Overview
- A Wired investigation published on June 5 found that Meta had placed core components of an internal facial‑recognition system called NameTag inside its Meta AI companion app, which has been downloaded more than 50 million times.
- Researchers said the embedded code can convert faces captured by Ray‑Ban and Oakley smart‑glasses into biometric templates, compare them with face records stored on a user’s phone, and save unrecognized faces in a ‘pending’ folder if the feature is turned on.
- Meta says it is still studying facial recognition and that the feature has not been activated on devices, and the company called Wired’s reporting 'intellectually dishonest.'
- More than 70 civil‑rights and privacy organizations have sent a public letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking Meta to remove NameTag and urging the Federal Trade Commission to investigate.
- Security researchers and journalists have also documented a market for modifying Ray‑Ban glasses to disable the camera LED, and the large device sales by EssilorLuxottica (over seven million units in 2025) raise the scale and practical risk of covert recording and biometric identification.