When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Welcome to the future, where there's always a camera lens within arm's reach. I'll park my wider-ranging rant about surveillance culture for the time being and attempt to just focus on the news story that's most recently made me consider stepping on to the soap box: the facial recognition system that was at one point in Meta's smart glasses app. Last week, Wired reported it had found code that suggested Meta had quietly embedded face-recognition technology into its smart glasses app. Now Wired reports that, since it published its original story, the code in question has been removed from the Meta AI app. That's good news, right? Well, I'm not sure I feel especially great about it. The code Wired identified was referred to internally as 'NameTag,' and reportedly added over multiple updates in 2026. It was reported that once activated, the system could identify the faces of those captured by the smart glasses' lens and that it would then alert the user when it recognised someone. The original story broke mere weeks after a Meta spokesperson told the publication, "If we were to release such a feature, we would take a very thoughtful approach before rolling anything out." Wired found this particularly troubling as code for the system had been quietly pushed out to an app downloaded millions of times. Couple this with reports that Niantic Spatial may be using images of the world captured by Pokemon Go players to build its highly-accurate geospatial model for use by delivery robots and potentially defense applications, and the whole episode leaves me feeling queasy. At the very least, it's a good time to re-assess what data you're handing over to big tech when you