Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to find “the right balance” for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns.
Now it wants to bring facial recognition back.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, plans to add the feature to its smart glasses, which it makes with the owner of Ray-Ban and Oakley, as soon as this year, according to four people involved with the plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about confidential discussions. The feature, internally called “Name Tag,” would let wearers of smart glasses identify people and get information about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.
Meta’s plans could change. The Silicon Valley company has been conferring since early last year about how to release a feature that carries “safety and privacy risks,” according to an internal document viewed by The New York Times. The document, from May, described plans to first release Name Tag to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company did not do last year, before making it available to the general public.
Meta’s internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature’s release.
“We will 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,” according to the document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
Facial recognition technology has long raised civil liberty and privacy concerns for its potential use by governments to monitor citizens and suppress dissent, by corporations to track unwitting customers or by creeps at bars. Some cities and states have restricted or banned use of the technology by the police over concerns about its accuracy. Democratic lawmakers recently asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop using facial recognition technology on American streets.
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“Face recognition technology on the streets of America poses a uniquely dire threat to the practical anonymity we all rely on,” said Nathan Freed Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union. “This technology is ripe for abuse.”
Meta considered adding facial recognition to the first version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2021 but pulled back over technical challenges and ethical concerns. It has renewed its efforts as the Trump administration has aligned closely with Big Tech companies and as Meta’s smart glasses have become an unexpected commercial success.
EssilorLuxottica, which works with Meta to make the glasses, said this week that it sold more than 7 million of them last year.
Meta’s smart glasses are expected to face fresh competition from companies, like OpenAI, that have teased their own wearable AI devices. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wants to add facial recognition to differentiate the devices and to make the AI assistant in the glasses more useful, three of the people involved with the plans said.
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Meta is exploring who should be recognizable through the technology, two of the people said. Possible options include recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.
The feature would not give people the ability to look up anyone they encountered as a universal facial recognition tool, two people familiar with the plans said.
“We’re building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives,” Meta said in a statement. “While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature — and some products already exist in the market — we’re still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out.”
The Information reported last year that Meta had renewed work on facial recognition in its smart glasses.
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Meta’s smart glasses have been used to identify people before. In 2024, two Harvard students used Ray-Ban Metas with a commercial facial recognition tool called PimEyes to identify strangers on the subway in Boston, and released a viral video about it. At the time, Meta pointed to the importance of a small white LED light on the top right corner of the frames “that indicates to people that the user is recording.”
Meta’s smart glasses require a wearer to activate them to ask the AI assistant a question or to take a photo or video. The company is also working on glasses, internally called “super sensing,” that would continually run cameras and sensors to keep a record of someone’s day, similar to how AI note takers summarize video call meetings, three people involved with the plans said.
Facial recognition would be a key feature for “super sensing” glasses so they could, for example, remind wearers of tasks when they saw a colleague. Zuckerberg has questioned if the glasses should keep their LED light on to show people they are using the “super sensing” feature, or if they should use another signal, one person involved with the plans said.
Meta has worked on facial recognition technology for more than a decade. Zuckerberg supported the company’s Fundamental AI Research lab, or FAIR, in developing ways to use AI and facial recognition technology to help people who are blind or have low vision, three people familiar with the work said. That includes working with outside organizations like Be My Eyes, an accessibility technology company.
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Mike Buckley, the CEO of Be My Eyes, said he had talked “for a year” with Meta about face-recognizing glasses for people with low or no vision. “It is so important and powerful for this group of humans,” he said.
Mark Riccobono, president of the National Federation of the Blind, said he was not aware of a specific plan to offer the glasses to attendees at the group’s conference this July but would support it.
Meta has a history of expensive privacy missteps. In recent years, the company paid $2 billion to settle lawsuits in Illinois and Texas that accused it of collecting the facial data of users without their permission for a since-shuttered facial recognition system on Facebook that let users tag their friends in photos more easily. In 2019, Facebook paid $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission to settle a lawsuit that accused it of violating user privacy, including with its facial recognition software.
As part of the FTC settlement, Meta agreed to review every new or modified product for potential risks to the privacy of the company’s users. In January 2025, Meta relaxed that process for reviewing privacy risks, according to an internal post viewed by the Times. The company’s privacy teams have less influence over product releases, and there are new limits on how long the risk review process takes.
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Around that time, employees who worked on risk review questioned whether Meta would still be in compliance with its FTC settlement under the changes. Andie Millan, a director of risk review in Reality Labs, told them that she believed the changes would “push the bounds” of Meta’s agreement with the FTC, according to a recording of an internal meeting obtained by the Times.
“Mark wants to push on it a little bit,” Millan said, referring to Zuckerberg.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
