Meta Plans To Let Smart Glasses Identify People Through AI-Powered Facial Recognition
4 62Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, New York Times reported Friday, five years after the social giant shut down facial recognition on Facebook and promised to find "the right balance" for the controversial technology.
The feature, internally called "Name Tag," would let wearers identify people and retrieve information about them through Meta's AI assistant, the report added. An internal memo from May acknowledged the feature carries "safety and privacy risks" and noted that political tumult in the United States would distract civil society groups that might otherwise criticize the launch. The company is exploring restrictions that would prevent the glasses from functioning as a universal facial recognition tool, potentially limiting identification to people connected on Meta platforms or those with public accounts.
4 comments
"Profit" on one side of the scale... (Score: 5, Insightful)
by kackle ( 910159 ) on Friday February 13, 2026 @08:42AM (#65986454)
promised to find "the right balance" for the controversial technology
It was good to start the day with a laugh.
Title Correction: (Score: 5, Informative)
by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Friday February 13, 2026 @08:42AM (#65986456)
"Privacy Rapist Meta[stasize] Plans To Let Smart Glasses Identify People Through AI-Powered Facial Recognition"
There FTFY.
Meta Approach (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Koreantoast ( 527520 ) on Friday February 13, 2026 @08:43AM (#65986458)
Given Meta's style, they'll one day turn on facial recognition for all users leveraging their full database of all tagged imagery they've gathered throughout their history (that they claimed they deleted). Then they'll say oops, my bad, then hide behind their lawyers.
How a Society Kills Privacy. (Score: 5, Insightful)
by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Friday February 13, 2026 @08:50AM (#65986470)
Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year..
For exactly what benefit? Yes Meta. Get specific for me while I walk through your executive hallways wearing your finest feature to face-ID and auto-search the Epstein files.
Kills me it was barely over a decade ago that wearers of smart glasses were known as "glassholes" in public. For privacy reasons. And Google's version at the time didn't have anywhere NEAR this privacy-raping capability.
A new privay-destroying concept reaching the median-intelligence level to garner an "are you insane?" response from the average seasoned citizen, used to take more than a generation. Today, it barely takes a decade for a horrible idea to come 'round again pretending to be better, because people are that stupid and shortsighted.