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

WIRED’s analysis found that Meta has integrated a face-recognition feature, internally named "NameTag," into its Meta AI companion app used with Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. Although the feature is not yet enabled for consumers, three AI models to detect, crop, and encode faces into biometric "faceprints" have been deployed to users' phones; recognized faces would trigger notifications while others are indexed into a "pending" folder. The article highlights legal and privacy concerns, recalls Meta’s prior faceprint deletions and settlements, and cites outside researchers who reproduced aspects of the analysis and warned that the capability could enable distributed consumer surveillance.