Wired finds facial recognition code hidden in Meta's AI app

Wired dug into Meta's AI app code and found something Meta hadn't announced yet. Facial recognition. The researchers spotted the unreleased feature sitting in the app's codebase, dormant but ready to go whenever the company decides to flip the switch. So why include code for something that's not live? That's the real question here.

Meta hasn't exactly been transparent about what's coming down the pipeline. The company has walked a thin line with facial recognition before—it shut down its photo tagging system years ago after privacy concerns, but it never stopped building the underlying tech. Finding this code suggests they're preparing to bring it back in some form, at least experimentally. The discovery raises the obvious concern: what else is hiding in there that we don't know about?

The timing matters too. As regulators worldwide tighten their grip on AI transparency and data practices, Meta's moving forward with facial recognition features anyway. Whether this gets released quietly as an optional setting or becomes a major feature rollout, users probably won't see much fanfare about it. That's how these things usually go.