Meta Renews Work on Facial Recognition Tech as Privacy Worries Fade

With less aggressive regulators in Washington, Meta Platforms, Google and other Silicon Valley companies feel emboldened to reconsider user-privacy strategies.

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Back in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg and other top Facebook executives were dreaming big about how to design the company’s first generation of smart glasses. One feature they considered adding to them was facial recognition, which would have allowed someone wearing the glasses to, say, identify a person they bumped into at a party. Ultimately, though, Zuckerberg and the others discarded the idea, which presented a mountain of both technical challenges and ethical questions about privacy invasion.

That was then. Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms, is once again actively working on facial recognition: Earlier this year, the company discussed adding software that could identify people by name to its smart glasses and other devices, such as artificial intelligence-powered earphones with cameras, according to three people involved in discussions about the feature.

Meta isn’t the only tech company rethinking its privacy decisions.

In January, Google offered buyouts to employees working on Privacy Sandbox, according to a current employee. The project, once a high-priority initiative, had been set up to eliminate cookies from its Chrome browser without devastating the digital ads market, which has relied on cookies to track users.