Meta licensed facial recognition technology from Rank One Computing for internal work on its smart glasses, a WIRED investigation found, tying a specific surveillance-industry vendor to the dormant face-recognition code that researchers had already found inside the company’s smart glasses app. The license covered Rank One’s facial recognition along with its liveness detection, the technique used to confirm a camera is seeing a real person rather than a photo or mask, for a test version of the Meta AI app.
The licensing puts a named vendor behind the face-recognition capability that had already surfaced in the shipped product. Researchers found dormant facial recognition code inside the Meta AI companion app for the Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, alongside an unreleased face-scanning feature Meta internally called NameTag. The Rank One integration sat inactive in that app, which has shipped to more than 50 million phones, before Meta pulled the face-recognition code.
Rank One Computing is a US facial recognition developer that sells to law enforcement, government, and military customers, and has posted strong accuracy results in NIST testing. Its presence in a consumer wearable is the detail driving the renewed scrutiny: a vendor whose tools are built for surveillance and identification contexts had its technology embedded, even if inactively, in glasses marketed to the public.
The timeline is tight. WIRED identified the dormant Rank One integration on June 4, and Meta released an update the next day, June 5, that removed the face-recognition code entirely. The feature had never been publicly announced, was not active, and was taken out after the reporting brought it to light, the same pattern of build-then-pull that has characterized Meta’s handling of facial recognition for its glasses.
The episode adds a concrete vendor and a removal to a controversy that regulators are already pursuing. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has opened an investigation into Meta’s glasses over biometric privacy, and privacy groups have pressed the company to abandon face recognition on the devices. The Rank One licensing shows how far the testing had progressed before Meta stepped back.
Meta has characterized its work on the technology as exploration rather than a shipped product decision, and the Rank One code is no longer present in the app.
Sources: WIRED
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
