Meta has quietly embedded facial-recognition technology for its smart glasses into its Meta AI app, according to a Wired report.
The report said it found a code added to the Meta AI app showing a feature called “NameTag.” If enabled, the feature would allow Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses to identify people captured by the device’s camera and alert the wearer when a match is found.
Faces that are not recognized would be cropped, indexed, and saved in a folder labeled “pending.”
Wired said the system is not yet activated but it noted that Meta’s AI app, which is required for core functionality of Meta’s smart glasses, has been downloaded “more than 50 million times.”
NameTag would mark a return to a category of technology Meta said it had phased out in 2021, when it announced plans to delete more than a billion facial templates linked to Facebook users after years of criticism over its photo-tagging tools.
The company later agreed to pay $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by Illinois users. In 2024, it also reached a separate $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over claims that it unlawfully collected and used biometric data.
In April, Meta said that if it were to use facial recognition, it would not be rolled out without first taking “a very thoughtful approach.”
“The discovery of NameTag in the live Meta AI app shows that Meta had begun shipping face-recognition code to users’ phones while publicly describing it as something the company was still ‘thinking through’,” Wired said.
Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab, told the news outlet: “The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go,” he said. “Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.”
Meanwhile, Meta has disputed claims that the feature is close to launch or fully developed for public release.
“This is more than shoddy reporting, it’s intellectually dishonest. Pure advocacy-driven click bait,” Meta Vice President of Communications Andy Stone wrote on X.
This is more than shoddy reporting, it’s intellectually dishonest. Pure advocacy-driven click bait.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) June 4, 2026
“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,” Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said.
Daniels said “nothing has shipped to consumers” and “no final decision has been made.”
“If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency,” he added.
