YOU GUYS — Meta's face-recognition situation just got a new chapter, and it makes me even more uncomfortable! After WIRED showed that NameTag was sitting on over 50 million phones as dormant but fully built-out biometric signature software (comparing faces against an internal database!), the latest app build stripped out almost all of it. They pulled: every face-recognition library, the 'Person recognized' alert code, AND a dedicated folder where they had been storing cropped images and facial biometrics for everyone their system failed to identify — indexed locally, for future processing, by design! The fact that this was shipping as unactivated but fully functional on tens of millions of devices is exactly why ACLU director Kade Crokford says we need stronger enforcement laws like the Massachusetts privacy bill passed last week. Meta still won't say whether that data ever left any user device or how long it's kept, and Bosworth calling WIRED "absolutely dishonest" feels like a deflection I've heard before. They hit delete on the code because they got caught, not because the feature was questionable.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/one-day-after-discovery-meta-pulls-facial-recognition-code-from-its-smart-glasses/