For makers and artists building the future with smart eyewear, the implications are stark: the same algorithms policing our streets and tracking our movements are now being quietly integrated into consumer hardware. Meta has licensed face-recognition software from Rank One Computing, a firm that derives roughly 80 per cent of its revenue from government clients, specifically for its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. This arrangement, documented in a software license obtained by WIRED, ties the technology to a test version of the Meta AI app.
The Surveillance Pipeline
Rank One’s capabilities are not new to the security sector. The US Marshals Service purchased its tools to confirm prisoners’ identities without fingerprinting during transport, while the Naval Criminal Investigative Service acquired the company’s video tool, ROC Watch. Under a government research contract, Rank One developed long-range face recognition for US Special Operations Command, claiming its software could identify a face from as far as a kilometre away. These algorithms are also embedded in tools bought by police departments across the country.
This license represents the first known evidence of a business relationship between Meta and Rank One, offering a rare glimpse at the technology Meta is weighing for a mass-market device. It highlights how thin the line has grown between surveillance tech sold to law enforcement and the military and the consumer products sold to everyone else. Increasingly, the same companies and underlying algorithms serve both.
Code in the Wild
The license authorizes the use of Rank One’s face recognition alongside its liveness detection, which verifies whether a camera sees a real person rather than a photo or mask. The system supports up to 10 million facial templates and remains active. Code reviewed by WIRED reveals that remnants of Rank One’s integration-the routines loading its license and initializing its software-remained in a version of Meta’s app that shipped this month. These were dormant alongside the company’s own face-recognition system.
None of these systems were ever active for users. Meta deleted them from the app entirely on June 5, a day after WIRED revealed that the company had quietly built an unreleased face-recognition system, internally called NameTag, into the Meta AI app. The system was dormant and inaccessible to users.
Corporate Silence
Meta declined to answer WIRED’s questions about its relationship with Rank One, refusing to state why it licensed the software, when the relationship began, or whether it is ongoing. Rank One also declined to comment for this story.
Deep State Roots
Rank One Computing was founded in 2015 by engineers who previously built face-recognition systems at the nonprofit research institute Noblis, including work evaluating algorithms for a US intelligence research agency. The company went public on the Nasdaq in February. Its leadership is drawn from the senior ranks of law enforcement and intelligence. Its chief executive, B. Scott Swann, previously ran the FBI division operating the bureau’s biometric databases. Its board includes a former CIA deputy director for science and technology, a former head of the FBI’s science and technology branch, and a former Pentagon official who stood up a multibillion-dollar special-capabilities office.
“There’s a long history of military technologies becoming consumer products,” says Joseph Jerome, a former Meta Reality Labs policy official. “That’s arguably the story of the internet.”
Real-World Deployments
Rank One’s technology is already running in notable locations. The US Marshals Service has used a biometric identification kit built on Rank One’s technology since 2021. In West Virginia, dozens of schools have used the software to screen faces at entrances against the state’s sex-offender registry, the company’s CEO said in 2024. Its algorithm is also bundled inside products from DataWorks Plus, a South Carolina firm, and inside LexisNexis’s Lumen platform, which allows police officers to run face searches against state and regional image galleries and the FBI’s national investigative database.
Biased Outcomes
Like other face-recognition systems, Rank One’s does not perform equally across demographic groups. In testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a version of the company’s algorithm produced false matches at sharply different rates depending on a person’s sex and country of birth, which NIST uses as a proxy for race. Error rates were lowest for people born in Eastern Europe and tended to run higher for women than for men.
There are few national rules governing face recognition in the US. Many states require police to get a warrant before accessing such data, and more are folding biometric protections into their general consumer-privacy laws each year, says Eric Null, director of the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.
“But consumer-facing companies clearly crave access to high-powered facial recognition technology,” he says. “And without proper checks, the risks of this tech becoming a common consumer product are significant and largely unbounded.”
Key takeaways
- Meta has licensed face-recognition software from Rank One Computing, a firm heavily reliant on government contracts, for its smart glasses, raising concerns about the flow of surveillance tech into consumer devices.
- Code analysis reveals dormant remnants of Rank One’s integration were shipped to millions of consumers alongside Meta’s own system before being deleted on June 5.
- Rank One’s leadership includes former FBI, CIA, and Pentagon officials, reinforcing the trend of military and law enforcement algorithms migrating to the public market.
- Independent testing shows significant bias in Rank One’s algorithms, with higher error rates for women and individuals born outside Eastern Europe.
