Meta Quietly Deletes Creepy Face-Scanning Tech After Getting Caught Red-Handed
Oh look, Meta accidentally left a digital stalker in your pocket. The tech giant just scrubbed a controversial facial recognition module from its AI app, but definitely-not-suspiciously claims the feature never existed. Truly, a masterclass in transparency.
Following a deep dive by Wired, Meta has scrubbed the NameTag code from its Meta AI app. The software, originally envisioned for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, functioned by turning human faces into biometric signatures and checking them against a private database. Any faces it couldn't identify were promptly clipped, indexed, and stored for later processing, which is definitely what everyone wants while walking down the street.
Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth(male) dismissed the report as misleading, while company spokespeople doubled down by claiming the feature doesn't even exist—a bold strategy for code that was sitting on millions of phones since January. Internal memos from The New York Times previously suggested that Meta was eyeing a launch during a "dynamic political climate" to keep critics busy.
The latest app update has nuked the identification module, the notification triggers, and the local biometric storage folders. While a few fragments of the NameTag menu remain, the heart of the surveillance engine is gone, proving once again that the easiest way to solve a public relations nightmare is to delete the evidence and gaslight the audience. Privacy is clearly just an optional beta feature for the tech giants of the world.
Source: Slashdot
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