Senators press Meta on facial recognition plans for smart glasses

Three U.S. Democratic senators are demanding answers from Meta over reports that the company plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses, arguing that the move could turn consumer eyewear into a tool for covert identification in public and deepen a surveillance culture that is already spilling into immigration enforcement.

In a letter sent Tuesday to Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, Sens. Edward Markey, Ron Wyden, and Jeff Merkley said the company must explain how it would obtain consent, handle biometric data, test for bias, and prevent misuse if it goes forward with the feature.

They gave Meta until April 6 to respond.

The senators said the biometric-enabled glasses “risks normalizing mass surveillance at a moment when the federal government is using similar tools to intimidate protesters and chill speech. Although facial recognition may offer real benefits for blind and visually impaired users, Meta’s history of failing to protect user privacy raises serious questions about its plan to deploy this technology in its smart glasses.”

“Americans do not consent to biometric data collection simply by walking down a public street, entering a café, or standing in a crowd,” the senators told Zuckerberg. Yet, the deployment of this technology would appear to do exactly that – subjecting countless individuals to covert identification without notice, without consent, and without any meaningful opportunity to opt out.”

Such a practice, the senators said, “would erode longstanding expectations of privacy in public spaces, effectively eliminating public anonymity.”

The senators’ letter was triggered by reports that Meta is exploring facial recognition for its smart glasses. The proposed feature could allow wearers to identify people around them in real time through the glasses’ AI system.

That possibility drew heightened concern because Meta had previously retreated from facial recognition in 2021, when it shut down Facebook’s face recognition program after years of criticism over privacy and civil liberties.

The senators’ letter makes clear that their concern is not limited to product design. It argues that Meta’s large stores of personal data would make facial recognition-enabled glasses uniquely dangerous because they could link faces in public to names, workplaces, profiles and other personal details in seconds, creating risks of stalking, harassment, doxxing, and targeted intimidation.

The lawmakers said smart glasses are especially troubling because they are designed to be worn continuously and are often indistinguishable from ordinary eyewear, making it difficult or impossible for bystanders to know when they are being scanned.

That concern has become more concrete because the glasses are no longer a hypothetical privacy problem. In recent months, U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents involved in immigration enforcement have been reported wearing Meta AI smart glasses during field activity.

Agents in six states reportedly have been seen wearing the glasses, in some cases recording or photographing members of the public during deportation-related operations.

Earlier, it was reported that Border Patrol agents appeared to have used Ray Ban Meta glasses while filming protesters in Evanston, Illinois, during a December operation.

That reporting does not establish that agents were using Meta’s proposed facial recognition capability, and it should not be framed that way. But it does sharpen the relevance of the senators’ warning.

Their letter says federal agencies are already using facial recognition tools to identify people engaged in lawful protest activity and potentially to assemble databases of those exercising First Amendment rights.

Embedding similar identification capabilities in widely available consumer eyewear, the senators argue, would vastly expand that surveillance infrastructure by making real-time recognition more ambient, more portable and harder to detect.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has said it “does not have an arrangement with Meta” and that personal recording devices are “not authorized,” even though officers may wear personally purchased sunglasses.

That distinction matters because it suggests smart glasses can be used in operational settings outside the normal body camera architecture and outside the clearer retention, disclosure, and oversight rules that usually govern official recording systems.

The senators’ questions to Meta are unusually specific. They ask how the company would obtain affirmative express consent not only from the user who enables facial recognition but also from every person whose biometric data may be captured in the glasses’ field of view.

They ask how long biometric data would be retained, whether device owners and non-users could seek deletion, whether the data would be used to train machine learning models, and whether Meta has conducted privacy impact assessments or commissioned third-party audits.

They also ask whether Meta plans to match captured faces against user uploaded images or against data from Facebook and Instagram, what information might be displayed to the wearer, and whether the company would share biometric data or outputs with law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

The broader political backdrop is also important. In November 2021, Meta said it would shut down Facebook’s facial recognition system and delete more than a billion facial templates, acknowledging that the uses of facial recognition had to be weighed against growing societal concerns.

The current controversy turns that earlier retreat into a new point of vulnerability for the company, because critics can now argue that Meta is not abandoning facial recognition at all so much as relocating it from the social media platform into always-on hardware.

“Five years later, Meta appears less worried about those societal concerns and is reportedly planning to deploy facial recognition technology in one of the most dangerous possible settings,” the senators wrote.

“Moreover,” they continued, “Meta is apparently aware of the risks with this technology,” noting that “an internal memo recommended launching the product ‘during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.’”

“In other words,” the senators added, “Meta appears to recognize the serious privacy and civil liberties risks of facial recognition but thinks it can avoid attention by slipping the once abandoned, ethically fraught product back onto the market while the world is distracted by the Trump administration’s daily chaos.”

Privacy advocates had already been trying to force regulators to intervene. In February, the Electronic Privacy Information Center asked the Federal Trade Commission and state enforcers to investigate Meta’s smart glasses plans, warning that the feature could put people at risk of stalking, harassment and worse.

That pressure was reinforced by the now widely cited examples of consumer smart glasses being used in public-facing contexts where recording and identification fears are particularly acute, including protests and immigration enforcement.

Taken together, the senators’ demand letter and the recent sightings of Meta glasses on CBP and ICE personnel push this issue beyond a simple tech product controversy.

The debate is now about whether a company with one of the world’s deepest reservoirs of personal data should be allowed to make instant identification a normal feature of daily life, just as federal immigration enforcement agencies are already being accused of expanding surveillance in the field.

Article Topics

biometrics  |  facial recognition  |  Meta  |  Meta glasses  |  smart glasses  |  U.S. Government