Meta's face recognition glasses linked to a vendor of the Pentagon.
According to an investigation by WIRED, the face recognition system for Meta's 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, still-active license linking Meta to a vendor that derives approximately 80 percent of its income from government clients. Rank One is not a startup aimed at consumers.
Founded in 2015 and recently listed on Nasdaq this past February, the Denver-based firm provides face recognition services for US law enforcement and the military. Its technology has been used to verify prisoners for the US Marshals Service since 2021; the Navy's criminal investigators have acquired its video tool; and US Special Operations Command has funded projects claiming the ability to identify faces from up to a kilometer away. The company's board is comprised of former officials from the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon, and its CEO previously managed the FBI division responsible for maintaining the bureau's biometric databases.
Meta has already removed the face recognition code, which adds to a narrative the company hoped had concluded. WIRED reported on June 5 that Meta’s AI companion app, found on over 50 million devices, included a dormant face-recognition component internally referred to as NameTag, capable of turning a glance through the glasses into a name. Meta deleted this code the following day.
However, the company did not disclose the origin of the technology. The Rank One license, which WIRED indicates can support up to 10 million facial templates, served as a dormant feature within the app, sitting alongside Meta's own face-recognition system that was never activated for users.
This detail is significant, given Meta's public stance. The company maintains that it will not incorporate face recognition into its Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses without strong privacy protections and discontinued Facebook's photo-tagging feature in 2021. The quiet licensing of a military-grade technology to prototype this very functionality highlights the disconnect between the company's stated policies and its actions. The combination of always-on camera glasses with such recognition technology presents the privacy risk that experts have warned about for years: identifying individuals on the street in real time without their consent.
There are legitimate concerns about the technology itself, not merely its political implications. In testing by NIST, a version of Rank One’s algorithm demonstrated varying rates of false matches based on sex and country of birth—proxy indicators for race—with higher error rates for women. The US currently lacks comprehensive national regulations regarding face recognition.
Meta did not provide information on why it licensed the software, when this relationship began, or whether it is ongoing; Rank One chose not to comment. The unsettling takeaway is clear: the technology capable of identifying every face you see has been licensed and tested, with the primary remaining question being who will deploy it first and under what legal conditions.
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Meta's face recognition glasses linked to a vendor of the Pentagon.
Meta obtained the face recognition technology for its smart glasses from Rank One, a contractor for the Pentagon that generates 80% of its revenue from government contracts, according to WIRED.