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.

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.

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.

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.

What Happened to Your Face? How the human countenance became something to study, edit, optimize, and scan. The physiognomists promised that your character could be read from your features. Certain forms of facial-recognition technology have revived that old fantasy in digital form. Several months ago, my partner and I bought an apartment in South London. Our previous home was a rental in which, for reasons best known to the landlord, there were mirrors everywhere. The bathroom had two; there was one outside on the terrace; in the bedroom, mirrored panels stretched across a twenty-foot-long wall. On moving day, we realized that we had a problem: the new apartment was mirror-free, and because we'd been so spoiled we weren't bringing one of our own. We spent a few days filling our drafty rooms, decanting books, building furniture, and dressing every morning without seeing ourselves in profile. It was a couple of weeks before we bought a simple mirror, wooden and round, to hang above the bathroom sink. By then, I joked, we didn't recognize ourselves.

The new Meta-branded glasses have the same camera, microphones, and chatbot as the Ray-Bans. They come in three styles, one of which was codesigned with Kylie Jenner. Smart glasses are like public transportation, according to Peter Bristol, Meta's vice president of industrial design. "People will use it when it's good enough." To reach "good enough," Meta is making its smart glasses more accessible, more customizable, and comfier to wear.

Synthesizing high-quality 3D head textures is crucial for gaming, virtual reality, and digital humans. Achieving seamless 360 textures typically requires expensive multi-view datasets with precise tracking. However, traditional methods struggle without back-view data or precise geometry, especially for human heads, where even minor inconsistencies disrupt realism. We introduce HairFree, an unsupervised texturing framework guided by textual descriptions and 2D diffusion priors, producing high-consistency 360 bald head textures--including non-human skin with fine details--without any texture, back-view, bald, non-human, or synthetic training data. We fine-tune a diffusion prior on a dataset of mostly frontal faces, conditioned on predicted 3D head geometry and face parsing.