Meta has quietly scrubbed facial recognition code from its smart glasses companion app following a WIRED investigation that exposed the feature's existence. The code, discovered in Meta AI—the app that powers the company's Ray-Ban smart glasses—vanished in the latest update, but Meta refuses to say whether it was experimental, accidental, or planned for future deployment. The move raises fresh questions about what AI capabilities tech giants are building into wearable devices that can record people without obvious consent indicators. Meta just got caught with its hand in the biometric cookie jar—and the company's silence is almost as revealing as the code itself. Investigative reporters at WIRED discovered facial recognition capabilities embedded in Meta AI, the companion app that controls Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. The code suggested Meta was either testing or preparing to deploy face-matching technology that could identify people captured through the glasses' cameras. Within days of WIRED's inquiry, that code disappeared from the app entirely. Meta's response? Radio silence on the specifics. The company won't confirm whether the feature was an abandoned experiment, an accidental inclusion, or a planned capability that got exposed too early. That opacity is triggering alarm bells among privacy advocates who've long warned about the dangers of normalizing always-on recording devices. The timing couldn't be more awkward for Meta. The company has spent years rebuilding trust after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and has repeatedly promised transparency around its AI development. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has positioned Meta's smart glasses as a privacy-conscious alternative to more intrusive wearables, emphasizing that a recording light alerts bystanders when the camera is active. But facial recognition changes the equation entirely. While recording someone in public might be legal, automatically identifying and cataloging faces crosses into surveillance territory that makes even tech-friendly regulators nervous. The EU's AI Act specifically classifies