Meta Sued Over NameTag and Emu AI Training in Illinois

A 66-page class action complaint filed on September 4, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois accuses Meta of using photographs from Facebook and Instagram to train a facial-recognition system it calls NameTag, along with its Emu and Muse Image generative models, without telling the people in those photos. WIRED's writeup follows its own earlier reporting on the feature: inactive NameTag code turned up in the Meta AI companion app in early June and was quietly removed once the discovery drew attention, according to Biometric Update.

The lawsuit, Alvarez et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., was brought by Illinois resident Francisco Alvarez, his minor child, California resident Jeremy Wahl, and Wahl's minor daughter. Plaintiffs are represented by Wexler Boley & Elgersma LLP, Stephan Zouras LLP, Gufstafson Gluek PLLC, and Taus, Cebulash & Landau LLP. NameTag, as described in the filing, was designed for Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley AI glasses and the Meta AI app: photos harvested from Facebook and Instagram would be reduced to numerical faceprints that the glasses could then match against strangers in the wild.

The complaint extends the same argument to Meta's image generators. Plaintiffs contend that training Emu and its successor Muse Image on photographs containing faces caused the models to encode identity-related facial characteristics in the model parameters — that the weights themselves, in other words, are alleged to carry biometric information.

"This case is about Meta's latest attempts to turn the personal information of billions of people into profit," said Justin N. Boley of Wexler Boley & Elgersma. "People shouldn't have to worry if their biometric information will be misused simply because their photographs appear on a social media platform."

The suit claims violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, California publicity and misappropriation law, and the California Constitution's privacy protections. Neither WIRED's writeup nor the corroborating reports we retrieved set a damages figure. Four researchers in our Who's Who tracker shared the piece.