Meta Wants to Put Facial Recognition in Your Smart Glasses—And Timed It So You Wouldn't Notice

The Feature Nobody Asked For

Meta is developing a facial recognition feature for its Ray Ban smart glasses that would let wearers identify strangers in real time. Internally called "Name Tag," the system would scan faces in public, match them against a database, and display personal information through Meta's AI assistant, transforming everyday eyewear into a portable surveillance device.

The feature could launch as early as this year. But what has alarmed privacy advocates is not just the technology itself, it is how Meta planned to roll it out.

The Internal Memo

According to The New York Times, Meta executives debated the rollout for over a year, and internal documents reveal a deliberate strategy around timing. One memo stated the company should 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 memo referenced political turmoil, including deportation campaigns and government restructuring efforts, as an opportune moment for the announcement. The calculation was straightforward: launch when the organizations most likely to oppose you are distracted by larger crises.

Meta also reportedly considered introducing Name Tag as an accessibility feature at a conference for visually impaired users before deploying it broadly. That plan was shelved, but it reveals a pattern: frame surveillance as assistance, launch during distraction, and normalize by the time critics catch up.

What the Glasses Already Do

Even without Name Tag, Meta's smart glasses already raise privacy concerns. The current generation allows wearers to covertly record video and audio of people around them, with the only indicator being a small LED light that is easily circumvented or overlooked. EPIC notes that "Meta glasses are already causing serious privacy harms by allowing unsuspecting and unconsenting members of the public to be covertly recorded."

Adding facial recognition would escalate these concerns dramatically. Instead of simply recording someone, a wearer could instantly identify them, pull up their social media profiles, and access whatever personal information Meta's databases contain. The anonymity of walking down a street, sitting in a cafe, or attending a protest would effectively disappear for anyone within camera range.

EPIC Calls on the FTC to Act

The Electronic Privacy Information Center sent a letter to FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson on February 13, urging the Commission and state privacy enforcers to investigate and block Meta's plans. EPIC argued that the technology could enable users to identify people around them instantly and access personal information without their knowledge or consent.

The ACLU's Nathan Freed Wessler added: "Face recognition technology on the streets of America poses a uniquely dire threat to the practical anonymity we all rely on. This technology is ripe for abuse."

The concerns are not hypothetical. In 2024, Harvard students demonstrated how Meta's existing smart glasses could be combined with publicly available facial recognition tools to identify random people on the street and look up their personal details in seconds. Meta's Name Tag feature would build that capability directly into the product.

The Consent Problem

Facial recognition in smart glasses creates a consent problem that has no clean solution. With a phone, you have to hold it up and point the camera. With glasses, the camera is always on, always facing forward, always capturing. There is no practical way for people in public spaces to opt out of being scanned, identified, and catalogued.

Meta has acknowledged "safety and privacy risks" internally and says it is "thinking through options" and will take a "thoughtful approach if and before" launching the feature. But the company's internal memos suggest the primary concern is not whether to launch, but when the backlash will be smallest.

What This Means for Everyone

If Meta deploys Name Tag, it would represent the first mass market consumer product with built in facial recognition designed for use on strangers in public. Law enforcement has used facial recognition for years, often with documented accuracy problems and racial bias. Putting the same capability in the hands of millions of consumers raises questions that existing privacy law is not equipped to answer.

• Where does the facial data go after scanning, and how long is it retained?
• What databases are being matched against, and how accurate are the results?
• What happens when someone is misidentified?
• How do you protect domestic violence survivors, undercover officers, or anyone with a legitimate need not to be identified?

Meta has not answered these questions publicly. Its strategy, as the internal memos reveal, is to wait for the right moment and move fast. Privacy advocates are trying to ensure that moment never comes.