Meta’s smart glasses will soon have facial recognition capabilities, according to The New York Times.
Called “Name Tag,” the glasses will be able to identify people and retrieve information about them. The move comes five years after Facebook shut down its facial recognition system for tagging photos in its feed due to privacy and legal concerns, the paper said.
Name Tag could be launched as early as this year.
Meta makes Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses with an embedded AI assistant. The glasses can shoot photos and videos, stream audio and calls, and access the internet through Meta AI.
The paper saw an internal company document describing its facial recognition plans, which was supposed to be first released at a conference for the blind before going to the general public.
Meta saw today’s political upheavals as an opportunity to release the feature.
“We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns,” the internal document said, according to the paper.
In recent years, the company paid out $2 billion to settle lawsuits for allegedly collecting facial data of users without their consent on Facebook, so users can tag their friends more easily. In 2019, Facebook paid $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission to settle a privacy lawsuit, which included the use of its facial recognition software, the paper said.
Meta told the Times that it is building products that help millions of people “connect and enrich their lives” and it plans to take a “thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out.”
The facial recognition tool would not be able to look up just anyone, sources told the paper. Meta could still change its mind about the release.