Meta has embedded facial recognition code into software used by its smart glasses, according to an investigation by Wired, which was confirmed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Threat Lab on Thursday. Though the feature isn't yet turned on for consumers, it's sitting in the Meta AI smartphone app.
Wired reports that Meta quietly added the facial-recognition components as early as January over multiple updates to its Meta AI companion app -- which has been downloaded more than 50 million times. The feature, under the internal designation "NameTag," would let the Meta smart glasses biometrically identify anyone in view and notify the wearer with information about that person.
When the feature is activated, Wired reports, "it will transform faces captured by Meta's glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user's phone."
In other words, NameTag would store biometric face data in an embedded database architecture that can compare new faceprints to existing ones. The database is designed to live on a user's phone but is configured to receive updates from Meta.
The EFF says the code was verified through static analysis and argues that Meta is moving ahead with surveillance-capable glasses in a way that normalizes biometric tracking without people's consent.
"Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine," EFF's senior staff technologist Cooper Quintin said in its article. "This is just one more reason to think twice before buying or using Meta's surveillance glasses."
Earlier this year, The New York Times reported that Meta was working on these types of features but had not officially announced plans to roll them out.
At the time, CNET's smart glasses and XR expert Scott Stein wrote about his concerns that "Meta's facial recognition is not an if, it's a when," and that the technology would need "to be handled with extreme measures of control and responsibility."
Not long after that, Stein spoke with Meta about its privacy policies for smart glasses and came away "frustrated and uncertain" by a lack of clear guidelines and guardrails.
A new chapter in Meta's privacy scandals #
In an email to CNET, Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said that the code is simply evidence of tech exploration and that no final decisions have been made to launch it to consumers.
"If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency," Daniels wrote. "One decision we can be clear about -- we are not building a central face database."
The company's communications team also posted responses on X, complaining that the Wired article pushed Meta's response too far down.
This recent reveal comes years after Meta had been automatically scanning faces on every photo uploaded to Facebook to power its Tag Suggestions tool. Following legal backlash, Meta agreed to pay $650 million to settle a lawsuit alleging violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires companies to obtain explicit consent before capturing biometric data such as facial scans. In 2021, the tech giant shut down its platform-wide facial recognition system and deleted the faceprint data of more than 1 billion people.
Facial recognition in the smart glasses race #
Meta has partnered with companies such as Ray-Ban and Oakley on its smart glasses, but it faces competition. Google and Samsung recently introduced their own takes on the product category. Apple is said to be shifting away from VR products like the Vision Pro to augmented reality glasses it's developing, but it's not expected to introduce such a product until next year.
The flood of smart glasses is renewing debate about privacy and safety around these devices. Glasses can record video and audio, largely without bystanders noticing -- and thus without their consent -- undermining anonymity in public spaces.
Digital rights experts have long worried about facial recognition tech because biometric data can be abused by governments to track dissidents or used by companies to spy on consumers. It can also be used for public harassment or doxing, or be leaked in data breaches.
If facial recognition software is enabled, it raises additional concerns about what sensitive data is being stored and how it's being used.