More than 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, reproductive rights, and immigrant advocacy organizations are demanding Meta abandon plans to deploy face recognition on its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. The feature, reportedly known internally as "Name Tag," would allow wearers to silently identify strangers in public.
The coalition, which includes the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, sent a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday calling for the feature to be scrapped entirely before launch.
According to reporting from The New York Times, 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 been weighing two versions: one that would identify only people the wearer is already connected to on a Meta platform, and a broader version that could recognize anyone with a public account on Instagram or other Meta services.
The organizations argue that face recognition in inconspicuous consumer eyewear "cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards." They contend that bystanders in public have no meaningful way to consent to being identified. The coalition warns the feature would endanger abuse victims, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people by giving stalkers, abusers, and federal agents the ability to silently verify identities.
Internal Meta documents obtained by The New York Times reveal the company's strategic approach to the rollout. In a May 2025 memo from Meta's Reality Labs, the company reportedly 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." The coalition characterized this as taking advantage of "rising authoritarianism" and the Trump administration's "disregard for the rule of law."
The organizations are also demanding that Meta disclose any known instances of its wearables being used in stalking, harassment, or domestic violence cases; reveal past or ongoing discussions with federal law enforcement agencies including ICE and Customs and Border Protection; and commit to consulting civil society and independent privacy experts before integrating biometric identification into consumer devices.
Meta has abandoned facial recognition before. In November 2021, the company ended Facebook's photo-tagging system and deleted the face recognition templates of more than a billion users, citing the need to "weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns." That decision followed years of costly litigation, including roughly $2 billion in settlements on biometric privacy lawsuits in Illinois and Texas, and a $5 billion FTC settlement in 2019 over separate privacy violations tied to its face recognition software.
A Meta spokesperson said the company does not currently offer this type of facial recognition product on competing devices, and stated that if it were to release such a feature, it would "take a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out." EssilorLuxottica, the Italian-French eyewear conglomerate that owns Ray-Ban and Oakley and manufactures the smart glasses with Meta, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.