Meta Is Turning Its Smart Glasses Into A Mass Surveillance Tool… And You Can’t Stop It

By Sarang Sheth 03/15/2026



If not Palantir, why Palantir-shaped??

Palantir builds spy tech for the CIA, DHS, and ICE. It aggregates data, maps your life, and tells governments who to watch. Meta is building something with the same bones. It’s called Name Tag, a facial recognition feature coming to Ray-Ban smart glasses that lets a wearer look at a stranger in public and have an AI identify them in real time, pulling their name and profile directly from Facebook and Instagram. The surveillance hardware is a $300 fashion accessory, the database was built by 3 billion people tagging photos for free, and the targets are anyone, anywhere, who never agreed to any of it.

A leaked internal memo from May 2025, obtained by The New York Times, laid out the full scope: the feature is planned for every pair of Meta’s glasses, from Ray-Bans to the Oakley Meta HSTN sports line. Meta’s official response was a practiced non-denial: “we’re still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out.” Companies that aren’t building something just say they’re not building it. Meta is not saying that.

The Database Was Being Built Before the Glasses Existed

Facebook turned on automatic photo tagging in 2010 with zero opt-in, and for eleven years, every time you tagged a friend’s face in a photo, you were feeding their facial recognition model. When Meta “deleted” over a billion faceprints in 2021 under lawsuit pressure, they kept the photos. They kept the social graph. They kept the engineers who built the whole thing. Name Tag isn’t a new product concept; it’s a previously mothballed capability getting a second run, this time with a camera on your face instead of a server in Menlo Park.

Anyone with a public Instagram account is immediately a potential target (it’s not like making your account private makes you any safer), which covers hundreds of millions of people who signed up to share photos, not to be enrolled in a real-world biometric identification system. Remember Portal, Meta’s smart home display with a face-tracking camera? It launched in 2018 right in the middle of the Cambridge Analytica fallout, and consumers collectively declined to put a Facebook camera in their living room. Meta discontinued it by 2022. The lesson they apparently took wasn’t “don’t build surveillance hardware.” It was “make sure the camera comes in wearing someone else’s face.”

COVID Lockdown Model for Digital ID Deployment

Goodbye to showing your passport...

Goodbye to showing your passport—the TSA launches contactless identification at airports in major US cities

by Laura M.
August 18, 2025



Goodbye to showing your passport—the TSA launches contactless identification at airports in major US cities

TSA is implementing a lot of changes so that our experience going through security checks isn’t so complicated, and now they’ve launched a new Touchless ID system for people who have PreCheck. What does this mean? Well, with facial recognition (yes, they scan your face) you don’t need to show your ID at some airports in the country. And it’s not just a few, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and San Francisco have already joined this change because speed is what matters most to these users. And now it will be even faster, you’ll look at a camera, and in less than a blink the system will recognize your face and off you go! The best part? You don’t even have to stop to talk to anyone.

What is Touchless ID

This new system is called TSA PreCheck Touchless ID, and it’s already working in the main cities of the country. If you already have PreCheck, you just have to activate the option from your airline’s website or app (in the travel documents section), and from there, in compatible airports, all you need is a face scan. They take a photo, compare it to the one they already have in the database (from your passport or real ID), and if everything matches, you pass “the test”.

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How police are using facial recognition on civilians | The Weekly with W...

How facial recognition became a routine policing tool in America

The technology is proliferating amid concerns that it is prone to errors and allows the government to expand surveillance without much oversight.

Police are increasingly using facial recognition to solve low-level crimes and to quickly identify people they see as suspicious.Claire Merchlinsky / for NBC News

May 11, 2019, 4:19 AM ‎EDT
By Jon Schuppe

In August 2017, a woman contacted the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado with what seemed like a simple case: After a date at a bowling alley, she’d discovered $400 missing from her purse and asked the manager to review the surveillance footage, which showed her companion snatching the cash while she bowled a frame.

But despite the clear evidence, the search for the bowling companion floundered. The woman knew only his first name. He’d removed his profile from the dating site on which they’d met. His number, now disconnected, was linked to a hard-to-trace “burner” phone. Security video captured his car in the parking lot, but not its license plate.

The investigator, Tara Young, set the case aside to work on others. It sat on a shelf until early 2018, when she ran into a colleague who was testing out the department’s new facial recognition system.

Young gave the officer a picture of the bowling companion taken from the victim’s cellphone. He plugged it into the software and up popped a mugshot of a man who looked a lot like the date thief.

It was Young’s first experience with facial recognition, one of the most powerful and controversial technological innovations of the 21st century. It gave her dormant case new life, and showed her its potential to transform policing.

Her investigation “would have been at a dead end without the facial recognition,” Young said. “It’s huge.”

Biometric retail technology is ready for its close-up; but are shoppers ready for it?

Nov 13, 2018 | Chris Burt

The global market for retail biometrics is by all accounts in its early stages, and is significantly fragmented between regions. Retailers in Asia are testing biometric systems for retail payments and customer interaction, while most trials and deployments in North America so far seem to be focused on security. The range of applications is broad enough for biometrics to be a potentially disruptive force for the retail industry worldwide in the foreseeable future.

