Meta walks back facial recognition in Meta AI app

It seems that Meta is highly concerned about potential backlash to its use of facial ID in more applications. The company has removed its face ID functionality from the back-end code of its AI glasses after recent reporting on its inclusion.

Last week, Wired reported that Meta had quietly added facial ID code elements into its Meta AI app. The elements were not active, but had been inserted in the codebase, seemingly with a view to future activation.

Which is no surprise. In February, reports circulated that Meta was planning to add facial recognition to its artificial intelligence-powered sunglasses, as a means to enhance connection despite the privacy concerns.

The inclusion of this in the Meta AI app aligns with that reporting. However, Meta responded angrily to Wired’s report, with Andy Stone, Meta’s spokesperson, saying in a June 4 post on X that Wired’s report was “shoddy,” “intellectually dishonest” and “pure advocacy-driven click bait.”

Meta’s decision to criticize the reporting came before the company removed the code, seemingly as a means to invalidate the report.

However, the evidence would suggest that Meta wants to add face ID to its AI device. It just wants to do so without sparking a massive PR backlash, which could potentially derail its evolving AI business.

Meta’s hesitance here is logical, given its history with facial recognition elements.

In 2021, Meta was forced to shut down its facial recognition processes on Facebook, after user backlash around the automated detection of faces in images, particularly via photo tagging.

That sparked a large-scale investigation into the privacy concerns around face ID and the troves of data that Meta had been collecting, through this and other means.

This, of course, also built on the Cambridge Analytica controversy, which had already led to various investigations into Meta’s data tracking.

Indeed, the controversy was so damaging that it forced Meta to rename the business (from Facebook to Meta), in an effort to distance itself from its failings and, ideally, start afresh.

As such, it makes sense that Meta would be particularly sensitive to this element, and to negative coverage of its push to reintroduce face ID. That said, Meta has been gradually bringing back facial recognition in different forms, including for account security purposes.  

The company has just been doing so quietly and carefully, in order to limit blowback.

According to a February report from the New York Times, Meta has specifically been seeking to sneak through its facial recognition updates amid broader political turmoil, in order to avoid detection.  

According to NYT, an internal communication from within Meta explained: “We will launch [face ID on AI glasses] 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.”

The face ID update, Meta said, would let wearers of its AI glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.

Seemingly, this recent code change was the latest step in that push, but Meta is apparently hoping that its public protest against Wired’s reporting will enable it to dismiss the suggestion, and quell potential concerns by questioning the credibility of such.

This has become a familiar tactic in modern politics, and it will be interesting to see just how long it takes for Meta to either implement face ID, or choose to shelve it.