An ACLU-led coalition representing more than 70 civil liberties advocacy groups are pushing back against Meta’s reported plans to bring facial recognition to its smart glasses.
The New York Times initially reported in February that Meta is currently exploring who should be recognizable through its smart glasses, as the company ostensibly hopes to bring some form of facial recognition to Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses.
According to the NYT report, possible options include “recognizing people a user knows because they are connected on a Meta platform, and identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a Meta site like Instagram.”
Now, as reported by Wired, an ACLU-led coalition hopes to oppose those plans, which the group says could turn Meta’s smart glasses into ad hoc “surveillance glasses,” capable of endangering consumers and vulnerable communities, and broadly undermining civil rights and civil liberties.
The group, which also includes the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, issued an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday urging the company to stop and publicly disavow its plans.
“People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviors,” the letter reads.
“It isn’t hard to see how easily this technology could be abused by corporations, private individuals, and the government to target immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, and other vulnerable groups,” an ACLU petition adds. “It also puts domestic violence and stalking survivors at risk and could even be used to go after protestors or people who criticize the government.”
Meta has bowed to public pressure before, albeit after years of costly litigation. As mentioned by Wired, in November 2021 the company ended Facebook’s photo-tagging system and said it would delete the facial recognition templates of more than a billion users, which at the time was called “a company-wide move to limit the use of facial recognition in our products.”
Neither Meta, nor its hardware partner EssilorLuxottica responded to Wired’s request for comment.
This follows news in February that Meta’s smart glasses partner EssilorLuxottica sold over seven million smart glasses in 2025 alone; that year the companies not only shipped a hardware refresh of Ray-Ban Meta, but also Oakley Meta HSTN, Oakley Meta Vanguard, and the $800 Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses—the company’s first smart glasses to include a heads-up display.
It’s not just Meta making smart glasses though. Meanwhile, a rash of competitors are currently preparing their own smart glasses for consumer release; Google, Samsung and Amazon have all announced their own devices, while Apple is also reportedly developing multiple pairs.
