Child ID Scare Brings New Attention to Privacy Fears Over Smart Glasses

Somewhere among New York State’s 1,240 courthouses this past month, a small but symbolic ban took effect.As of July 20, judges, lawyers and members of the public have been forbidden to wear smart glasses, including Meta’s Ray-Bans, inside any of New York’s state, county, city, town and village courts. The rule was adopted over fears that the devices’ cameras and recording functions are too easy to disguise.It is a narrow policy, covering a narrow set of buildings, but it reflects a much bigger question playing out in subway cars, on playgrounds and, until recently, inside Meta’s own code. Can a stranger aim a pair of ordinary-looking glasses at a child and walk away knowing that child’s name, school, and address, all without a parent finding out?That question stopped being hypothetical in June when researchers with Wired and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Threat Lab reported finding dormant facial recognition code — built by Meta and known internally as “Name Tag” — already embedded in the companion app installed on more than 50 million phones — including those connected to some 11 million Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 devices.Days later, Meta quietly deleted the unactivated code, according to a follow-up report from the same outlet. The company’s vice president of communications, Andy Stone, told Wired the feature was purely exploratory and dismissed the findings by saying the feature “does not exist.”Meta, at the time, declined to answer 10 questions from the outlet, including how long the app had retained photographs and biometric data of unrecognized faces, and whether that data was ever sent to Meta’s servers.If the feature truly doesn’t exist, why was it already installed on so many pairs of glasses?The Subway Moment That Made Strangers SuspectsThe public’s unease with the glasses had already been building for months before the Name Tag code surfaced. Last fall, a viral video showed a woman on a New York City subway car smashing a fellow rider’s Meta Ray-Bans after accusing him of secretly filming her. Drawing millions of views, the video turned the unidentified woman into an overnight folk hero online.The rider insisted he hadn’t done anything wrong, but commenters weren’t buying it. The woman found plenty of defenders online, and the moment resonated for a reason: A device that looks just like a regular pair of glasses lets its wearer record almost anyone nearby, kids included, in places where pulling out a phone would get noticed.Meta has pointed to a small LED indicator light built into the frame as proof that recording cannot happen in secret, and the company has since updated the glasses to turn off the camera if it detects the light has been tampered with. Privacy advocates counter that the light is easy to miss in a crowded room and does nothing to alert a parent after the fact.The senior campaign director of Fight for the Future, Reem Suleiman, tells The New York Sun that parents have good reason to worry.“Parents should absolutely be concerned with smart glasses being able to identify their kids,” Ms. Suleiman says. “It can also help stalkers track ex-partners, or nefarious actors looking to target journalists and activists. Simply put, if the technology has the capacity to identify and locate people, it is simply too dangerous to allow in public spaces.”Concern about the software has spawned its own counter-industry.An open-source Android application called Nearby Glasses, built by a developer named Yves Jeanrenaud after he read reports about people using the glasses to film others without consent, is designed to scan for the Bluetooth signatures broadcast by Meta’s Ray-Bans and by Snap’s Spectacles, alerting a user when a pair is likely nearby.A separate iOS version, marketed as a “Ray-Ban Scanner,” offers similar detection along with continuous background scanning for parents who want a standing alert while their children are at a park or a pool.But neither app can see what the glasses are recording, and both acknowledge a real limitation: Meta’s own virtual reality headsets share the same Bluetooth identifiers, so a neighbor playing in a headset at home can trigger a false alarm.The Face-Scanning Tool Meta Says It DeletedName Tag itself has a longer and more contested history than its brief life inside the app suggests.Reports earlier this year indicated that Meta was preparing to launch a feature that would let a wearer look at a person and have Meta’s AI assistant identify them and bring up information pulled from their public profile. Two versions were reportedly under consideration: one limited to people already connected to the wearer on a Meta platform, and a broader one capable of recognizing anyone with a public Instagram or Facebook account.The reaction from the advocacy world was immediate and, by tech-industry standards, unusually unified.In April, a coalition of more than 75 organizations sent an open letter to the Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, demanding the company scrap the feature outright. Separately, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts warned Meta that the company was reviving, on a wearable device, a facial recognition capability it had abandoned on Facebook in 2021 amid a $650 million settlement over a biometric privacy law in Illinois.A Meta spokesperson tells the Sun the company’s glasses were designed with privacy safeguards.“We designed our AI glasses with privacy and safety features built in from the start — informed by engagement with safety experts,” the spokesman says, pointing to the LED light as a distinguishing feature. “No other camera category — not smartphones, action cameras, or doorbell cameras — does anything like this.”On the Name Tag code specifically, the spokesman contends that “nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”“If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency,” the representative continues. “One decision we can be clear about — we are not building a universal facial recognition tool.”Child-safety groups aren’t reassured. The communications director of Fairplay for Kids, Ashwin Verghese, tells the Sun the risk to children goes beyond simple identification.“Not only can children be captured in photos or videos via Meta’s smart glasses, but their likenesses can also be exploited and turned into realistic child sexual abuse material with the help of AI,” Mr. Verghese says.He calls the LED light a hollow protection.“There’s no way to guarantee the light will be seen by the person being recorded, and even if it is, they could have already been filmed for an unknown amount of time and have no real recourse to stop the recording or delete it,” Mr. Verghese says.Legal analysts have flagged a separate problem: An update to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule, which took effect in April, now treats a child’s facial template as protected personal information, meaning it can’t be collected without a parent’s verifiable consent. That’s hard to reconcile with a stranger’s glasses scanning a kid’s face in the cereal aisle.Not everyone treats the danger as new. The underlying anxiety, some say, predates the glasses by decades.“For years, parents have been advised not to put a child’s name on a backpack or jacket because it gives strangers unnecessary information,” the advisory solutions director at TrustedSec, Alex Hamerstone, tells the Sun. “AI-powered smart glasses extend that same concern into the digital world by potentially identifying someone without any interaction.”He is skeptical that the LED light offers real protection, calling it more symbolic than protective, yet he is equally doubtful that any device-level fix can solve the problem.“The reality is that privacy in public increasingly depends on broader policy decisions and how companies choose to build and deploy these technologies, not just on individual actions,” Mr. Hamerstone says.

Child ID Scare Brings New Attention to Privacy Fears Over Smart Glasses

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