It seems that Meta is highly concerned about potential backlash to its use of facial ID in more applications. The company has removed its face ID functionality from the back-end code of its AI glasses after recent reporting on its inclusion. Last week, Wired reported that Meta had quietly added facial ID code elements into its Meta AI app. The elements were not active, but had been inserted in the codebase, seemingly with a view to future activation. Which is no surprise. In February, reports circulated that Meta was planning to add facial recognition to its artificial intelligence-powered sunglasses, as a means to enhance connection despite the privacy concerns. The inclusion of this in the Meta AI app aligns with that reporting. However, Meta responded angrily to Wired’s report, with Andy Stone, Meta’s spokesperson, saying in a June 4 post on X that Wired’s report was “shoddy,” “intellectually dishonest” and “pure advocacy-driven click bait.” Meta’s decision to criticize the reporting came before the company removed the code, seemingly as a means to invalidate the report. However, the evidence would suggest that Meta wants to add face ID to its AI device. It just wants to do so without sparking a massive PR backlash, which could potentially derail its evolving AI business. Meta’s hesitance here is logical, given its history with facial recognition elements. In 2021, Meta was forced to shut down its facial recognition processes on Facebook, after user backlash around the automated detection of faces in images, particularly via photo tagging. That sparked a large-scale investigation into the privacy concerns around face ID and the troves of data that Meta had been collecting, through this and other means. This, of course, also built on the Cambridge Analytica controversy, which had already led to various investigations into Meta’s data tracking.