On June 4 2026, WIRED published an article accusing Meta of quietly slipping in a feature called NameTag onto 50 million phones. NameTag was built to scan faces through the glasses, turn them into biometric identifiers, and then match them against a stored database. For those faces where the biometric identifiers did not match the stored data the faces were cropped and indexed.
Reportedly, internal documents obtained by the New York Times showed Meta was considering timing the official launch of this feature around political chaos, thus betting critics would be looking the other way to avoid mass criticism.
When the reveal via the WIRED article, Meta's communications officer said the NameTag feature 'does not exist.' However, the next day Meta made an update and deleted the code.
There is no viable source of information to know whether a face database exists, and if it does, to what extent the data is accurate. Nevertheless, this story caused critics to accuse Meta of multiple privacy violations, some even calling it 'surveillance code'.
What do you think: can Big Tech regulate itself, or are more privacy regulations the way to go?
