Meta sued for allegedly using Facebook and Instagram photos to build facial recognition system for smart glasses

A proposed nationwide class action filed September 7 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois accuses Meta of extracting biometric data from Facebook and Instagram photos to train "NameTag," an unreleased facial recognition system designed for its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. The complaint, Alvarez et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., alleges Meta collected face embeddings, vectors, and templates from user and non-user photos alike, without notice or consent, in violation of Illinois's BIPA and California privacy law. Statutory damages under BIPA run up to $5,000 per intentional violation; the proposed class covers anyone in the U.S. whose image was uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, or fed into a Meta generative AI model.

The suit extends beyond NameTag. Plaintiffs argue that training Emu (initially on 1.1 billion image-text pairs) and its successor Muse Image on face-containing photos caused those models to encode identity-specific facial characteristics in their parameters — and that those representations qualify as biometric identifiers under the law. Meta has said "nothing has shipped to consumers" and that it is "not building a central face database," though WIRED previously reported finding inactive NameTag code in the Meta AI app and evidence the system was designed to retrieve faceprints from Meta servers. Meta previously paid $650 million to settle a BIPA suit over Facebook face tagging and $1.4 billion to resolve a Texas biometric-data case.