MENLO PARK, CALIFORNIA — More than 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+, labor, and immigrant advocacy organizations on Monday sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding the company abandon plans to deploy face recognition on its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. The planned feature, known internally as "Name Tag," would work through the AI assistant built into the smart glasses, allowing wearers to pull up information about people in their field of view.

The coalition, which includes the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, argued that face recognition in inconspicuous consumer eyewear cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards. The groups said bystanders in public have no meaningful way to consent to being identified.

"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 behaviors," the coalition wrote.

Name Tag was revealed in February by The New York Times. Meta engineers have been weighing two versions — one that would identify only people to whom the wearer is already connected on a Meta platform, and a broader version that could recognize anyone with a public account on a service such as Instagram. A May 2025 memo from Meta's Reality Labs stated that the company would launch the feature during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups expected to attack would have their resources focused on other concerns. The coalition described that plan as "vile behavior" and accused Meta of taking advantage of "rising authoritarianism" and the Trump administration's "disregard for the rule of law."

The groups also urged Meta to disclose any known instances of its wearables being used in stalking, harassment, or domestic violence cases, and any past or ongoing discussions with federal law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, about the use of Meta wearables or data from them. The coalition called on Meta to consult civil society and independent privacy experts before integrating biometric identification into any consumer device.

A Meta spokesperson said, "Our competitors offer this type of facial recognition product, we do not." The spokesperson added, "If we were to release such a feature, we would take a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out." EssilorLuxottica, which owns Ray-Ban and Oakley and manufactures the smart glasses with Meta, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In February, the Electronic Privacy Information Center sent letters to the Federal Trade Commission and state enforcers urging them to investigate and block the rollout. EPIC wrote that people could be identified at protests, places of worship, support groups, and medical clinics, "destroying the concept of privacy or anonymity in public spaces."

In November 2021, Meta ended Facebook's photo-tagging system and said it would delete the face recognition templates of more than a billion users. The company has paid roughly $2 billion to settle biometric privacy lawsuits in Illinois and Texas related to capturing users' faceprints without consent. In 2019, Facebook paid $5 billion to the FTC to resolve a separate privacy case, including allegations tied to its face recognition software.