Meta Executives Call Wired Report on Unreleased Facial Recognition 'Dishonest'
Meta executives are publicly attacking Wired over a report that the company quietly embedded facial recognition technology into its AI-enabled smart glasses. The unreleased feature, internally dubbed "NameTag," was discovered by Wired journalists in code within the Meta AI app. According to Wired, NameTag would "transform faces captured by Meta's glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and check each one against faceprints stored on the user's phone — a database that's currently configured to receive updates from Meta."
Wired's report made clear that NameTag is not activated and not accessible to consumers. But the prospect of consumer smart glasses with facial recognition has long concerned privacy advocates, especially as adoption of Meta's smart glasses rises. Meta's initial response to Wired called the discovery "sensational" and characterized NameTag as exploratory. "We've said before we're exploring these types of features, and what you're seeing is just evidence of that exploration," the company said. "Nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything. If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency. One decision we can be clear about—we are not building a central face database."
Meta executives then took to social media to allege the story was misleading. Meta spokesperson and VP of communications Andy Stone pointed out that Wired only noted the feature was "not enabled" in paragraph four, that Meta had no existing plans in paragraph 16, and that an expert said the feature was not "exposed to consumers" in paragraph ten. "This is more than shoddy reporting, it's intellectually dishonest," Stone said. "Pure advocacy-driven click bait." Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth added: "Incredibly misleading from Wired, sadly we are coming to expect that from them more and more. Absolutely dishonest."
This is not the first time NameTag has surfaced. In February, The New York Times reported on an internal Meta memo discussing plans to install NameTag into smart glasses. The memo noted the feature should ideally 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." Following that report, 75 organizations signed an ACLU letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling NameTag "a red line society must not cross." Meta has previously faced controversy over biometric data: in 2025 it paid $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit with Texas, and in 2021 it killed a Facebook facial recognition tagging feature after a class action settlement.
NameTag remains unreleased, but its potential implications are significant. "The feature is not yet exposed to consumers but seems nearly ready to go," Electronic Frontier Foundation Threat Lab technologist Cooper Quintin, who reviewed the latent code, told Wired. "Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine."
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