--- title: "Meta Furious Over Bombshell Smart Glasses Revelation" description: "Wired reported that Meta discreetly embedded facial recognition tech into its AI-enabled smart glasses. Executives are very mad." date: "2026-06-08" modified: "2026-06-08" authors: - name: "Maggie Harrison Dupré" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/mharrison" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-furious-smart-glasses" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "Meta" tags: - "smart glasses" - "surveillance" --- # Meta Furious Over Bombshell Smart Glasses Revelation ![A color treated photograph featuring a pair of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses.]() *Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Josh Edelson / AFP via Getty Images* Code uncovered by journalists revealed that Meta quietly embedded facial recognition tech into its AI-enabled smart glasses — and top Meta executives are fuming. Last week, [*Wired* reported that]() Meta discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its popular smart glasses, as evidenced by a piece of code discovered in the Meta AI app by the magazine's journalists. The unreleased feature, internally dubbed "NameTag," would "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," as *Wired* put it. The report made clear that NameTag isn't activated yet, nor is it accessible to consumers in its current form. But the prospect of consumer-facing smart glasses equipped with facial recognition tech has long had privacy advocates on edge — and with public adoption of Meta's smart glasses on the rise, privacy concerns have become more pertinent than ever. If a company has gone about building out the infrastructure to roll out a wildly controversial feature of this kind, consumers might want to know about that, even if the feature currently remains inaccessible. And yet, according to the company's executives, it's "dishonest" to inform the public about a piece of unreleased tech that Meta has chosen to incorporate into a consumer product. In its initial response to *Wired*, Meta referred to the discovery as "sensational" and characterized NameTag as exploratory. "We've said before we're exploring these types of features, and what you're seeing is just evidence of that exploration," the company said in a statement to *Wired*. "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." A few well-known Meta higher-ups then weighed in on social media, doubling down on the allegation that *Wired's* story was somehow "misleading." "It's not until \[paragraph\] four that Wired says this feature is 'not enabled,'" [declared]() Meta spokesperson and VP of communications Andy Stone. "And then takes until \[paragraph\] 16 for *Wired* to reflect that Meta has no existing plans and this is exploratory. And not until \[paragraph\] ten does *Wired* quote its own expert saying the feature is not 'exposed to consumers.'" "This is more than shoddy reporting, it's intellectually dishonest," Stone continued. "Pure advocacy-driven click bait." Meta's longtime chief technology officer, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth jumped in, [adding](): "Incredibly misleading from *Wired*, sadly we are coming to expect that from them more and more. Absolutely dishonest." But this isn't the first time in recent months that NameTag has been in the news. In February, the [*New York Times* reported]() on an internal Meta memo in which Meta discussed plans to install NameTag into its smart glasses. In the striking memo, the tech giant noted that the ethically-fraught feature should ideally be launched "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." Public pushback following the *NYT's* reporting was swift, and in April, 75 organizations signed an [ACLU letter]() addressed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that characterized NameTag as "a red line society must not cross." This particular feature isn't Meta's first brush with controversy in this area, either. In 2025, the tech giant [paid $1.4 billion]() to settle a lawsuit with Texas over its handling of biometric data. And in 2021, after settling a different class action suit, it [killed]() a Facebook feature that used facial recognition to automatically tag people in photos. It's true that NameTag remains unreleased. But if Meta were to launch it, the implications are likely to be enormous. "The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go," Electronic Frontier Foundation Threat Lab technologist Cooper Quintin, who reviewed the latent NameTag code, told *Wired*. "Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine." **More on Meta glasses:** *[Meta Workers Say They're Seeing Disturbing Things Through Users' Smart Glasses]()* ## Author At Futurism, I've reported extensively on the rise of AI as a cultural and business force shaping the media industry, and more broadly how those dynamics are changing how we all consume and share information and relate to one another. I'm also fascinated by public health policy and ethics, the role of emerging tech in politics and governance — and the powerful people and forces at those intersections — climate change, and the environment. My investigation on Sports Illustrated's use of AI-generated authors with fictional biographies won a 2024 Mirror Award for "Best Story on Media Coverage of Artificial Intelligence in Journalism and the Media" from Syracuse University's SI Newhouse School, I contributed to Niemen Lab's 2025 Predictions for Journalism series, and I've discussed my work for Futurism during appearances on NPR, CNN, the BBC, the CBC, and more. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I played Division I field hockey for the Minutewomen as a midfielder. Since then, I've lived in New Orleans, Louisiana and Manhattan, New York. I spend my free time running, reading, perusing archival fashion, and searching for the world’s best negroni. I also have a debonair tuxedo cat, Westley, who's named after "The Princess Bride." ### Author social links [Bluesky]()