Meta tests Pentagon-linked face recognition for smart glasses

At a glance:

• Meta is testing face-recognition software from Rank One Computing, a company that supplies surveillance tools to police and the military.
• The technology, including liveness detection, is linked to a test version of the Meta AI app for Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.
• The face-recognition system was dormant and has since been removed from the app.

A Pentagon Connection in Consumer Tech

Meta is testing face-recognition software developed by Rank One Computing, a Denver-based company that derives roughly 80% of its revenue from government clients, including the US Marshals Service and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The arrangement, documented in a software license obtained by WIRED, is tied to a test version of the Meta AI app that powers Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. Rank One's face recognition has been purchased by the US Marshals Service, which uses it to confirm prisoners' identities without fingerprinting them during transport, and by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service—the Navy's police force—which purchased the company's video tool, ROC Watch. Rank One developed long-range face recognition for US Special Operations Command under a government research contract, saying its software could identify a face from as far as a kilometer away.

Blurred Lines Between Surveillance and Consumer Tech

The license Meta acquired authorizes use of Rank One's face recognition along with its liveness detection, which checks whether a camera is seeing a real person rather than a photo or mask. It supports up to 10 million facial templates and remained active. Code reviewed by WIRED shows that remnants of Rank One's integration—the routines that load its license and initialize its software—remained in a version of Meta's app that shipped this month, dormant, to millions of consumers, alongside the company's own face-recognition system. None of the face-recognition systems tied to Meta's smart glasses were ever active for users. Meta deleted them from the app entirely on June 5, a day after WIRED revealed that the company had quietly built an unreleased face-recognition system, internally called NameTag, into the Meta AI app—the companion software for its smart glasses, downloaded to more than 50 million phones. The system was dormant and could not be accessed by users.

Leadership with Deep Government Ties

Rank One Computing was founded in 2015 by a group of engineers who had built face-recognition systems at the nonprofit research institute Noblis—work that included evaluating algorithms for a US intelligence research agency. The company went public on the Nasdaq in February. Rank One's leadership is drawn from the senior ranks of law enforcement and intelligence. Its chief executive, B. Scott Swann, previously ran the FBI division that operates the bureau's biometric databases. Its board includes a former CIA deputy director for science and technology, a former head of the FBI's science and technology branch, and a former Pentagon official who stood up a multibillion-dollar special-capabilities office.

Accuracy Concerns and Privacy Risks

Like other face-recognition systems, Rank One's does not perform equally across demographic groups. In testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a version of the company's algorithm produced false matches at sharply different rates depending on a person's sex and country of birth, which NIST uses as a proxy for race. Error rates were lowest for people born in Eastern Europe and tended to run higher for women than for men. There are few national rules governing face recognition in the US. Many states require police to get a warrant before accessing such data, and more are folding biometric protections into their general consumer-privacy laws each year. "But consumer-facing companies clearly crave access to high-powered facial recognition technology," he says. "And without proper checks, the risks of this tech becoming a common consumer product are significant and largely unbounded."

Meta's Silence and the Broader Trend

Meta would say almost nothing about the arrangement, declining to answer WIRED's questions about its relationship with Rank One. Meta would not say why it licensed the software, when the relationship began, or whether it is ongoing. Rank One declined to comment for this story. "There's a long history of military technologies becoming consumer products," says Joseph Jerome, a former Meta Reality Labs policy official. "That's arguably the story of the internet."

Police and Schools Also Use the Technology

The US Marshals Service has used a biometric identification kit built on Rank One's technology since 2021. In West Virginia, dozens of schools have used the software to screen faces at their entrances against the state's sex-offender registry, the company's CEO said in 2014. Its algorithm is also bundled inside products from DataWorks Plus, a South Carolina firm, and inside LexisNexis's Lumen platform, which lets police officers run face searches against state and regional image galleries and the FBI's national investigative database.