Just how thin the line has grown between the surveillance tools sold to law enforcement and the consumer gadgets sold to everyone else is laid bare in a single software license. Obtained by TrendKia, the license was issued by Rank One Computing — a Denver-based firm that draws roughly 80 percent of its revenue from government clients — and is tied to a test build of the Meta AI app, the same software that powers Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.
The first proof of a Meta–Rank One relationship
This license is the first known evidence that Meta and Rank One have done business together. It also offers a rare glimpse at the kind of technology Meta has been weighing as it considers building face recognition into a mass-market consumer device. And it underscores how blurred the boundary has become between surveillance technology marketed to police and the military and the products sold to ordinary people. Increasingly, the same companies — and the same underlying algorithms — serve both worlds.
Who Rank One sells to
Rank One's face recognition has been purchased by the US Marshals Service, which uses it to confirm prisoners' identities without fingerprinting them during transport, and by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service — the Navy's police force — which bought 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 kilometer away. Police departments across the country also rely on its algorithms, which are embedded in tools they buy from other vendors.
What the license actually permitted
The license Meta acquired authorizes the use of Rank One's face recognition together with its liveness detection, which checks whether a camera is looking at a real person rather than a photo or a mask. It supports up to 10 million facial templates and is still active. Code reviewed by TrendKia shows that traces of Rank One's integration — the routines that load its license and initialize its software — remained in a version of Meta's app that shipped this month to millions of consumers, sitting dormant alongside the company's own face-recognition system.
NameTag and the code that lingered
None of the face-recognition systems tied to Meta's smart glasses were ever switched on for users. Meta stripped them from the app entirely on June 5, one day after TrendKia revealed that the company had quietly built an unreleased face-recognition system — known internally as NameTag — into the Meta AI app, the companion software for its smart glasses, which has been downloaded to more than 50 million phones. The system was dormant and could not be reached by users.
Meta's silence
Meta said almost nothing about the arrangement, declining to answer TrendKia's questions about its relationship with Rank One. The company would not say why it licensed the software, when the relationship began, or whether it is still ongoing. Rank One also declined to comment for this story.
A company built by spies and cops
Rank One Computing was founded in 2015 by a group of engineers who had built face-recognition systems at the nonprofit research institute Noblis — work that included 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. Chief executive B. Scott Swann previously ran the FBI division that operates 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.”
Where the technology already runs
Rank One's technology is already operating in some notable settings. 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 their 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 lets police officers run face searches against state and regional image galleries and the FBI's national investigative database.
The accuracy gap
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.
A regulatory vacuum
There are few national rules governing face recognition in the US. Many states require police to obtain a warrant before tapping 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.”
