One of the biggest fantasies -- and fears -- in the science fiction-like realm of smart glasses is the idea of looking across a room, seeing someone, and instantly being able to recognize who they are. And maybe when the last time you met them was. And who knows what else.
The line between fantasy and reality, and fantasy and nightmare, often gets pushed and pulled to the limit in new tech. Meta, the biggest maker of smart glasses right now, is apparently already well underway with plans to introduce facial recognition into its glasses, according to a new report from the New York Times that mirrors reports that The Information wrote last year.
While Meta has goals for facial recognition tech to be used for assistive purposes, an internal company memo from 2025 cited in the Times story sees our current "dynamic political environment" as being a good landscape to launch a controversial feature like facial recognition, claiming that "many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns."
That sentiment alone is deeply worrying, and not surprising for a company like Meta that has been at the center of privacy scandals more than once. If facial recognition technology like this does come to smart glasses -- and I expect it will -- it'll need to be handled with extreme measures of control and responsibility. Sliding its debut into a chaotic political landscape in hopes it'll go unnoticed -- or unregulated -- is the worst type of outcome.
Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Is facial recognition on glasses inevitable?
Nothing in tech is "inevitable," but even so, I don't see a way that facial recognition on glasses won't happen to some degree sooner or later. While no smart glasses have facial recognition capabilities now, it's totally possible to do this. AI can already recognize faces in photos and some of our phone apps have been using the technology to sort our photo libraries for years. The federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, which has been widely criticized for its heavy-handed tactics, already uses it in software via Clearview AI and Mobile Fortify without the public's consent. Two students hacked a way to make Meta glasses do it in 2024.
Facial recognition has been possible for so long, CNET wrote a feature package about it in 2019. It's the consent and privacy parts that I'm thinking about. Our brains already have facial recognition capabilities, but we don't share that data out of our brains to others. And, if a tech company had the capability to recognize and label faces, would that function be limited to personal and private access, or shared out with government agencies or within that company itself?
It's an idea that's already embedded deep in the very metaphor of Facebook, a company named for the little student handbooks at colleges that would list who's who in a given class, and Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook app is essentially a portable digital recognition tool. A pair of glasses that could do the same thing and accelerate recognition and connection seems like a natural bridge.
The second-gen (or third-gen if you count Stories) Meta Ray-Ban glasses get a big battery boost. Always-on AI modes could be improving every year. Scott Stein/CNET
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