Meta Strips NameTag Facial Recognition Code From Ray-Ban App

Hidden inside Meta's AI companion app for its Ray-Ban smart glasses was a dormant facial recognition system called NameTag that the company had not publicly disclosed. WIRED reported that the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses' cameras into unique biometric signatures and compare them against a database stored on the user's device. That app sits on more than 50 million phones.

Meta removed nearly all traces of the system within one day of the report. Before publishing, WIRED posed ten questions to the company, including whether it had already created the face profile database NameTag would use and how long the app retains photographs and biometric data of unrecognized people. Meta declined to answer them.

The company's public response focused on coverage framing rather than the substance of those unanswered questions. Andy Stone, Meta's vice president of communications, called the feature "purely exploratory" and complained on X that WIRED waited until the fourth paragraph to note it was "not enabled" -- saying "this is more than shoddy reporting, it's intellectually dishonest." Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, called the reporting "incredibly misleading" and "absolutely dishonest." Whether the feature was non-functional and exploratory does not resolve the basic questions about what data the app may have already collected or retained -- questions that, as of publication, Meta had not answered.

For wearable AI developers and anyone building products in this space, the episode illustrates what happens when biometric features are shipped in code before they are disclosed: the removal happens fast, but the questions about prior data handling linger. What the reporting does not give you is any confirmation of whether NameTag was a product on a timeline or genuinely dead-end exploratory code, and that distinction matters for assessing whether a similar feature is likely to resurface.