Consternation about smart glasses is ramping up, and it looks like those fears are officially hitting the national stage. This week, U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley (both D-Ore) officially inquired about Meta’s plans to add facial recognition to its Ray-Ban smart glasses, painting the idea as an existential threat to privacy.
“Despite Meta’s desire to minimize public attention on this product, the deployment of smart glasses equipped with facial recognition technology threatens Americans’ privacy rights and civil liberties, and therefore warrants close scrutiny,” the senators wrote in a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The widespread deployment of facial-recognition-enabled smart glasses also risks accelerating the normalization of mass surveillance in the United States.”
As Scooby-Doo would say: ru-roh! In case you missed it, the New York Times reported in February that, according to memos seen by the publication, Mark Zuckerberg and company are working on plans to introduce facial recognition to the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses. Not only that, but Meta is reportedly planning to do so during—and this is apparently the company’s own words—”a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.” Feel free to go rinse your eyeballs if they’re feeling a little unclean; I’ll wait.
While plans for facial recognition in its smart glasses have not been acknowledged by Meta, let alone made official, the Democratic senators, to their credit, appear to be getting out ahead of any potential privacy bombshells—and for good reason. Meta already has a checkered history with facial recognition. In 2021, the company shut down a tool that scanned the face of every single person on Facebook, deleting more than a billion face templates. What’s worse is that two years before nixing that tool, Meta agreed, as part of a $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, to obtain “affirmative express consent” from users before using facial recognition to scan their faces.
© Raymond Wong / Gizmodo
So, just to lay this all out plainly: the company that has already been reprimanded and regulated for its use of facial recognition on its platform is now (reportedly) considering adding facial recognition to hardware that is arguably even more problematic than the previous application. Welcome to 2026.
As the senators lay out in their letter, the potential risks of adding facial recognition to smart glasses are numerous, and because of the implications on privacy, they have a few questions, including the following: will people be able to request deletion of their biometric data? Will the data collected be used to train AI? Has Meta actually thought about the privacy implications? Will Meta be making a database of people’s faces? Has the company ever heard of civil liberties? Would it share data with law enforcement? Lastly, what the actual f*ck are you thinking, Mark? Okay, that last one is made up, but it’s pretty much implied by all the other very real questions.
There was never really a good time for Meta to be considering something as ethically bankrupt as adding facial recognition to smart glasses—a device that already has a ton of inherent privacy implications—but now is a particularly bad one. Last month, a report revealed that Meta has been sending sensitive videos captured by its smart glasses to human reviewers tasked with helping to train AI models. Those videos, according to the subcontractors, show people naked, going to the bathroom, and having sex, and some of them were recorded unintentionally.
Partially as a result of that icky reality, smart glasses (Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses in particular) are now very much on the radar of state legislatures, privacy watchdogs, and pretty much anyone else who doesn’t like the idea of being recorded discreetly. Clearly, though, Meta could still make things worse, and while it’s done a bang-up job of pretty much ignoring all the rotten revelations as of late, the U.S. Senate might not blow over as easily. Hard to say, but it looks like we might get another court appearance from Mark Zuckerberg, and maybe this time he won’t outfit his entourage in smart glasses.
