Meta quietly added facial recognition code for smart glasses to its app, says it's just exploring
Meta has embedded facial recognition code into its app in connection with its smart glasses, characterizing the move as exploratory rather than an active feature rollout. The addition was not publicly announced and came to light through outside observation.
Why this matters: Two Harvard students already showed you can point Ray-Ban Meta glasses at a stranger, run their face through a lookup tool, and pull up their name and address in seconds. Now Meta is quietly building that capability directly into its own app. 'Just exploring' is doing a lot of work here. Code ships before features do, and features tend to ship once the infrastructure is ready. Bystanders never agreed to be scanned. They have no way to opt out of a device they cannot see coming.
Who should care: Privacy officers · Cybersecurity · General readers · Policy
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