Researchers Find Dormant Face-Recognition Code in Meta’s Smart Glasses App

Code for an unreleased facial recognition feature has been found inside Meta’s AI app, the companion software for its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, in a WIRED investigation that examined the app and had a security researcher review the findings. The feature, labeled “NameTag” in the code, is built to identify a person captured by the glasses’ camera and notify the wearer, with the biometric matching apparently designed to run against faceprints stored on the user’s own phone.

The components have been present in app updates since January 2026 but are not switched on. According to the researcher who examined the code, no part of NameTag is currently running or transmitting biometric data to Meta’s servers, and the feature is not available to users. In testing, the researcher added a faceprint of the French philosopher Michel Foucault and was able to trigger a “Person recognized” notification, indicating the recognition pipeline is functional even though it is dormant in shipped builds. Cooper Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab, who reviewed the work, said the feature looked nearly ready for use.

The on-phone design is the detail that distinguishes this from a server-side face search. Matching against a gallery held locally on the wearer’s device, rather than a centralized database, is the architecture the code suggests, which would keep faceprints on the phone rather than uploading them. In the code, each face is reduced to a string of 2,048 numbers representing the geometry of a person’s features, the template a recognition system compares against its stored gallery. That structure does not resolve the core privacy question raised by face recognition on always-available camera glasses, which is whether the people being identified have consented to being matched at all.

Meta has disputed the conclusions drawn from the code, with a spokesperson saying the findings reflect only the company’s continued exploration of potential technologies rather than a product decision. The company has previously said its consumer glasses do not include facial recognition.

The discovery lands on top of sustained scrutiny of Meta’s face-recognition ambitions for the glasses. Reporting that Meta was developing a name-identifying feature for next-generation Ray-Ban glasses drew opposition from privacy groups, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has opened an investigation into the glasses over biometric privacy. The presence of working, if inactive, code moves the question from what Meta might build to what it has already written.

The NameTag code remains inactive in the shipped app, and Meta says it has not deployed facial recognition in its consumer glasses.

Sources: WIRED

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By the ID Tech Editorial Team