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A new investigation from WIRED has found that Meta has installed facial recognition code for its smart glasses inside the Meta AI app. The revelation is raising alarm bells about how AI wearables could affect people who never chose to use the technology.
NameTag, as Meta calls the feature, has not yet been activated for users. The company says it hasn’t yet decided whether to launch it and promised it would take “a very thoughtful approach” before rolling out the facial recognition tech.
Still, WIRED reports that the code is already embedded in the companion app for Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. When activated, the system uses biometric data stored on the user’s phone to identify people captured by the camera.
While Meta hasn’t made the feature available to the public, the code is an example of how consumer AI is moving into devices that can see, hear, interpret, and act on the world around us.
In the past, the privacy question largely stopped with the person who bought the product. With smart glasses, even if the wearer agrees to share data with Meta, people who come into the camera’s view can become part of the device’s data environment without ever consenting to being captured, analyzed, or identified.
AI Smart Glasses Are Moving Beyond Cameras
Cameras have been one of the biggest selling points of AI smart glasses. Being able to point and shoot while walking, cooking, or traveling without pulling out a bulky cell phone has made them feel like the logical next step in hands-free technology.
Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have done a lot to help push this tech closer to the mainstream. Now, big tech is racing to see who can make AI glasses useful enough, normal-looking enough, and socially acceptable enough to become an everyday consumer device.
Google is prepping its Gemini-powered intelligent eyewear with Samsung and eyewear brands Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. In May, the company announced that its audio glasses with Gemini would arrive this fall. Users will be able to use the glasses to get directions, send texts, take photos, translate speech and writing, and ask Gemini questions about the world around them.
As for Samsung, it describes the glasses as being “built to understand the world alongside users in real time, the new intelligent eyewear provides everyday support while keeping users hands-free and heads-up.”
That’s part of the commercial appeal of these glasses. With a smartphone, you have to stop, unlock the screen, open an app, and decide what to share. AI glasses make the assistant available when you’re shopping, walking, commuting, cooking, or talking to someone.
For smart glasses to truly reach their potential, they also need to use information picked up from the user’s environment. While that’s part of the appeal, it’s also part of the problem with this type of tech. Users may want smart glasses that can interpret what they see and hear, but what about those around them who never chose to be part of the interaction?
Facial Recognition Creates a Bystander Privacy Problem
Privacy is one of the biggest concerns with technologies like Meta’s NameTag, because the person being identified may have no relationship to the device’s owner, the app, or the company that’s powering the tech.
According to WIRED’s report, NameTag works by recognizing people through the camera on the smart glasses, which then alerts the wearer when it has identified someone. WIRED also found unreleased interface language that refers to the feature as “Connections” and invites users to “remember the people you met.”
Meta’s response to privacy concerns is to point out that the feature hasn’t been released to users and that no final decision has been made on whether it will ever be. The company also says it’s not building a central database, according to WIRED. However, that raises another question: why even add the code to the consumer app if Meta has no plans to use it?
What Meta’s responses fail to do is address the social problem created when facial recognition tech is added to eyewear. While the person wearing the glasses may be perfectly happy to use the technology, the person in front of them may have no idea they were ever scanned.
If someone scans you, you won’t know whether a faceprint was created, whether your data was saved, and you may not have any way to object. That’s a completely different privacy problem than a phone camera or a smart speaker in someone’s kitchen. Smart glasses move through public and semi-public spaces with the wearer, including stores, classrooms, locker rooms, transit systems, workplaces, medical offices, bars, and protests.
Recording Indicator Isn’t Enough
The recording indicator on these glasses can tell you when someone’s recording something, but it doesn’t do much to explain whether AI is analyzing faces, voices, objects, locations, documents, or conversations.
In April, WIRED reported that more than 70 organizations, including the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, called on Meta to abandon plans to deploy facial recognition on Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.
The coalition warned that facial recognition in inconspicuous consumer eyewear “cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards.”
Joseph Jerome, a former Meta Reality Labs policy official, told WIRED, “I don’t know how Meta can responsibly deploy a technology like this.” That concern gets at the heart of the bigger challenge facing AI wearables. The issue has moved well past what companies allow users to do with their own data into questions about what those users may be able to do with everyone else’s.
AI Wearables Need Privacy Rules for People Who Did Not Opt In
Tech companies often present privacy as a choice users can control through permissions, settings, disclosures, and opt-in screens. However, that model starts to break down when the person affected by the data collection isn’t the one using the device.
Research on smart devices shows how hard privacy controls can be even for device owners. A 2026 privacy-by-design audit of Google Home, Alexa, and Siri found that users’ ability to manage privacy can be limited by technical design, complex settings, and unclear data policies, especially among young people.
When AI glasses enter the picture, that problem extends to everyone within range of the glasses, because bystanders don’t have access to the settings, disclosures, or opt-out choices on someone else’s device.
That’s why privacy rules for AI glasses can’t focus only on the person wearing them. If companies decide to enable facial recognition on this eyewear, they need to tell the public how biometric data will be stored, whether recognition happens on the device, and what happens to people who never consented.
Meta says NameTag isn’t active, which gives the company, regulators, and the public time to debate whether facial recognition belongs in mass-market smart glasses at all.
