The proposed class action alleges Meta illegally harvested people's Facebook and Instagram photos to train its AI image-generation models and to build its unreleased "NameTag" face recognition feature. A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models including Emu and Muse Image . The proposed class action alleges that Meta violated Illinois and California privacy laws by extracting biometric information from people's photos without notice or consent. WIRED reported in June that code for NameTag had been secretly embedded in the Meta glasses AI companion app, which had been downloaded more than 50 million times. While the feature had not been enabled for users of the app, the analysis found that the system was designed to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures and compare them with so-called faceprints stored in a database on the user's phone.

InquiryIQ, a previously unreported prototype, tested a model from xAI, maker of Grok, to surface associates, social accounts, and other information about people identified through Clearview. In 2020, face-recognition firm Clearview AI became infamous for scraping more than 3 billion photos from the internet to turn faces into names for police and security professionals. Now the company is experimenting with trawling the web again, this time using AI to potentially help law enforcement fill in the person behind the name--who they are, who they know, where they live, and what they've left behind online. Clearview has quietly built and tested what it describes as an experimental AI "analyst assistant," WIRED has learned. Called InquiryIQ, the unreleased tool is designed to take details an investigator unearths from a Clearview search and then automatically fan out across the web--opening webpages, analyzing images, and assembling what it finds into a profile containing the possible employers, aliases, associates, and physical characteristics of a person police are investigating. InquiryIQ's interface states that supplying age, gender, and race can help the system make "smarter decisions" as it searches, according to code for the tool analyzed by WIRED.

To keep scammers at bay, dating apps are embracing biometric scanning tools and “verified human” badges. These moves are sparking concerns about surveillance and privacy.

Services using facial recognition technology are expanding in Japan, allowing, for example, touchless or ticketless entry through train station gates and payments at shops without the need to take out a wallet or a credit card. Expectations are growing that the evolution of artificial intelligence will improve accuracy of facial recognition systems and help reduce fraud. Meanwhile, concerns about privacy violations persist, making thorough user information management essential. Trial Holdings, which runs discount stores and other operations, has introduced a payment service using NEC's facial recognition technology at 15 stores in Tokyo and Fukuoka Prefecture. Advance registration allows customers to shop simply by scanning goods at the self-checkout counter without using cash or smartphone payment services.

'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. 'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. Did someone wearing Meta Glasses film you today? People say they've been secretly filmed in their own home, at concerts and at work. Are the wildly popular smartglasses the final nail in the coffin of personal privacy? The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. "I've had one person who told me that their intentions were creepy," a man tells me over a video call, on condition of anonymity.

New York City Lawmakers Push to'Ban the Scan' at MSG At a press conference outside Madison Square Garden, politicians, musicians, and privacy advocates argued for tighter restrictions on how public venues deploy biometric surveillance. Privacy advocates and musicians rallied outside Madison Square Garden on Friday, pushing for new legislation to prevent facial-recognition technology at the venue and other public spaces in New York City. "MSG and its CEO, James Dolan, have been flagrantly abusing biotechnology," City Council member Shahana Hanif said at the event on Friday, after leading a chant of "ban the scan." In January, Hanif proposed a bill that would prohibit public venues from using biometric recognition tech such as Madison Square Garden's facial-recognition systems. Madison Square Garden is well-known for its biometric data collection practices .

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents have reportedly misused electronic databases to spy on family members, try to get dates and even provide intelligence to suspected drug traffickers, according to freedom of information (FOIA) files seen by Wired. Officers allegedly abused databases that can draw from sources like license plate readers, facial recognition and smartphone searches to violate the privacy of numerous individuals. A CBP officer is alleged to have used a government database to contact a flight attendant, and another was accused of using data from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. One employee provided border-crossing data to someone involved in a divorce, and another abused internal policies by tracking coworkers cellphones with ad-tech-derived location data. Of 300 incidents tracked by Wired, 138 were referred to CBP management and 78 assigned to criminal investigators, while 43 others weren't investigated.

Records obtained by WIRED detail hundreds of allegations of Customs and Border Protection workers misusing internal tools to look up romantic interests and track colleagues' cell phones. Internal records obtained by WIRED reveal how, for years, United States Customs and Border Protection employees and contractors were accused of abusing sensitive government databases for reasons that had nothing to do with their jobs. The records contain hundreds of allegations of misuse of law enforcement databases, including federal agents querying data to look up romantic interests, monitor family members, expose various personal information and, in some cases, provide intelligence to suspected smugglers or drug-trafficking organizations. Acquired through Freedom of Information Act requests to CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General, the records reveal the breadth of alleged database abuse by CBP employees spanning more than a decade. As immigration and border authorities expand their surveillance through facial recognition, license plate readers, mobile-device searches, and commercially purchased location information generated by ordinary apps, the sheer range of these records, which date from 2009 through 2022, highlights how US residents can be--and have been--targeted by federal government employees with access to highly sensitive data and powerful tools.

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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.