A group of parents and their children in California and Illinois filed the proposed class action suit, which relates to Meta’s leaked “NameTag” feature, WIRED reported Monday (Sept. 14).
According to the report, the suit alleges that Meta illegally used the plaintiffs’ Facebook and Instagram photos to develop NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train Meta AI models including Emu and Muse Image.
The suit alleges that Meta violated Illinois and California privacy laws by using biometric information from people’s photos without notice or permission.
“People shouldn’t have to worry if their biometric information will be misused simply because their photographs appear on a social media platform,” Justin Boley, a partner at Wexler Boley & Elgersma and lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement to WIRED.
The publication had reported in June that code for NameTag had been secretly integrated with the Meta glasses AI companion app.
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Although the feature had not been enabled for app users, an analysis found that the system was designed to turn faces captured by the glasses into biometric signatures and compare them with “faceprints” kept in a database on the user’s phone.
WIRED said it was initially unable to determine where the original faceprint data came from. The suit alleges that they could be derived from Facebook and Instagram images.
The filing bases this on reports that Meta employees claimed that NameTag could recognize people from their Meta connections or public Instagram accounts, as well as on a a company patent describing face matching against profile photos and other images held by Meta.
A Meta spokesperson told WIRED the suit is meritless and stressed that the company is not building a “universal” database of faces.
“We’ve been transparent about how we use people’s information to build and improve our AI products,” the spokesperson said. “As for NameTags, nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”
In other Meta news, PYMNTS wrote last week about the company’s new Muse AI system, which struggled in tests of basic consumer tasks like buying toilet paper, because of the various other connections required before Muse could attempt a task.
Meta’s business model for Muse, that report said, depends on the AI “completing transactions reliably enough for people to trust it with real purchases.”
“Based on three attempts at ordinary errands, that trust isn’t earned yet,” the report added.
“The promise of agentic AI has always been that handing off a task removes work rather than creating more to manage. Muse, in its first days, adds the layer instead of removing it.”
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