A coalition of over 70 activist groups is asking Meta — the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and other social apps — to end its plan to launch a “Name Tag” facial recognition feature on its AI-powered Ray-Ban smartglasses.

The coalition argues that the tech would allow stalkers, abusers, and federal agents to target and harass abuse victims, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people by being able to silently identify strangers in public, Wired magazine reported.

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The Name Tag program would allow smartglass users to pull up information on people within their view. One version of Name Tag would only identify people that the wearer is already connected to on a Meta platform; another larger version of the program would allow wearers to identify anyone with a public account on any Meta social network.

In a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the coalition — which includes LGBTQ+-inclusive advocacy groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, UltraViolet and Old Dykes Against Billionaire Tech Bros, and other human rights groups — said that the facial recognition program gives members of the public no way to opt-out of being identified.

As such, this primary issue with the Name Tag program “cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards,” the letter states.

The coalition has asked Meta to reveal any instances in which its wearables were used to aid stalking, harassment, or domestic violence; to share any talks Meta has had with federal law enforcement agencies (including ones handling immigration and domestic security); and to commit to consulting with civil society and independent privacy experts before integrating biometric identification into its devices.

Biometric identification is any automated system that recognizes individuals based on unique biological or behavioral traits, such as fingerprints, DNA, or facial features.

The coalition groups also noted that internal Meta documents showed that the company hoped to quietly roll out its Name Tag program now, at a time when the “dynamic political environment” has made civil rights groups less likely to attack Meta because they are “focused on other concerns.”

The coalition called this internal calculation “vile behavior” and accused Meta of trying to launch an unethical product under the fog of the current presidential administration’s “rising authoritarianism” and “disregard for the rule of law.”

“People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviors,” the coalition wrote.

The ACLU found that LGBTQ+ individuals are up to six times more likely to be stopped by police in public spaces than the general population. The Williams Institute found that LGBTQ+ people are five times more likely than non-LGBTQ+ people to be victims of violent crime.

The worry is that auto-recognition features would enable the government to target and identify people in a variety of public and private settings, essentially “destroying the concept of privacy or anonymity in public spaces,” Wired wrote, citing a concern from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

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