Meta has removed an unreleased face-recognition system, internally called NameTag, from its Meta AI smart glasses app, just one day after WIRED revealed the company had quietly embedded it in software already installed on more than 50 million phones. The system was built to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric “faceprints” and match them against an on-device database, and it even cropped and stored faces it couldn't identify for later processing, though Meta says it was never enabled and calls the feature purely exploratory. The latest version strips out nearly all of it, but Meta won't say why it pulled the code, whether the removal was planned before the story, or whether the feature is coming back, while privacy advocates point to the episode as evidence that consumer privacy needs stronger legal protection.
