Welcome to Tech Beat, your daily briefing on the stories shaping our digital world.
Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition code into the platform powering its smart glasses, and millions of phones are already carrying it. Code reviewed by WIRED reveals the system is designed to identify people using biometric data stored on the device — without any public announcement from the company.
Turning to politics and money, crypto interests are making a serious move into British democracy. Tether investor Christopher Harborne and BitMEX co-founder Ben Delo together donated nine point four million dollars to Nigel Farage's Reform UK in the first quarter of the year, outspending the traditional donor base of every major British party and raising fresh questions about where political financing is heading.
And a quieter but telling story for anyone who codes with AI assistance — a developer published a detailed account of how a large language model confidently talked them into breaking their own working code. The piece is a sober reminder that these tools can be persuasive in exactly the wrong direction, presenting false certainty with the same fluency they use when they're actually right.
Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
