YO GUYS YOU CANNOT IGNORE THIS ONE BECAUSE IT IS NOT JUST "CREEPY" — Meta literally had live, production-ready facial recognition code in its smart glasses app that was named *Name Tag* internally and it is one of the most shameless corporate pivot I've seen! The NYT reported on this as early as February 2026 but Wired caught the actual code sitting in a companion app used for Bluetooth pairing — meaning anyone could have had their every face scanned, turned into biometric identifiers, stored locally, and cross-referenced with each new scan. And here is what makes it insane: people were actually PAID real money by Meta to write, review, and deploy this code into the live product! So when VP Andy Stone calls it a "pilot effort" that was never fully decided upon, he's gaslighting everyone because engineers didn't build features for fun.
This isn't just abstract privacy theory — there is real harm already attached to these glasses through Meta's partnership with Ray-Ban and Oakley. Manosphere influencers have been using them specifically to harass and record women without consent, and a woman even smashed someone's glasses on the NYC subway in December after being recorded against her will. That is not "smart features," that is weaponizable surveillance tech sold as fashion eyewear. And remember March? The Swedish investigation that found Kenyan workers reviewing footage — including people using bathrooms AND having sexual intimacy - all while owners were totally unaware they were being filmed, which led to a class-action lawsuit. Meta's answer of "oh it was just a pilot" is cold comfort for anyone whose private moments got turned into data points by someone in an office halfway across the world!
The core problem is that no one actually asked for this — we wanted glasses that let us know people's names, not systems that harvest our faces. The fact that Meta could build it and then "remove" it within 24 hours of getting caught shows how far down they were willing to go on the feature before a public-relations fire forced them back. This is one of those features companies insist you need while secretly building something nobody wanted, and I am so done with tech that builds systems first and asks for permission later. If your smart device needs my biometric signature just to let me pair it over Bluetooth, that's not a feature; it's a ransom note disguised as convenience!
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2190115/meta-quietly-removes-face-recognition-code-from-its-smart-glasses-app/
This isn't just abstract privacy theory — there is real harm already attached to these glasses through Meta's partnership with Ray-Ban and Oakley. Manosphere influencers have been using them specifically to harass and record women without consent, and a woman even smashed someone's glasses on the NYC subway in December after being recorded against her will. That is not "smart features," that is weaponizable surveillance tech sold as fashion eyewear. And remember March? The Swedish investigation that found Kenyan workers reviewing footage — including people using bathrooms AND having sexual intimacy - all while owners were totally unaware they were being filmed, which led to a class-action lawsuit. Meta's answer of "oh it was just a pilot" is cold comfort for anyone whose private moments got turned into data points by someone in an office halfway across the world!
The core problem is that no one actually asked for this — we wanted glasses that let us know people's names, not systems that harvest our faces. The fact that Meta could build it and then "remove" it within 24 hours of getting caught shows how far down they were willing to go on the feature before a public-relations fire forced them back. This is one of those features companies insist you need while secretly building something nobody wanted, and I am so done with tech that builds systems first and asks for permission later. If your smart device needs my biometric signature just to let me pair it over Bluetooth, that's not a feature; it's a ransom note disguised as convenience!
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2190115/meta-quietly-removes-face-recognition-code-from-its-smart-glasses-app/