Coalition of Advocacy Groups Demands Meta Abandon Face Recognition in Smart Glasses

Coalition Demands Meta Halt Face Recognition Plans More than 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+, labor, and immigrant advocacy organizations demanded that Meta abandon plans to deploy face recognition on its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.

The coalition sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday demanding Meta kill the Name Tag feature before launch. The groups include the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

, UltraViolet, the National Organization for Women, the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Library Freedom Project, and Old Dykes Against Billionaire Tech Bros.

The coalition argues that face recognition in inconspicuous consumer eyewear cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards.

Name Tag Feature Details and Internal Strategy Name Tag would work through the artificial intelligence assistant built into Meta's smart glasses, allowing wearers to pull up information about people in their field of view.

Engineers have reportedly been weighing two versions of the Name Tag feature: one that would only identify people the wearer is already connected to on a Meta platform, and a broader version that could recognize anyone with a public account on a Meta service such as Instagram.

Internal documents surfaced showing Meta hoped to use the current dynamic political environment as cover for the Name Tag rollout, according to The New York Times. In the May 2025 memo from Meta’s Reality Labs that the Times obtained, Meta wrote that it would launch 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.

Calls for Disclosure and Consultation The coalition urged Meta to disclose any known instances of its wearables being used in stalking, harassment, or domestic violence cases.

The coalition urged Meta to disclose any past or ongoing discussions with federal law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, about the use of Meta wearables or data from them. The coalition urged Meta to commit to consulting civil society and independent privacy experts before integrating biometric identification into any consumer device.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center sent its own letters to the Federal Trade Commission and state enforcers in February urging them to investigate and block Name Tag’s rollout.

Meta's Response and Company Background Meta did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

EssilorLuxottica, the Italian-French eyewear conglomerate that owns Ray-Ban and Oakley and manufactures the smart glasses with Meta, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In November 2021, Meta ended Facebook's photo-tagging system and said it would delete the face recognition templates of more than a billion users.

Meta has paid roughly $2 billion to settle biometric privacy lawsuits in Illinois and Texas.

In 2019, Facebook paid $5 billion to the FTC to resolve a separate privacy case.