As someone who gets greeted alarmingly often by people whose names I ought to remember but don't (I'm a minor community leader but am bad with names), I've wanted a device like this for 20+ years. I'm a little sad about the concept being vilified.
On the other hand, as an advocate for both privacy and Free Software, I always imagined it as being completely self-hosted and only adding people's names/faces to its database when I'm introduced to them in person. I'm not at all sad about the particular implementation being vilified.