EPIC Urges FTC, States to Block Meta’s Facial Recognition Smart Glasses Plan

EPIC has sent letters to the Federal Trade Commission and state enforcers urging them to promptly investigate and prevent Meta’s plan to add facial recognition and surveillance capabilities to its Ray-Ban Meta glasses. “This feature would pose a grave risk to privacy, safety, and civil liberties and would cause widespread harm to the public,” the letter warns. “It must not be allowed to reach the market.”

The New York Times reported Friday that Meta plans to embed facial recognition technology into its smart glasses, potentially as soon as this year. This integration would allow wearers to identify individuals around them and receive real-time information about these individuals.

The implications of this feature are dire. Real-time facial recognition exacerbates the already serious and apparently unlawful privacy risks of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which allow members of the public to be covertly recorded with no warning beyond a small and easily hidden LED light. The addition of facial recognition puts everyone at risk of stalking, harassment, doxxing, and worse. People could be identified at protests, places of worship, support groups, and medical clinics, revealing incredibly sensitive information about those individuals and destroying the concept of privacy or anonymity in public spaces. Combined with Meta’s history of privacy abuses—such as building “shadow profiles” of people who don’t even use Meta products, violating international data transfer and protection laws, and deceiving users about their privacy options—this surveillance escalation is alarming.

“[I]t is crucial that regulators act now to prevent this planned feature from being deployed in every bathroom, clinic, classroom, house of worship, and protest in the country,” the letters state. In addition to the FTC, EPIC sent letters to the nine member states of the Consortium of Privacy Regulators, which includes California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Oregon.

An internal Meta memo included in the article stated that Meta wishes to take advantage of today’s “dynamic political environment” to launch this feature while “many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.” The company’s attempt to avoid attention from civil society, enforcement authority, and the general public has failed. EPIC will continue to monitor closely and push state and federal enforcement authorities to investigate and prevent this move by Meta.