Amazon opened its first Go stores, which are partially automated to provide payments without a cashier or self-checkout, to the public at the beginning of 2018. The company plans to roll out up to 3,000 Go stores by 2021, in a unique divergence from the regional split. Pay with a smile was launched with Alipay technology at KPRO by KFC stores last year in China, and facial recognition has more recently been applied to controlled retail settings for trials in Finland and Korea.

Other modalities have been tested or trialed for retail payment authentication this year, including Fujitsu palm vein biometrics, and Hitachi finger vein biometrics.

The majority of retail biometrics projects in the U.S. so far, however, are focused on loss prevention and violence prevention, FaceFirst CEO Peter Trepp tells Biometric Update. After more production roll-outs of that application, different ones will eventually follow, he expects, but not right away.

“There is another step though that exists which has more to do with consumer loyalty, and consumer experience, that is not quite as expensive an endeavor, and I think there are lots of folks looking at ways of doing that in a friendly opt-in environment, where privacy is not the cornerstone issue, and consumers are opting into systems that allow them to engage with them,” Trepp says.

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Selfie pay: Security fears as facial recognition set to revolutionise payments

A LEADING privacy group has warned that so-called selfie pay is another massive step towards a “Big Brother” society.


By Paul Harper / Published 3rd February 2018




Facial recognition ID is predicted to replace cash and cards in future as a standard form of payments.


Just last week it emerged MasterCard customers will be able to pay for their shopping by using a selfie from April next year.

Mark Barnett, from Mastercard, said: “Biometric technologies perfectly meet the public’s expectation for state-of-the-art security when making a payment.

"This will be of great benefit to everyone: consumers, retailers and banks.”





GETTY
THREAT: Selfie pay face payment systems have raised fears of Big Brother-style surveillance


Artificial intelligence: AI in the past, present and future
AI is creeping into ever corner of our lives




Getty Images

A 1949 illustration shows a man with an electronic circuit board for a brain

DHS Announces Program to ILLEGALLY Scan Our Faces

DHS Announces Program to ILLEGALLY Scan Our Faces—And They’re Forcing Us to Pay For It

Both Congress and the Department of Homeland Security have never justified the biometric scanners at airports that could cost Americans $1 billion in 2018.

By Rachel Blevins - December 28, 2017



As TSA agents continue to prove their incompetence in the “War on Terror,” the Department of Homeland Security is now allocating $1 billion in taxpayer funding to create a facial recognition program that will illegally scan Americans’ faces.

A study conducted by Georgetown Law’s Center for Privacy and Technology looked at the biometric scanners that are creating an inventory of the faces of individuals leaving the country at airports across the United States. While they are only at certain major airports right now, the full implementation of these scanners could cost Americans up to $1 billion.

The study noted that while the “9/11 Response and Biometric Exit Account” created by Congress has the funds for the program, “neither Congress nor DHS has ever justified the need for the program.”

In addition to the fact that Congress has never provided a reason why the system is needed in the U.S., the study claimed that DHS has “repeatedly questioned ‘the additional value biometric air exit would provide’ compared with the status quo and the ‘overall value and cost of a biometric air exit capability,’ even as it has worked to build it.”

Not only is a government agency pouring $1 billion into a program to increase the country’s security measures even though it lacks full confidence, and has no evidence that the program it is implementing will do so, there is also the fact that the program requires Americans to give up their civil liberties, and it has never been explicitly authorized by the government. As the researchers from Georgetown Law noted:

“DHS’ biometric exit program also stands on shaky legal ground. Congress has repeatedly ordered the collection of biometrics from foreign nationals at the border, but has never clearly authorized the border collection of biometrics from American citizens using face recognition technology. Without explicit authorization, DHS should not be scanning the faces of Americans as they depart on international flights—but DHS is doing it anyway. DHS also is failing to comply with a federal law requiring it to conduct a rulemaking process to implement the airport face scanning program—a process that DHS has not even started.”

The study also found that the biometric scanners used by DHS are not reliable, and often make mistakes. In fact, “according to DHS’ own data, DHS’ face recognition systems erroneously reject as many as 1 in 25 travelers using valid credentials.” This means that at the country’s busiest airports, more than 1,500 travelers could be wrongfully denied boarding in a single day.

As The Free Thought Project has reported, while the biometric scanners are currently located at the major airports in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, New York City and the District of Columbia, DHS has made it clear that they plan to roll this program out nationwide by January 2018.

Sens. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah, criticized the privacy implications, and called for Homeland Security to halt the facial recognition scanning program in a letter to DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielson:

“We request that DHS stop the expansion of this program, and provide Congress with its explicit statutory authority to use and expand a biometric exit program on U.S. citizens. If there is no specific authorization, then we request an explanation for why DHS believes it has the authority to proceed without congressional approval. Additionally, we ask that you address a number of our privacy concerns with the program.”

Markey told The Hill that DHS should never have started testing and implementing the biometric scanners without first receiving congressional approval, and the United States Congress should take the time to weigh the implications of the program before handing the department a blank check.

“When American citizens travel by air internationally, they should not have to choose between privacy and security,” Markey said. “The implementation of the Department of Homeland Security’s facial recognition scanning program for passengers leaving the country raises a number of concerns around accuracy, transparency and basic necessity.”

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