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Concerns Over Meta's Smart Glasses Have Reached the U.S. Senate
https://gizmodo.com/concerns-over-metas-smart-glasses-have-reached-the-u-s-senate-2000735746Consternation 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.”
-snip-
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.
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.
-snip-
“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.”
-snip-
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.
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.
-snip-