Back in 2010, Facebook launched a massive face-recognition system that scanned billions of photos and suggested tags for people. It drew lawsuits, regulatory scrutiny, and eventually cost Meta over $2 billion in settlements. In 2021, the company announced it was shutting the whole thing down and deleting more than a billion faceprints.
Now, according to a WIRED investigation, Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition code for its smart glasses into an app downloaded over 50 million times. The feature, internally called "NameTag," can identify people captured by the glasses' camera and alert the wearer when it recognizes someone.
As early as January, core components of NameTag were reportedly integrated into the Meta AI companion app, the one users need to manage Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. Per the WIRED report, the underlying technology has already been distributed through an app downloaded more than 50 million times. Three AI models are now present inside the app: one detects faces, another crops them, and a third converts them into biometric identifiers known as faceprints. Two security researchers who reviewed WIRED's findings said the feature appears close to deployment.
If activated, the system would check each face against a database stored on the user's phone. Recognized faces trigger notifications. The rest get saved to a "pending" folder.
A May version of the app rebrands the feature as "Connections," inviting users to "remember the people you met."
Ejiro Onose
After the report, spokesperson Ryan Daniels pushed back, saying: "Nothing has shipped to consumers, and no final decision has been made... We are not building a central face database." Meta said the code identified by WIRED was evidence that the company is merely "exploring" the technology and that no consumer-facing feature has been launched.
But internal Meta documents published by The New York Times in February showed the company had planned to roll out NameTag during a "dynamic political environment," when its biggest critics would be preoccupied.
Concerns about the technology had already been building before WIRED's report. In May, more than 70 organizations, including the ACLU and Fight for the Future, urged Meta to abandon any plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses, warning that the technology could enable widespread identification of people in public spaces without their consent.
Joseph Jerome, a former Meta Reality Labs policy official, told WIRED: "I don't know how Meta can responsibly deploy a technology like this."
Privacy advocates argue that embedding facial recognition into mass-market wearables could normalize a technology Meta previously abandoned amid growing public and regulatory concerns. Cooper Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it bluntly: "Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine."
The concern isn't just whether smart glasses can identify people but what happens when that capability becomes embedded in devices designed to be worn throughout the day. Unlike a smartphone camera, smart glasses can continuously observe the world around their users. Privacy advocates worry that adding facial recognition to that stream could make identification and surveillance feel routine. Meta insists no decision has been made, but the discovery of NameTag's underlying infrastructure suggests the debate is no longer purely theoretical.
Ogbonda Chivumnovu
