Meta plans facial recognition for smart glasses, sparking fresh privacy debate after 2021 retreat

Meta Reportedly Wants to Add Facial-Recognition Tech to Its Smart Glasses

Meta's smart glasses have proved a hit for the company, and leaked internal documents suggest it may soon add facial recognition to help it stay ahead of growing competition from rivals like Apple, Samsung, and Snap. According to a report from The New York Times, Meta plans to add a feature called Name Tag to its smart glasses to identify people the user meets in public and gather online information about them through its AI assistant. The report cites four anonymous sources familiar with the plans, and an internal memo from May 2025 outlining Meta's ideas. This report matches a similar story from The Information, published last May, close to the date of the now-leaked internal memo. These sources say Meta is exploring multiple ideas for how facial-tracking tech could work. One example provided suggests Meta AI may share details when it knows two users are connected on a platform, such as Facebook or Instagram, while another suggests it may work when the user has a public account on one of its services. The internal memo also said Meta intended to first introduce Name Tag at a conference for the blind in 2025. That event came and went without an announcement, so Meta's plans may have since changed. Meta's messaging confirms it knows this feature will prove controversial with privacy advocates. The memo from its Reality Labs says, "We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns." Meta previously shut down a face-scanning tool on Facebook. It was designed to make it easier to tag other people in an image, but came under fire from regulators and privacy campaigners, leading the brand to remove it in 2021. The then VP of artificial intelligence at Meta, Jerome Pesenti, said, "Every new technology brings with it potential for both benefit and concern, and we want to find the right balance."

Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart Glasses

Kashmir Hill reported from New York, and Kalley Huang and Mike Isaac from San Francisco. Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find "the right balance" for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns. Now it wants to bring facial recognition back. Meta, Facebook's parent company, plans to add the feature to its smart glasses, which it makes with the owner of Ray-Ban and Oakley, as soon as this year, according to four people involved with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential discussions. The feature, internally called "Name Tag," would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta's artificial intelligence assistant. Meta's plans could change. The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries "safety and privacy risks," according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. The document, from May, described plans to first release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company did not do last year, before making it available to the general public. Meta's internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature's release. "We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns," according to the document from Meta's Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses. Facial recognition technology has long raised civil liberty and privacy concerns for its potential use by governments to monitor citizens and suppress dissent, by corporations to track unwitting customers or by creeps at bars. Some cities and states have restricted or banned use of the technology by the police over concerns about its accuracy. Democratic lawmakers recently asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop using facial recognition technology on American streets. "Face recognition technology on the streets of America poses a uniquely dire threat to the practical anonymity we all rely on," said Nathan Freed Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union. "This technology is ripe for abuse." Meta considered adding facial recognition to the first version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2021 but pulled back over technical challenges and ethical concerns. It has renewed its efforts as the Trump administration has aligned closely with big tech companies and as Meta's smart glasses have become an unexpected commercial success. EssilorLuxottica, which works with Meta to make the glasses, said this week that it sold more than seven million of them last year. Meta's smart glasses are expected to face fresh competition from companies, like OpenAI, that have teased their own wearable A.I. devices. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, wants to add facial recognition to differentiate the devices and to make the A.I. assistant in the glasses more useful, three of the people involved with the plans said. Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram. The feature would not give people the ability to look up anyone they encountered as a universal facial recognition tool, two people familiar with the plans said. "We're building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives," Meta said in a statement. "While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature -- and some products already exist in the market -- we're still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out." The Information reported last year that Meta had renewed work on facial recognition in its smart glasses. Meta's smart glasses have been used to identify people before. In 2024, two Harvard students used Ray-Ban Metas with a commercial facial recognition tool called PimEyes to identify strangers on the subway in Boston, and released a viral video about it. At the time, Meta pointed to the importance of a small white LED light on the top right corner of the frames "that indicates to people that the user is recording." Meta's smart glasses require a wearer to activate them to ask the A.I. assistant a question or to take a photo or video. The company is also working on glasses, internally called "super sensing," that would continually run cameras and sensors to keep a record of someone's day, similar to how A.I. note takers summarize video call meetings, three people involved with the plans said. Facial recognition would be a key feature for "super sensing" glasses so they could, for example, remind wearers of tasks when they saw a colleague. Mr. Zuckerberg has questioned if the glasses should keep their LED light on to show people they are using the "super sensing" feature, or if they should use another signal, one person involved with the plans said. Meta has worked on facial recognition technology for more than a decade. Mr. Zuckerberg supported the company's Fundamental A.I. Research lab, or FAIR, in developing ways to use A.I. and facial recognition technology to help people who are blind or have low vision, three people familiar with the work said. That includes working with outside organizations like Be My Eyes, an accessibility technology company. Mike Buckley, the chief executive of Be My Eyes, said he had talked "for a year" with Meta about face-recognizing glasses for people with low or no vision. "It is so important and powerful for this group of humans," he said. Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, said he was not aware of a specific plan to offer the glasses to attendees at the group's conference this July but would support it. Meta has a history of expensive privacy missteps. In recent years, the company paid $2 billion to settle lawsuits in Illinois and Texas that accused it of collecting the facial data of users without their permission for a since-shuttered facial recognition system on Facebook that let users tag their friends in photos more easily. In 2019, Facebook paid $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission to settle a lawsuit that accused it of violating user privacy, including with its facial recognition software. As part of the F.T.C. settlement, Meta agreed to review every new or modified product for potential risks to the privacy of the company's users. In January 2025, Meta relaxed that process for reviewing privacy risks, according to an internal post viewed by The Times. The company's privacy teams have less influence over product releases, and there are new limits on how long the risk review process takes. Around that time, employees who worked on risk review questioned whether Meta would still be in compliance with its F.T.C. settlement under the changes. Andie Millan, a director of risk review in Reality Labs, told them that she believed the changes would "push the bounds" of Meta's agreement with the F.T.C., according to a recording of an internal meeting obtained by The Times. "Mark wants to push on it a little bit," Ms. Millan said, referring to Mr. Zuckerberg.

