Meta reportedly wants to add face recognition to smart glasses while privacy advocates are distracted

Meta aims to introduce facial recognition to its smart glasses while its biggest critics are distracted, according to a report from The New York Times. In an internal document reviewed by The Times, Meta says it will launch the feature “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.”

The document is from last May and reportedly describes the new “Name Tag” feature that would allow smart glasses wearers to identify people using Meta’s built-in AI assistant. The New York Times reports that Meta initially planned to launch the feature during a conference for the blind before releasing it more widely, but that never panned out. Meta, which makes smart glasses with Ray-Ban and Oakley, reportedly plans to launch the feature as soon as this year.

Sources tell The Times that the facial recognition technology wouldn’t allow people to identify everyone they see. Instead, Meta is reportedly considering using the feature to detect people that the wearer is connected with on one of Meta’s platforms. It’s also exploring “identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram,” according to The New York Times.

Meta has faced legal battles for using facial recognition tools before. After launching the ability to tag people in Facebook photos using facial recognition in 2017, the company discontinued its use of the technology in 2021. But recent reports suggest that Meta is considering working with facial recognition once again. Last year, The Information reported that Meta’s new AI glasses could come with an always-on “super-sensing” mode that uses built-in cameras to track your daily activities and recognize people by name. The company has also made some changes to its privacy policy, which now states that “Meta AI with camera use is always enabled on your glasses unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta.’”

We have already gotten a taste of what a future with facial recognition on Meta glasses may look like. In 2024, two Harvard students developed a project that allows Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses wearers to identify people’s faces and use public databases to find names, addresses, phone numbers, and relatives.

Features that identify someone by face can be helpful for people who are blind or have low vision, but connecting them to a broader social network or database could pose serious security risks. A company called Envision partnered with Solos to launch a pair of glasses that uses AI to help blind or low vision users recognize other people — but only after a wearer takes a picture of them and assigns them a name from within its app, according to Envision’s website.

“We’re building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives,” Meta spokesperson Erin Logan said in a statement to The Verge. “While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature — and some products already exist in the market — we’re still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out.”