'I Felt Super Violated': Men Wearing Meta Glasses on Dates Is an Instant Red Flag As anxieties over surveillance tech grow, unsuspecting singles are sharing stories of being covertly filmed on dates by Meta smart glasses. Courtney McAnuff was out of a year-long relationship in the summer of 2024 and starting to date again when she agreed to grab drinks with a potential suitor. They met at a bar in midtown Manhattan . He arrived wearing a baseball cap pulled low and sported a pair of black-framed glasses, she says. As conversation flowed, from discussions about navigating life in New York to past relationships, he mentioned that his glasses were Meta Ray-Bans.

The proposed class action alleges Meta illegally harvested people's Facebook and Instagram photos to train its AI image-generation models and to build its unreleased "NameTag" face recognition feature. A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models including Emu and Muse Image . The proposed class action alleges that Meta violated Illinois and California privacy laws by extracting biometric information from people's photos without notice or consent. WIRED reported in June that code for NameTag had been secretly embedded in the Meta glasses AI companion app, which had been downloaded more than 50 million times. While the feature had not been enabled for users of the app, the analysis found that the system was designed to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures and compare them with so-called faceprints stored in a database on the user's phone.

'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. 'Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives,' says Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing a class-action suit against Meta over its privacy assurances. Did someone wearing Meta Glasses film you today? People say they've been secretly filmed in their own home, at concerts and at work. Are the wildly popular smartglasses the final nail in the coffin of personal privacy? The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. "I've had one person who told me that their intentions were creepy," a man tells me over a video call, on condition of anonymity.

Since WIRED reported on Meta's NameTag face recognition system, company executives have made confusing and conflicting remarks about its very existence. Does a software feature exist if its code has been deployed to the devices of millions of people but they can't use it yet? Not if you work at Meta . The company's executives have spent the last few weeks making this semantic argument about NameTag, the in-development face-recognition system that Meta built for its smart glasses . The inevitable result is confusion, but that's easy enough to clear up.

I started at Slate not too long ago, and in my first weeks in the magazine's New York office, I was faced with a problem that is familiar to anyone who's ever started a new office job. I was surrounded by dozens of new faces and struggled to connect them to names. Which man with a scruffy beard was the one in charge of podcasts again? Who was the friendly woman at my desk pod offering me some of her snacks? I found myself wishing, as I often do, that everyone was wearing a nametag.

This summer, Facebook will present a paper at a computer vision conference revealing how it has created a tool almost as accurate as the human brain when it comes to saying whether two photographs show the same person – regardless of changes in lighting and camera angles. A human being will get the answer correct 97.53% of the time; Facebook's new technology scores an impressive 97.25%. "We closely approach human performance," says Yaniv Taigman, a member of its AI team. Since the ability to recognise faces has long been a benchmark for artificial intelligence, developments such as Facebook's "DeepFace" technology (yes, that's what it called it) raise big questions about the power of today's facial recognition tools and what these mean for the future. Facebook is not the only tech company interested in facial recognition.