Glasses with facial recognition technology from Meta linked to a Pentagon contractor.
According to an investigation by WIRED, the Meta face recognition system for its smart glasses was developed using software licensed from Rank One Computing, a contractor for the Pentagon and police forces. Reporters Dell Cameron and Dhruv Mehrotra uncovered a leaked, active license connecting Meta to a vendor that generates roughly 80 percent of its revenue from government clients. Rank One is not a typical consumer startup.
Established in 2015 and newly listed on Nasdaq this past February, the Denver-based company provides face recognition services to US law enforcement and military. Its technology has been used to verify prisoners for the US Marshals Service since 2021; the Navy’s criminal investigators purchased its video tool; and US Special Operations Command funded work that, according to the company, can identify a face from as far away as one kilometer. The company's board includes numerous former officials from the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon, and its CEO previously headed the FBI division responsible for managing the bureau’s biometric databases.
As for the Meta face recognition code, it has already been removed. This issue arises amid a narrative that Meta believed was concluded. WIRED reported on June 5 that Meta’s AI companion app, present on over 50 million devices, contained an inactive face-recognition pipeline, referred to internally as NameTag, capable of converting a glance through the glasses into a name. Meta removed the code the following day.
However, the source of this technology was not disclosed. The Rank One license, which WIRED claims covers up to 10 million facial templates, was dormant within the app alongside Meta’s own face-recognition system and was never activated for users.
This detail is significant given Meta's public statements. The company asserts that it will not implement face recognition in its Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses without stringent privacy safeguards and turned off Facebook’s photo-tagging feature in 2021. Covertly licensing a military-grade technology to prototype that feature highlights the disparity between the company's stated intentions and its actual development. The combination of continuously recording camera glasses with this type of recognition is a scenario that privacy advocates have cautioned against for years: identifying a stranger in public in real time, without consent.
Concerns about the technology itself extend beyond public perception. In testing by NIST, a version of Rank One’s algorithm showed significantly different false match rates based on sex and country of birth, a proxy for race, with higher error rates for women. The US lacks comprehensive national regulations on face recognition.
Meta did not provide details about the rationale for licensing the software, the initiation of the relationship, or its ongoing status; Rank One also chose not to comment. The uncomfortable conclusion is clear: the technology capable of associating a name with every face you encounter has been licensed and tested, leaving the primary question about who will deploy it first and under what legal framework.
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Glasses with facial recognition technology from Meta linked to a Pentagon contractor.
According to WIRED, Meta acquired the facial recognition technology for its smart glasses from Rank One, a contractor for the Pentagon that derives 80% of its revenue from government contracts.