Meta Sued Over NameTag Face Data

The lawsuit draws on a specific set of facts Meta has not fully addressed. WIRED reported in June that NameTag code was embedded in an app downloaded more than 50 million times, and that the system was designed to turn faces captured by smart glasses into biometric signatures compared against faceprints on the user's phone, with that database configured to receive updates from Meta. The complaint alleges those faceprints may derive from Facebook and Instagram images, pointing to employee claims and a company patent, though it acknowledges Meta has not disclosed which images were used.

Meta's public posture has been that NameTag never existed because it was not available to consumers, even as CTO Andrew Bosworth called WIRED's reporting misleading and later described NameTag on a podcast as a feature that could recognize people a wearer had met. Meta removed the code the day after WIRED's June 4 report. The complaint also cites Meta's history of biometric settlements, including $650 million to Illinois in 2020 and $1.4 billion to Texas in 2024.

The case is likely to turn on whether the court treats the unreleased status of NameTag as decisive, and on how broadly the proposed class is defined. If the national class numbers in the millions as the complaint estimates, the statutory damages under Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act could become significant for Meta, though the $5,000 and $1,000 figures are per-violation maximums rather than a fixed total.