Meta sued over alleged facial recognition training for smart glasses Meta Platforms is facing a proposed nationwide class action lawsuit accusing the company of using photographs from Facebook and Instagram to extract biometric information for an unreleased facial recognition system intended for its smart glasses. The suit further alleges that Meta has used images to train generative AI models without obtaining consent. The 66-page complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleges Meta used images depicting both users and non-users to train and test facial recognition technology known internally as NameTag; to generate facial templates for the system; and to develop image-generation models including Emu and Muse Image. The lawsuit, Alvarez et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., was brought by Illinois resident Francisco Alvarez, his minor child, California resident Jeremy Wahl, and Wahl’s minor daughter. It alleges violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), California publicity and misappropriation law, and the California Constitution’s privacy protections. At the center of the smart glasses allegations is NameTag, facial recognition technology developed for Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses, as well as the Meta AI companion app. The unreleased system’s existence became public in June, when WIRED reported finding inactive NameTag code in the Meta AI app. The code showed that the system was designed to recognize people seen through the glasses’ camera. When activated, it would convert a captured face into a biometric signature, or faceprint, and compare it with faceprints stored on the wearer’s phone. According to the complaint, Meta went substantially beyond developing software capable of recognizing faces. The plaintiffs allege that the company obtained photographs from Facebook and Instagram, extracted numerical representations of the faces in those photos, and created biometric identifiers that could be supplied to NameTag to identify people encountered