardiology chief science officer John Rumsfeld, while developing smart glasses and Oculus VR for potential medical applications.
ACLU’s Kade Crockford stated that Meta’s removal of NameTag code does not undo the original decision to ship it and urged state lawmakers to pass strong consumer privacy laws with private right of action.
Just one day after WIRED magazine revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased facial recognition system into the Meta AI app installed on more than 50 million smartphones, the tech giant silently stripped the code out of its latest update but refused to say why or whether the feature will ever return.
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