Only traces of the user interface are currently present, hinting at how the feature may ultimately work. A May version of the app rebrands the feature for users as “Connections”, inviting them to “remember the people you met.” It remains unclear whose faces will be included in the system’s recognition database, how those profiles are created or how many people could ultimately be identifiable through it.
WIRED shared its findings with two outside security researchers who separately examined the app and reproduced key aspects of the analysis: Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab, and an independent security and privacy researcher who goes by the pseudonym Buchodi and has spent more than a decade reverse engineering consumer software and surveillance technologies.
“The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go,” says Quintin. “Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.”
Buchodi ran additional tests on the recognition pipeline. (Read their technical analysis here.) To see if the matching system worked, Buchodi added a single faceprint to the app’s gallery, taken from the deceased French philosopher Michel Foucault. After triggering NameTag with Foucault’s image, the app produced a notification: “Person recognized.”
“The main components of a face-recognition feature are already in Meta’s companion app,” Buchodi says. “Not many pieces stand between this and a working feature.”
In April, more than 70 advocacy groups – including the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Privacy Information Center and Fight for the Future – demanded Meta scrap NameTag, warning it would let stalkers and abusers silently identify strangers in public. “Our competitors offer this type of face-recognition product, we do not,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED at the time. “If we were to release such a feature, we would take a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out.”
Privacy advocates argue that by embedding face recognition into a mass-market wearable platform, Meta could normalise a capability it previously pulled back amid privacy concerns.
“You’re setting norms and standards by putting technology into the ecosystem,” Joseph Jerome, a former Meta Reality Labs policy official who worked on privacy reviews for the company’s AR and VR products, says of Meta’s role in the wearable tech industry. “I don’t know how Meta can responsibly deploy a technology like this.”