Meta removes undisclosed smart glasses facial recognition system after WIRED report

MANILA, Philippines – Meta has removed the code related to a facial recognition system found on the Meta AI app that is used by the company’s smart glasses, Monday, June 8.

The removal comes after a June 4 report by American tech magazine WIRED found the said code and system called NameTag, which is used to automatically identify people captured by the glasses, with the capability of turning faces into biometric signatures called “faceprints.” 

The magazine found the code embedded in the Meta AI app, which is required for the functioning of its smart glasses. 

The code, to be clear, while embedded was inactive. But the presence of the code and 3 specific AI models — one to detect faces, one to crop them, and to convert and encode them as biometric data — belie previous pronouncements from the company that it would only be exploring the technology. WIRED estimates that the Meta AI app has already been installed in at least 50 million phones. 

Independent researchers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and another one known only as Buchodi, corroborated WIRED’s findings. 

Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, said, “The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go,” and warned about the system’s potential to be a “distributed surveillance machine.”

Meta told WIRED: “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… 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.”

In February 2026, the New York Times also reported that internal documents in 2025 revealed that Meta had planned to roll out a facial recognition feature timed with a “dynamic political environment” so that their critics would be preoccupied when they released it. In the same month, a report from Swedish media SVD also found that data annotators subcontracted by Meta in Kenya were reviewing intimate footage such as recordings of bank cards, sexual activity, and people in bathrooms. 

The need for regulation for smart glasses

Politico reported how European lawmakers have called for regulation of these nascent devices, urging the European commission to probe whether these new AI-powered glasses are in line with current privacy laws. 

Privacy activists and advocates in the region have also argued that these glasses violate key privacy principles involving consent, saying that bystanders cannot consent meaningfully because they wouldn’t readily know that they are being recorded. Aside from being recorded, they argue that bystanders can’t readily consent to their biometric data being processed for AI systems such as facial recognition. 

France’s privacy regulator has also warned that these devices, if not scrutinized, could further normalize surveillance, and lead to a “profound transformation of our societies.” 

In the US, there are proposals to make it a legal requirement for such glasses to have a clear, visible indicator that smart glasses are recording. Meta’s glasses already have such a function, but the proposed bill wants to make it a requirement for the product category. 

The glasses aren’t currently officially available in the Philippines, but their release would likely pose similar concerns already raised in other countries, with privacy concerns exacerbated further by recent findings on private footage being seen by annotators, and the evidence of code designed for facial recognition. 

As the country prepares to legislate for AI, the emerging consumer device category brings with it new regulatory concerns. 

As the European Data Protection Board chair Anu Talus told Politico, the glasses “really bring the filming, collecting information from people, into a new level if you compare it with smartphones.” – Rappler.com