ACLU Eyewear, Not Spywear! — civil society coalition opposing Meta facial recognition in smart glasses (2026)

Eyewear, Not Spywear! is a civil society coalition campaign led by the American Civil Liberties Union targeting Meta's reported plan to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. Launched on 13 April 2026 with an open letter signed by 75 organizations, the campaign demands that Meta halt and publicly disavow the feature — known internally as "Name Tag" — which would allow wearers to identify strangers in public in real time without those individuals' knowledge or consent. The coalition includes organizations advocating for domestic violence survivors, immigrant communities, LGBTQ+ people, workers, and consumers, who argue the feature would create infrastructure for stalking, harassment, and state surveillance that no opt-out mechanism can address.

Coalition letter and congressional pressure track

A precursor action on 31 March 2026 saw 64 organizations send letters to Congress, Meta, and EssilorLuxottica demanding Meta abandon the plans. The 13 April open letter, co-organized by the ACLU of Massachusetts and the New York Civil Liberties Union, expanded the coalition to 75 organizations and was addressed directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Co-signatories included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, Access Now, and EPIC. Internal Meta planning documents cited by the coalition reportedly showed the company had considered launching the feature during a "dynamic political environment" on the assumption that civil society groups would be too occupied to mount opposition.

Code discovery and removal

On 4 June 2026, the EFF published "Move Fast, Surveil Things," confirming through static analysis that Meta had already deployed dormant NameTag facial recognition code inside the Meta AI companion app on more than 50 million phones. WIRED's concurrent investigation found the same code, which converts faces into biometric faceprint arrays for matching against a stored database. Within approximately one day, Meta released an app update stripping nearly all the NameTag code. Meta denied the feature had ever been active and called the reporting "incredibly misleading" and "absolutely dishonest." The EFF declared the removal a victory for the civil society coalition; Meta declined to answer whether face profiles had been created or retained before removal. The campaign's demand for a public disavowal of the feature has not been met.