Dozens of civil rights organizations have sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, warning about the dangers of bringing facial recognition technology to the company’s smart glasses. Over 70 groups have formed a coalition, urging Zuckerberg to abandon plans to use this tech. They argue it would empower stalkers, sexual predators, and other bad actors.
This coalition includes prominent organizations like the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, and Access Now. The groups are not asking for safeguards; they want the feature completely removed. They state that the idea behind this type of facial recognition is so dangerous that it “cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms or incremental safeguards.” This makes sense, as bystanders would have no real way to know or consent to being identified.
The letter emphasizes, “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 organizations have also pressed Meta to reveal any known cases of its wearables being used for stalking, harassment, or domestic violence. They also want the company to disclose any past or ongoing discussions with federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE, about the use of Meta smart glasses and other wearables, as reported by Wired.
There is indeed cause for concern. According to the New York Times, Meta issued an internal memo last year suggesting it could roll out this technology “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.” This is corporate language for “we’ll do it when nobody is watching.” The coalition called this “vile behavior” that seeks to take advantage of “rising authoritarianism.”
The technology in question is reportedly called “Name Tag.” It uses AI to pull up information about people in a wearer’s field of view and display it on the smart glasses. This sounds quite dystopian.
Meta is reportedly working on two versions of this toolset. One would only identify people connected to a Meta platform, while the other would identify anyone with a public account on a service like Instagram. It seems there is no current way to use this tech to identify complete strangers without a Meta account. This implies the company should expect a wave of user cancellations if it rolls this out.
In an emailed statement, a Meta spokesperson told Engadget: “Our competitors offer this type of facial recognition product, we do not. If we were to release such a feature, we would take a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out.”
Public outcry has successfully pushed Meta away from facial recognition in the past. The company ended Facebook’s photo-tagging system in 2021 after pushback from civil liberties groups and years of expensive lawsuits. Meta paid billions of dollars to settle biometric privacy lawsuits in Illinois and Texas and another $5 billion to the FTC for a separate privacy case partly linked to facial recognition software.
