Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones

Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company's software.

Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone.

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.” In April, Meta said if it were to utilize face recognition, it wouldn't be rolled out without first taking "a very thoughtful approach." But WIRED found that as early as January, core components of the system had been integrated into software distributed to millions of people.

Though not yet enabled, NameTag sits inside a Meta AI companion app that's been downloaded over 50 million times and is necessary for use of key features of its smart glasses, including Ray-Ban and Oakley models. If activated, it will transform faces captured by Meta's glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user’s phone—a database that’s currently configured to receive updates from Meta. Recognized faces will trigger notifications, while the rest are cropped, indexed, and saved to a folder marked “pending.”

NameTag would revive a type of technology Meta said it had sunsetted in 2021, when the company announced it would delete more than a billion faceprints belonging to Facebook users following years of controversy over its photo-tagging system. Meta ultimately paid $650 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by Illinois users and, in 2024, agreed to a separate $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over allegations it had unlawfully collected biometric data from users.

Its renewed efforts arrive amid mounting opposition to consumer-level face recognition, which privacy advocates argue will give anyone from stalkers to immigration agents easy access to a dangerous technology. Internal Meta documents published by The New York Times in February showed the company had planned to roll out the feature during a “dynamic political environment,” when Meta believed its biggest critics would be preoccupied.

Three AI models powering NameTag have already been deployed from Meta's servers and now reside on its customers' phones, according to WIRED’s analysis, which was independently reproduced by outside experts. One model detects faces, one crops them, and a third encodes them into biometric data.

Only traces of the user interface are currently present, hinting at how the feature may ultimately work. A May version of the app rebrands the feature for users as “Connections,” inviting them to “remember the people you met.” It remains unclear whose faces will be included in the system's recognition database, how those profiles are created, or how many people could ultimately be identifiable through it.

WIRED shared its findings with two outside security researchers who separately examined the app and reproduced key aspects of the analysis: Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab, and an independent security and privacy researcher who goes by the pseudonym Buchodi and has spent more than a decade reverse engineering consumer software and surveillance technologies.

“The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go,” says Quintin. “Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.”

Buchodi ran additional tests on the recognition pipeline. (Read their technical analysis here.) To see if the matching system worked, Buchodi added a single faceprint to the app’s gallery, taken from the deceased French philosopher Michel Foucault. After triggering NameTag with Foucault’s image, the app produced a notification: “Person recognized.”

“The main components of a face-recognition feature are already in Meta's companion app,” Buchodi says. “Not many pieces stand between this and a working feature.”

In April, more than 70 advocacy groups—including the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Fight for the Future—demanded Meta scrap NameTag, warning it would let stalkers and abusers silently identify strangers in public. “Our competitors offer this type of face-recognition product, we do not,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to WIRED at the time. “If we were to release such a feature, we would take a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out.”

Privacy advocates argue that by embedding face recognition into a mass-market wearable platform, Meta could normalize a capability it previously pulled back amid privacy concerns.

“You're setting norms and standards by putting technology into the ecosystem,” Joseph Jerome, a former Meta Reality Labs policy official who worked on privacy reviews for the company’s AR and VR products, says of Meta’s role in the wearable tech industry. “I don't know how Meta can responsibly deploy a technology like this.”

"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," says Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels. "Nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything. If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency. One decision we can be clear about—we are not building a central face database."

WIRED’s code review shows the NameTag system is currently designed to pull faceprints from Meta’s servers and store them on user devices.

Meta’s earlier system, announced by Facebook in 2010, analyzed photos and suggested tags for people who appeared in users’ images. It quickly scaled to more than a billion users and became one of the largest consumer face-recognition systems ever deployed.

The technology drew scrutiny almost immediately. European regulators and privacy advocates in the US questioned its legality as early as 2011, and there were concerns over whether users had meaningfully consented to the creation of biometric data. In 2019, Meta paid $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to settle a wider privacy case that included face-recognition concerns.

In November 2021, Meta announced it would shut down the system and delete the face templates it had built, citing growing concerns about the role of face recognition in society. But the decision was never understood internally as a permanent retreat, says Jerome, who joined Reality Labs in mid-2021. “There was always this tension of, well, when do we roll back out face recognition?”

In 2025, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times, Meta planned to debut face recognition on its smart glasses to attendees of a conference for the blind before making it available to the general public. It never did. But the technology answers a real demand: Existing assistive devices already let blind users identify faces they have personally enrolled, and a 2018 study of blind users by Cornell Tech and Facebook researchers found that every participant called recognizing people an important daily task.

Meta did not respond to questions about which users might be identifiable through NameTag; whether it intends for photos, faceprints, or other data generated by the system to ever be transmitted back to its servers; or whether the company has plans to let users opt in rather than out. EssilorLuxottica, which manufactures the Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses with Meta, did not respond to a request for comment.

Woodrow Hartzog, a privacy law professor at Boston University, says even opt-in protection—should Meta eventually offer it—would be thin. Consent, he says, can often be tied to a job, a benefit, or access to a service. Framing privacy as a matter of personal choice is advantageous to businesses, placing no meaningful limits on collection while letting companies claim users are in control.

“We know that the more these systems are deployed, the more people come to see them as unexceptional,” Hartzog says. “And the more we come to see them as unexceptional and routine, the more people tend to start to take their moral cues about whether it's desirable or good to have your face scanned. That's just human psychology.”