THE FUSE

Just twenty-four hours after Wired exposed dormant facial recognition code inside Meta’s smart glasses companion app, the tech giant quietly pushed a software update to purge the software. Discovered on June 4, the internal code, dubbed “Name Tag”, was embedded within the core Meta AI application required to pair the wearable hardware to smartphones over Bluetooth. The tool was engineered to convert captured faces into biometric identifiers stored on-device, automatically cross-referencing them with every new facial scan. By June 5, the entire framework was erased.