Meta has repeatedly said it has not launched face recognition for its smart glasses. But a WIRED analysis found that much of the technology needed to make such a feature work has already been placed inside the company’s live Meta AI app, which has been downloaded more than 50 million times. The system, internally called “NameTag,” appears designed to identify people seen through Meta’s smart glasses and alert the wearer when a face is recognized.
Though the feature is not currently visible to users or switched on for public use, WIRED found that core parts of the system had been added to the app over several updates this year.
The discovery raises fresh questions about Meta’s plans for consumer face recognition, a technology the company publicly walked away from in 2021 after years of regulatory scrutiny, lawsuits and privacy backlash.
NameTag is embedded in the Meta AI companion app, which is used with the company’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses and is required for several major features. According to WIRED’s analysis, code tied to the feature began appearing as early as January, months before Meta publicly said it was still evaluating whether it would ever release face recognition for the glasses.
In April, after more than 70 advocacy organizations called on the company to abandon the project, Meta claimed that the technology had not been released. “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.”
However, WIRED’s review showed that three AI models tied to NameTag have already been delivered from Meta’s servers and are now stored on customers’ phones. One model detects faces, another crops them, and a third converts them into biometric data.
If activated, the feature would turn faces captured by the glasses’ camera into unique biometric identifiers, often called faceprints. Those faceprints would then be checked against a recognition gallery stored on the wearer’s phone. The database is currently configured to receive updates from Meta.
When a match is found, the system appears designed to notify the wearer. Faces that are not recognized are cropped, indexed and saved in a folder labeled “pending,” according to the code.
Only fragments of the feature’s user interface are currently visible in the app’s code. In a May version, NameTag appears to be renamed for consumers as “Connections,” with language inviting users to “remember the people you met.” It remains unclear whose faces could be added to the system, how profiles would be created, whether people would need to opt in, or how many individuals could ultimately be identifiable through the feature.
WIRED also brought its findings to two outside researchers with experience in privacy, security, and reverse software engineering. One was Cooper Quintin, a senior public interest technologist and security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab. The other was Buchodi, the pseudonym of an independent researcher who has spent years examining consumer apps and surveillance-related systems.
Both researchers were able to reproduce key parts of WIRED’s analysis, and Quintin said the findings suggest Meta has already built much of the infrastructure for a working face-recognition feature.
“The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go. Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.”
Buchodi went a step further by testing whether the recognition process could produce a match. The researcher added a single faceprint to the app’s gallery using an image of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault. When Buchodi then triggered NameTag with Foucault’s image, the app displayed a notification: “Person recognized.”
“The main components of a face-recognition feature are already in Meta’s companion app,” Buchodi said. “Not many pieces stand between this and a working feature.”
Meta disputes the idea that anything has launched. In a statement, spokesperson Ryan Daniels said the findings show only that the company is experimenting.
“Regardless of any sensational reporting, the facts are simple: We’ve said before we’re exploring these types of features, and what you’re seeing is just evidence of that exploration. Nothing 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—we are not building a central face database.”
It’s still undetermined whose faces may be identifiable through NameTag, whether photos, faceprints or other data produced by the system could ever be sent back to Meta’s servers.
For privacy advocates, the concern is not only whether the technology is technically “shipped,” but whether Meta is preparing to make face recognition an ordinary part of wearing consumer smart glasses in public.
The renewed push is especially striking because Meta once operated one of the largest consumer face-recognition systems in the world before publicly dismantling it.
Facebook first introduced face recognition in 2010 through a photo-tagging tool that analyzed users’ images and suggested names for people who appeared in them. The system expanded rapidly, eventually involving more than a billion users. Regulators and privacy advocates in the United States and Europe began questioning the legality of the technology as early as 2011, including whether users had meaningfully consented to the creation of biometric face data.
The legal consequences were substantial. Meta paid $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by Illinois Facebook users over biometric privacy claims. In 2024, the company agreed to a separate $1.4 billion settlement with Texas, which had accused Meta of unlawfully collecting biometric data from users. The company also paid $5 billion in 2019 to the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice to resolve a broader privacy case that included concerns related to facial recognition.
In November 2021, Meta announced it would shut down Facebook’s face-recognition system and delete more than a billion face templates, citing growing public concern over the technology and the lack of clear rules governing its use.
But Joseph Jerome, a former Meta Reality Labs policy official who worked on privacy reviews for the company’s products and joined Reality Labs in mid-2021, said the decision was not necessarily understood inside the company as a permanent retreat. “There was always this tension of, well, when do we roll back out face recognition?” Jerome told WIRED.
Meta’s possible return to the technology is especially significant because of the company’s power to shape expectations for wearable devices and public face-scanning.
“You’re setting norms and standards by putting technology into the ecosystem. I don’t know how Meta can responsibly deploy a technology like this.”
Internal Meta documents published by The New York Times in February suggested the company was preparing to do just that. The documents showed that Meta planned to introduce face recognition for its smart glasses in 2025, beginning with conference attendees who are blind before expanding to the broader public. Meta viewed the moment as a “dynamic political environment” in which some of its strongest critics might be distracted.
The feature was never rolled out at that conference. Still, Meta’s interest intersects with a real use case—assisted technology for blind and low-vision users. Some existing devices already allow blind users to identify people whose faces they have personally enrolled. A 2018 study by researchers at Cornell Tech and Facebook found that every blind participant interviewed considered recognizing people an important daily task.
That potential benefit has not quieted criticism. In April, more than 70 organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Privacy Information Center and Fight for the Future, urged Meta to cancel NameTag.
The groups warned that putting face recognition in smart glasses could allow people to silently identify strangers in public, including by stalkers, abusive partners or government agents.
Privacy experts say the danger grows when such tools become easy to use, widely distributed and socially normalized. A consumer face-recognition system built into stylish glasses could make public identification feel routine rather than exceptional, they warn.
Woodrow Hartzog, a privacy law professor at Boston University, says even an opt-in system may not offer enough protection if Meta eventually releases NameTag that way. Consent, he argues, can be shaped by power imbalances when access to a job, benefit, service or social environment depends on agreeing.
Companies benefit from framing privacy as a matter of individual choice because it allows data collection to continue while shifting responsibility onto users.
“We know that the more these systems are deployed, the more people come to see them as unexceptional,” Hartzog says. “And the more we come to see them as unexceptional and routine, the more people tend to start to take their moral cues about whether it’s desirable or good to have your face scanned. That’s just human psychology.”
For now, NameTag remains hidden from Meta AI app users. But WIRED’s analysis indicates that the company has already laid much of the technical groundwork for a smart-glasses face-recognition system, even as Meta insists no final decision has been made.
Moumita Basuroychowdhury is a Contributing Reporter at The National Digest. After earning an economics degree at Cornell University, she moved to NYC to pursue her MFA in creative writing. She enjoys reporting on science, business and culture news. You can reach her at moumita.b@thenationaldigest.com.
