Meta's ships facial recognition on smart glasses
A security researcher discovered that Meta's smart glasses companion app contains a fully functional, though currently gated, facial recognition stack. While the code is present and capable of biometric identification, there is no evidence it is active for standard users.
Why it matters
This raises significant privacy concerns regarding the potential for wearable technology to perform real-time, on-device biometric surveillance.
Stella is the companion app for Meta's smart glasses. Inspecting version 273.0.0.21 of the Android build ( com.facebook.stella ), I found the entire computational and storage stack for on-device facial recognition: three face models, a local database schema, a cosine-similarity vector index dimensioned to match the models, a write path that stages biometric records to disk, a fully wired notification surface, and a user-facing "Connections" widget.
The author presents technical findings while explicitly clarifying what they can and cannot prove, maintaining a neutral tone.
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