After Wired discovered the "Faceprint" code buried within Meta's smart glasses software, the company has denied the allegations its glasses have it.
The latest reports claim that the said code is no longer available, with Meta allegedly wiping off the evidence by deleting it.
Meta Denies Face Recognition Code on Smart Glasses
Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, told WIRED that the feature is "purely exploratory" and that no final decision has been made on what to do with it. Stone also called the original reporting "dishonest" while simultaneously describing the feature as a pilot program still under internal consideration.
The company declined to answer questions about data retention, whether any server syncing had occurred, or whether test data was deleted along with the code.
This was not the first warning sign regarding Meta's smart glasses ambitions as civil rights groups had previously raised alarms about Meta's reported plans to bring facial recognition to its AI glasses.
They also argued that a feature capable of identifying people through wearable cameras could create serious privacy risks for bystanders who never agreed to be scanned.
Reports Claim Meta Secretly Deleted Evidence
The feature Meta internally called NameTag was designed to convert faces captured by the Ray-Ban smart glasses into unique biometric signatures and compare them against a database stored on the user's device.
WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.
As per WIRED (via Digital Trends), Meta has secretly deleted the said code from the repository of its Meta AI app, removing such evidence linking it to the facial recognition technology.
Meta stuck to their claims before that it was only part of a pilot testing of the feature and ultimately decided not to use it.
Meta Faceprint Code Discovered
WIRED's investigation shared in its report that Meta added the underlying NameTag code to its companion app, but it was not enabled and was not currently sending biometric data to Meta's servers. The components had been distributed to phones since around January 2026, though no working feature was exposed to users.
NameTag is an internal Meta system that uses three AI models to detect a face, store it on the phone, and match it against saved faceprints, then notify the wearer when the glasses recognize someone.
It is designed for the Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, but has not been released. Security researchers who reviewed the code for WIRED said the feature appeared close to working, even in its dormant state.
The issue drew added concern because this was not hidden in a research demo or a developer-only build as it surfaced in the app that ordinary smart glasses owners interact with. For a camera-equipped wearable designed to be worn in public, privacy advocates argued that even inactive facial recognition code raises serious questions about consent.
Meta had previously considered adding facial recognition to its first generation of Ray-Ban glasses back in 2021 but dropped the idea after backlash and ethical concerns.
