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Code uncovered by journalists revealed that Meta quietly embedded facial recognition tech into its AI-enabled smart glasses \u2014 and top Meta executives are fuming.<\/p>\n
Last week, Wired reported that<\/a> Meta discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its popular smart glasses, as evidenced by a piece of code discovered in the Meta AI app by the magazine\u2019s journalists. The unreleased feature, internally dubbed \u201cNameTag,\u201d would \u201ctransform faces captured by Meta\u2019s glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user\u2019s phone \u2014\u00a0a database that\u2019s currently configured to receive updates from Meta,\u201d as Wired put it.<\/p>\n The report made clear that NameTag isn\u2019t activated yet, nor is it accessible to consumers in its current form. But the prospect of consumer-facing smart glasses equipped with facial recognition tech has long had privacy advocates on edge \u2014\u00a0and with public adoption of Meta\u2019s smart glasses on the rise, privacy concerns have become more pertinent than ever. If a company has gone about building out the infrastructure to roll out a wildly controversial feature of this kind, consumers might want to know about that, even if the feature currently remains inaccessible.<\/p>\n And yet, according to the company\u2019s executives, it\u2019s \u201cdishonest\u201d to inform the public about a piece of unreleased tech that Meta has chosen to incorporate into a consumer product.<\/p>\n In its initial response to Wired, Meta referred to the discovery as \u201csensational\u201d and characterized NameTag as exploratory. \u201cWe\u2019ve said before we\u2019re exploring these types of features, and what you\u2019re seeing is just evidence of that exploration,\u201d the company said in a statement to Wired. \u201cNothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything. If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency. One decision we can be clear about\u2014we are not building a central face database.\u201d<\/p>\n A few well-known Meta higher-ups then weighed in on social media, doubling down on the allegation that Wired\u2019s story was somehow \u201cmisleading.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not until [paragraph] four that Wired says this feature is \u2018not enabled,’\u201d declared<\/a> Meta spokesperson and VP of communications Andy Stone. \u201cAnd then takes until [paragraph] 16 for Wired to reflect that Meta has no existing plans and this is exploratory. And not until [paragraph] ten does Wired quote its own expert saying the feature is not \u2018exposed to consumers.’\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThis is more than shoddy reporting, it\u2019s intellectually dishonest,\u201d Stone continued. \u201cPure advocacy-driven click bait.\u201d<\/p>\n Meta\u2019s longtime chief technology officer, Andrew \u201cBoz\u201d Bosworth jumped in, adding<\/a>: \u201cIncredibly misleading from Wired, sadly we are coming to expect that from them more and more. Absolutely dishonest.\u201d<\/p>\n But this isn\u2019t the first time in recent months that NameTag has been in the news. In February, the New York Times reported<\/a> on an internal Meta memo in which Meta discussed plans to install NameTag into its smart glasses. In the striking memo, the tech giant noted that the ethically-fraught feature should ideally be launched \u201cduring a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.\u201d<\/p>\n Public pushback following the NYT\u2019s reporting was swift, and in April, 75 organizations signed an ACLU letter<\/a> addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that characterized NameTag as \u201ca red line society must not cross.\u201d<\/p>\n This particular feature isn\u2019t Meta\u2019s first brush with controversy in this area, either. In 2025, the tech giant paid $1.4 billion<\/a> to settle a lawsuit with Texas over its handling of biometric data. And in 2021, after settling a different class action suit, it killed<\/a> a Facebook feature that used facial recognition to automatically tag people in photos.<\/p>\n It\u2019s true that NameTag remains unreleased. But if Meta were to launch it, the implications are likely to be enormous.<\/p>\n \u201cThe feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go,\u201d Electronic Frontier Foundation Threat Lab technologist Cooper Quintin, who reviewed the latent NameTag code, told Wired. \u201cDespite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.\u201d<\/p>\n