In the face of AI content, profiles and slop, Meta hopes a new Facebook Verified program will help human users interact with other humans. Based on a facial recognition selfie, checked against your existing profile pics, the company says the process will only take a few minutes. Interestingly, Meta has chosen to use facial recognition, given recent legal settlements and the pushback over facial recognition inside its smartglasses . To qualify, you will have to be over 18 and in good standing with Facebook's community standards. Once you've passed the test, your verified badge will appear across Marketplace, Dating and other parts of Facebook's sites and services. The big difference between this and the Facebook badge of old is that it's explicitly only identity confirmation, not endorsement, from Facebook or any guarantee of their trustworthiness.

Trump's 50 percent Canada tariffs: What to know Rally attendee steals the show by mimicking Trump's gestures NewsFeed Rally attendee steals the show by mimicking Trump's gestures A rally attendee seated directly behind US President Donald Trump drew attention by appearing to mimic the president's signature hand gestures and facial expressions throughout a campaign speech in Marietta, Georgia. Is this Italy's'George Floyd moment'?

A new toolkit for attorneys in Massachusetts targets the technologies police use--and conceal--to build criminal cases, from facial recognition to AI-written police reports. The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts says it's releasing an online toolkit this week for criminal defense attorneys designed to uncover whether police used surveillance technologies --facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and more--to build the cases against their clients in secret. The toolkit, which the group describes as the first of its kind, is built around handcrafted legal motions that, when granted by a judge, will force prosecutors to reveal whether surveillance technology was used against a defendant. It covers an array of technologies, from "stingray" phone trackers and location data sold by commercial brokers to AI-drafted police reports and forensic tools that crack phones and siphon data from car infotainment systems. It also includes preservation motions--demands that surveillance data be saved before it is deleted automatically--aimed at government agencies and private vendors alike.

The City Attorney's Office sent the tech giants cease-and-desist letters this week telling them to stop profiting from 13 "face-swap" apps that are overwhelmingly used to target women and girls. Apple and Google have been ordered to take down apps that can "nudify" or "undress" people and told that they must stop profiting from the harmful technology, according to cease-and-desist letters sent to the companies seen by WIRED. On Thursday, San Francisco city attorney David Chiu sent legal notices to Apple and Google demanding that they remove from their app stores 13 face-swapping apps, which allow users to create AI-generated nonconsensual nude images. The letters say the Silicon Valley giants should stop "aiding and abetting" the sale of explicit deepfake images and "sever" business relationships with the app developers. "Generating non-consensual intimate images is illegal, harmful, and completely unacceptable," Chiu tells WIRED.

Models wearing garments created by Cap_able, which which markets them as making AI recognition more difficult. Models wearing garments created by Cap_able, which which markets them as making AI recognition more difficult. 'Adversarial clothing': are garments designed to confuse facial recognition systems about to go mainstream? As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain's public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend. Companies have started incorporating "adversarial patterns" in their garments - carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.

The defendant used Grok to create sexualized images of adults and children, xAI says. SpaceXAI (as xAI) has filed a lawsuit against Terry Wayne Harwood, a 67-year-old man from South Carolina whom the company has accused of using Grok to generate sexual images of real people without their consent. In the complaint that xAI filed in Texas, it said that the defendant uploaded non-sexual images of numerous adults and minors to his two xAI accounts from December 8, 2025 until February 18, 2026. He then asked Grok to alter the photos or to create new images and videos depicting the adults and children in them in a pornographic manner or otherwise sexualizing them. The company said that Grok refused to follow his prompts on numerous occasions but that he repeatedly submitted edited prompts to circumvent the AI's safeguards. In one example mentioned in the filing, xAI said Harwood uploaded the photo of a fully dressed girl around 10 to 11 years old and then asked Grok to remove all of her clothing and make her do a Playboy model impression as she laid in bed.

A facial recognition system has been introduced at ticket gates at Ikebukuro Station on the Tobu Tojo Line in Tokyo. Hitachi and Tobu Railway on Wednesday introduced a facial recognition system at ticket gates at Ikebukuro Station in Tokyo's Toshima Ward. Passengers can pass through the ticket gates hands-free if they register their facial data and commuter pass information in advance. The companies hope to encourage other railway operators to adopt the system, which can be installed by simply adding cameras and other equipment to existing ticket gates. The system was jointly developed in cooperation with three ticket gate manufacturers, including Toshiba. This is the first time that the system has been installed at a major terminal station in Tokyo.

Since WIRED reported on Meta's NameTag face recognition system, company executives have made confusing and conflicting remarks about its very existence. Does a software feature exist if its code has been deployed to the devices of millions of people but they can't use it yet? Not if you work at Meta . The company's executives have spent the last few weeks making this semantic argument about NameTag, the in-development face-recognition system that Meta built for its smart glasses . The inevitable result is confusion, but that's easy enough to clear up.

Customers inside a B&M store, which is one of more than 100 businesses that will be using the technology. Customers inside a B&M store, which is one of more than 100 businesses that will be using the technology. Civil liberties groups say Facewatch system in stores such as Sainsbury's and B&M is'dangerous escalation' Fri 10 Jul 2026 06.19 EDTLast modified on Fri 10 Jul 2026 06.57 Facial recognition technology in shops will soon alert police in real time to the presence of serious offenders, with civil liberties groups warning of a "dangerous escalation" towards surveillance and criminalisation in the retail sector. Facewatch, a facial recognition system used by more than 100 businesses including Sainsbury's, B&M and Spar to monitor thieves, said it was launching a UK-first feature to "alert police instantly when the most serious offenders trigger a live facial recognition match".

Bees seem to show when they are pleased and like something, rather than just needing it, in one of the strongest signs yet that insects have subjective experiences. In recent decades, it has become clear that bees are capable of more complex behaviours than we previously thought, such as counting and demonstrating a sense of rhythm . But discerning whether they have inner states akin to our emotions is more difficult. For one thing, insects don't have the flexible facial musculature of mammals, which we use to communicate our feelings. "How can we get any behavioural readout of these insects with a hard body and their mask of a face," asks Andrew Barron at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.