META'S SMART GLASSES FACE A GROWING PRIVACY BACKLASH OVER REPORTED FACIAL RECOGNITION PLANS

Meta’s RayBan smart glasses do not currently include facial recognition, but a rapidly growing coalition of civil liberties, privacy, and digital rights groups wants to make sure that never changes.

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More than 70 organizations — including the ACLU, the ACLU of Massachusetts, the New York Civil Liberties Union, EPIC, and Fight for the Future — have sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg urging the company to “immediately halt and publicly disavow” reported plans to add facial recognition to its wearable devices.

The opposition is not about a feature already launched. It is about a feature reportedly under consideration inside Meta, known internally as "Name Tag," which advocacy groups say would allow wearers to identify other people in public without their consent. The coalition argues that such technology would fundamentally alter what it means to move through daily life anonymously, turning ordinary glasses into a portable identification system.

The timing of the backlash reflects a broader anxiety that smart glasses are moving from novelty hardware into something much more socially consequential. Cameras on faces were already controversial. AI-enhanced cameras capable of helping identify strangers raise a far more serious set of questions — about consent, stalking, surveillance, power imbalance, and whether public anonymity can survive the next generation of wearables.

WHAT THE COALITION IS ACTUALLY DEMANDING

The coalition's letter is unusually direct. It does not ask Meta to slow down, refine the feature, or add more user controls. It asks the company to abandon the idea entirely. The groups describe facial recognition in consumer eyewear as a "red line" that should not be crossed and argue that the risks cannot be meaningfully solved through opt-outs, interface tweaks, or incremental safety measures.