Edited by: Swastika Das Sharma
The lawsuit alleges Meta went well beyond developing the software to merely capture faces. The complainants cited two Meta employees, who claimed that NameTag could identify people through their public Instagram accounts or connections. The complaint further alleges that Meta’s generative AI systems, Emu and Muse Image, harvested biometric information of people whose images were used by the company to train them.
It says that those photos have possibly been taken from Facebook and Instagram images.
NameTag’s existence was revealed by a WIRED report in June, when it said that there was an inactive code for the system in the Meta AI app. Meta is facing yet another lawsuit, this time for allegedly illegally using users’ Facebook and Instagram photos for facial recognition. The case, filed by a set of parents and their children in Illinois and California, alleged that Meta used their Facebook and Instagram photos without consent and fed the data to NameTag, an unreleased facial recognition system for its new AI glasses. The lawsuit further alleges that the photos were used to train generative AI models, including Emu and Muse Image, without taking their consent. It could then compare it with other faceprints on the wearer’s phone.
Analysts at the time determined that the system was designed so that it could turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures or a faceprint.
