Over 70 Advocacy Groups Demand Meta Scrap Facial Recognition Feature for Ray-Ban, Oakley Smart Glasses
More than 70 organizations focused on civil liberties, domestic violence survivor protections, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ equity, labor rights, and immigrant justice are calling on Meta to abandon plans to roll out facial recognition on its line of Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. The coalition warns the tool, which internal Meta documents label “Name Tag,” would give stalkers, domestic abusers, and federal law enforcement the power to secretly identify random members of the public in shared public spaces.
The coalition, whose members include the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, is pushing Meta to cancel the feature entirely before launch. The demand comes after the leak of internal Meta records showing the company planned to use the current “dynamic political environment” as cover for the rollout, gambling that civil society groups would have all their resources “focused on other concerns” rather than organizing pushback.
First revealed by The New York Times in February, Name Tag operates through the built-in artificial intelligence assistant on Meta’s smart glasses, allowing wearers to pull up identifying information on any person within their line of sight. According to internal reports, Meta engineers have evaluated two versions of the tool: a limited version that would only identify people the wearer is already connected to on Meta platforms, and a far broader version capable of recognizing any user with a public account on Meta-owned services like Instagram.
In an open letter sent to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, the coalition argues that facial recognition built into low-profile consumer eyewear “cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards.” Random bystanders in public have no way to give meaningful consent to being identified by strangers wearing the technology, the letter notes.
Beyond scrapping Name Tag, the coalition lays out three additional demands for Meta:
Disclose all confirmed cases where Meta wearables have been used for stalking, harassment, or domestic violence
Reveal any past or ongoing discussions with federal law enforcement agencies—including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—about the use of Meta wearables or data collected from them
Commit to mandatory consultation with civil society groups and independent privacy experts before integrating biometric identification into any future consumer device
“People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviors,” the groups wrote. Dozens of other organizations have joined the coalition, including Common Cause, Jane Doe Inc., 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.
After the letter was published, a Meta spokesperson issued a statement pushing back on the criticism. “Our competitors offer this type of facial recognition product, we do not,” the spokesperson said. “If we were to release such a feature, we would take a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out.”
EssilorLuxottica, the Italian-French eyewear conglomerate that owns Ray-Ban and Oakley and co-manufactures the smart glasses alongside Meta, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The controversial rollout strategy was laid out in a May 2025 internal memo from Meta’s Reality Labs division, obtained by The New York Times. The memo explicitly states Meta planned to launch Name Tag “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 coalition has labeled this distraction tactic “vile behavior,” and accuses Meta of exploiting “rising authoritarianism” and the Trump administration’s “disregard for the rule of law” to push through the controversial tool.
EPIC separately sent letters to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and state-level regulators in February, urging them to investigate and block Name Tag’s launch. The group warned that real-time facial recognition would compound what it calls the “already serious and apparently unlawful” privacy risks of existing Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which can covertly record bystanders with only a small, easily hidden indicator light to alert others that recording is active. EPIC noted that people at protests, houses of worship, peer support groups, and medical clinics could all be identified via the tool, “destroying the concept of privacy or anonymity in public spaces.”
This is not Meta’s first move away from public facial recognition, though the company has never eliminated the technology entirely. In November 2021, Meta shut down Facebook’s automatic photo-tagging system, announced it would delete facial recognition templates from more than one billion user accounts, and framed the decision as “a company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification.”
At the time, Meta stated it needed to “weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules,” and committed to “working with the civil society groups and regulators who are leading this discussion.”
The 2021 shutdown came after years of costly litigation. Meta has paid roughly $2 billion to settle biometric privacy class-action lawsuits in Illinois and Texas, which accused the company of collecting users’ faceprints without consent for the same photo-tagging system it later shuttered. In 2019, Facebook (as the company was then named) paid a $5 billion fine to the FTC to resolve a separate privacy case, which included allegations tied to its facial recognition software—at the time, that was the largest privacy penalty in the agency’s history.
Legal pressure on Meta’s product design choices has only intensified in recent months. This past March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google’s YouTube negligent in the design of Instagram and YouTube, ruling the companies knew their platforms were dangerous for users but failed to issue adequate warnings. The jury awarded $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages in the first “bellwether trial” of a sprawling set of lawsuits alleging social media platforms design products to addict users.
Just last week, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not shield Meta from a consumer protection lawsuit alleging the company deliberately designed Instagram features—infinite scroll, push notifications, and autoplaying videos—to addict young users. This marks the first such ruling from a U.S. state high court on the issue.
Updated at 8:49 pm ET, April 13, 2026: Added statement from a Meta spokesperson.
