Dozens of civil rights organizations have written a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to warn of the dangers in bringing facial recognition technology to the company’s smart glasses. More than 70 groups have banded together to form a coalition to urge Zuckerberg to abandon plans to incorporate the tech, on the grounds that it would empower stalkers, sexual predators and other bad actors.
This coalition includes organizations like the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Access Now and many others. The letter isn’t asking for safeguards. These groups want the feature to be completely eliminated, stating the idea behind facial recognition of this type is so dangerous that it “cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms or incremental safeguards.” This tracks, as there would be no real way for bystanders to know or consent to being identified.
“People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health and behaviors,” the letter states.
The organizations have urged Meta to disclose any known instances of its wearables being used for stalking, harassment or domestic violence. They also want the company to disclose past or ongoing discussions with federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE, about the use of Meta smart glasses and other wearables, according to a report by Wired.
There is certainly some cause for worry here. According to the New York Times, Meta issued an internal memo last year that suggested it could roll out this technology “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.” That’s corporate speak for “we’ll do it when nobody is watching.” The coalition called this “vile behavior” that looks to take advantage of “rising authoritarianism.”
The technology in question is apparently called Name Tag, for obvious reasons. It uses AI to pull up information about people in a field of view to smart glasses displays. That’s about as dystopian as it gets.
The company has reportedly been working on two versions of the toolset. There’s one that would only identify people that are currently connected to a Meta platform and another that would identify anyone with a public account on a service like Instagram. It doesn’t look like there’s any way, as of yet, to use this tech to identify strangers on the street who don’t have a Meta account of any kind. In other words, the company should expect a wave of cancellations if this rolls out.
In an emailed statement, a Meta spokesperson told Engadget: “Our competitors offer this type of facial recognition product, we do not. If we were to release such a feature, we would take a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out.”
Public outcry has gotten Meta to back off from facial recognition in the past. The company ended Facebook’s photo-tagging system in 2021 after pushback from civil liberties groups and years of costly litigation. Meta paid out billions of dollars to settle biometric privacy lawsuits in Illinois and Texas and another $5 billion to the FTC for a separate privacy case partially tied to facial recognition software.
Update, April 13 2026, 4:45PM ET: This story was updated after publish with comment from Meta.
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Lawrence Bonk