Meta’s smart glasses companion app may be doing a little more than managing settings and syncing photos. A new report says the app contains dormant facial recognition code for a feature called ”NameTag,” raising fresh questions about how far the company is willing to go with wearable AI after publicly shutting down its old facial recognition system.
The feature is not active, but the code has reportedly shown up in multiple updates to Meta’s AI app since January 2026. That matters because the app is required for several Meta smart glasses, including the Ray-Ban Meta lineup, and it has reportedly been installed more than 50 million times. In other words: this is not some lab toy tucked away where nobody will notice.
What the code appears to do
Researchers who dug through the app say the feature could use the glasses camera to spot faces, create biometric identifiers, and compare them with a database stored locally on the user’s phone. If there’s a match, the wearer could get a notification with the person’s identity. That is a slick pitch for memory aid, but it also sounds a lot like surveillance with a friendlier font.
- Feature name: ”NameTag”
- Status: dormant, not active
- App footprint: more than 50 million installs
- Reported capability: face detection, biometric matching, identity notifications
Meta’s past makes this harder to shrug off
The company already burned through one face recognition era. In 2021, Meta said it would shut down Facebook’s facial recognition system and delete more than a billion stored faceprints after years of criticism, regulatory scrutiny, and legal fights. Those fights were expensive too, including a $650 million settlement in Illinois and a later $1.4 billion settlement in Texas over biometric privacy claims.
That history is why even a dormant feature sends up red flags. Consumer tech has spent years trying to convince people that ”AI-powered” means helpful, not creepy, and glasses are a uniquely sensitive place to test that theory because they sit on your face and point at everyone else’s.
Why Meta says this is not a launch plan
Meta says readers should not overreact. Company spokesperson Ryan Daniels described the code as internal experimentation, not a product announcement, and said no final decision has been made. Meta also says it is not building a centralized facial recognition database, and that it would move carefully and be transparent if it ever decided to bring such a feature to consumers.
Still, the report suggests the company is at least leaving the door open. Competitors in wearable AI are pushing hard on camera-first features, and the temptation to bolt on face recognition is obvious: it solves a real user problem while creating a very obvious privacy headache. The next move will tell us whether Meta is genuinely exploring an accessibility-style memory aid or just testing how much biometric discomfort its hardware business can absorb.