Move Fast, Surveil Things

Meta has deployed facial recognition code to millions of their always-on surveillance glasses, according to new reporting by Wired. EFF’s Threat Lab was able to confirm that the facial recognition code is present through static analysis of the application. 

This dangerous new Meta functionality stores faceprints as a series of 2,048 numbers uniquely representing the positioning of a person’s facial features. When this feature is activated, it will convert every new face in the sightlines of the surveillance glasses into a series of numbers, and compare it to all the existing faceprints in the user’s database.

Wired and EFF confirmed that the code is present and active, though not yet exposed to consumers. Another researcher confirmed that when they manually added a face to the app database by connecting the phone to a computer in debug mode and issuing a few commands, the glasses would subsequently detect that face when it came into view. 

Meta has already paid $650 million to settle a BIPA lawsuit challenging mass facial recognition of every photo posted to its platform, a feature which it has since shut down. 

Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine. This is just one more reason to think twice before buying or using Meta’s surveillance glasses. 

Considering that Meta previously wrote in an internal document that they want to launch facial recognition “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” this invasive new feature doesn’t come as a surprise. But Meta’s surveillance plans won’t escape public scrutiny that easily, and we’ll be watching if this feature is rolled out to the public.