Meta’s new smart specs are turning a walk down the street into an all-you-can-eat buffet for cops, pervs and sex pests.
More than 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+, labour and immigrant advocacy groups want Meta to ban face recognition on its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. They warn the feature, reportedly dubbed “Name Tag” inside the company, would let stalkers, abusers and federal agents identify strangers in public.
The coalition includes the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, Fight for the Future, Access Now and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. It wants Meta to kill the feature before launch after internal documents suggested the company hoped to use the current “dynamic political environment” as cover, betting critics would have resources “focused on other concerns.”
“Name Tag”, first reported in February by The New York Times, would run through the AI assistant inside Meta’s glasses and pull up information about people in the wearer’s field of view. Engineers have reportedly weighed a version that identifies people the wearer already knows on a Meta platform, plus a broader one that could recognise anyone with a public account on a Meta service such as Instagram.
In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent on Monday, the groups argue that face recognition in discreet consumer eyewear “cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards.” They say bystanders in public have no meaningful way to consent to being identified.
The coalition wants Meta to disclose any known cases where its wearables were used in stalking, harassment or domestic violence. It wants disclosure of discussions with federal law enforcement, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, about Meta wearables or related data.
The groups want Meta to commit to consulting with civil society and independent privacy experts before implementing biometric identification in any consumer device.
“People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviours,” write the groups.
Alongside the big names sit Common Cause, Jane Doe Inc., UltraViolet, the National Organisation for Women, the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Library Freedom Project and Old Dykes Against Billionaire Tech Bros. Meta gets to decide whether this ends as a privacy lesson or a product launch.