Meta Plans 'Name Tag' Facial Recognition for Ray-Ban Smart Glasses

Meta plans to add a facial recognition feature to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, reports The New York Times ($). According to people involved in the plans who spoke to the publication, the feature is internally called "Name Tag," and would let wearers identify people and get information about them via Meta's artificial intelligence assistant. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly wants the feature to differentiate the devices and to make the AI assistant in the glasses more useful. According to an internal document seen by NYT, Facebook's parent company has been in discussions since early last year about releasing the feature, which carries obvious civil liberty and privacy risks. Based on the document, dated to last May, the company originally planned to release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind - which did not happen - before releasing it to the general public. The internal memo also said the "political tumult" in the United States was good timing for the feature's release. NYT quoting from the document out of Meta's Reality Labs: "We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns." The plan is a turnaround for the company - five years ago, Facebook shut down its facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, citing a need to find "the right balance" for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns. This isn't the first time it has considered adding facial recognition to a consumer product either. Technical challenges and ethical concerns reportedly prevented the feature from making it into Meta's first version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which have proven successful since they debuted in 2021. EssilorLuxottica, which works with Meta to make the glasses, said this week that it sold more than seven million units in 2025. Meta is still said to be exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, with possible options including recognizing people a user knows via a Meta platform, and identifying people who they may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram. What Name Tag reportedly won't allow users to do is look up literally anyone they encounter. In a statement given to NYT, Meta said: "We're building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives. While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature - and some products already exist in the market - we're still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out." Meta's smart glasses have already been used to identify people in public. In 2024, two Harvard students used Ray-Ban Meta glasses alongside the facial recognition service PimEyes to identify strangers on the Boston subway, and later posted a video of the experiment that went viral. Meta responded by emphasizing that the glasses included a small white LED on the top-right corner of the frame to signal when recording is taking place. Meta is apparently also working on so-called "super-sensing" glasses that continually run cameras and sensors to keep a record of someone's day. According to a Bloomberg report last year, Apple is planning to launch a set of smart glasses by the end of this year. The glasses will be comparable to Meta's Ray-Bans and Google's Android XR glasses, "but better made." Apple's smart glasses are expected to include cameras, microphones, and AI capabilities, and will have the ability to take photos, record video, provide translations, give turn-by-turn directions, and more. However, they won't have augmented reality capabilities.