Meta Tapped a Pentagon Supplier to Prototype Face Recognition for Its Glasses

Source: Wired

The arrangement is documented in a software license, obtained by WIRED, that was issued by Rank One Computing—a Denver-based company that derives roughly 80 percent of its revenue from government clients—and 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 bought 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. Police departments across the country use its algorithms too, embedded in tools they buy from other vendors.

The license is the first known evidence of a business relationship between Meta and Rank One, and it offers a rare look at the kind of technology Meta is weighing as it considers face recognition for a mass-market consumer device. It also shows how thin the line has grown between the surveillance technology sold to law enforcement and the military and the consumer products sold to everyone else.

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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 remains 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.

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Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/meta-rank-one-computing-face-recognition-smart-glasses/