Meta says it isn't building a face database. A 10-year-old girl's lawyers disagree
A lawsuit filed in Chicago says Meta turned ordinary Facebook and Instagram photos into faceprints for its smart glasses — and the proposed class could be millions of people.
Two fathers and their kids — one of them a 10-year-old girl from California — filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago. Their claim is simple enough to explain at dinner: the photos they put on Facebook and Instagram were used, without asking them, to teach Meta's systems what human faces look like. Some of that, the complaint says, went into NameTag — an unreleased face-recognition feature for Meta's smart glasses.
The plaintiffs are Francisco Alvarez and his son, both in Illinois, and Jeremy Wahl and his daughter in California. But the proposed class reaches much further: anyone in Illinois, California and across the US whose image was uploaded to Facebook or Instagram, or fed into Meta's AI through a prompt, going back to September 4, 2021. The complaint estimates the national class could number in the millions. Meta calls the suit "without merit" and says it is "not building a universal face database."
The part that matters isn't the lawsuit. It's what WIRED found in June: working code for NameTag sitting inside the Meta glasses companion app, an app downloaded more than 50 million times. The feature wasn't switched on. But the system was built to take a face captured by the glasses, turn it into a biometric signature, and compare it against faceprints stored in a database on the user's own phone — a database set up to receive updates from Meta.
So the question stops being "will Meta build this" and becomes "where did the faceprints come from?" WIRED couldn't determine that. The complaint says it can't either, because that information sits solely with the company. It points at Meta employees who reportedly said NameTag could recognise people through their Meta connections or public Instagram accounts, and at a company patent describing face matching against profile photos and other images Meta holds.
Your face may already be in a system you have never heard of, and nobody outside Meta can check.
Then there's the money. Illinois has a biometric privacy law that puts a price tag on each violation: $5,000 for an intentional or reckless one, $1,000 for a negligent one, or actual damages if greater. Multiply that by a class "in the millions" and you see why this is not a symbolic case. Meta has been here before — $650 million to settle an earlier Illinois class action in 2020, and $1.4 billion paid to Texas in 2024 over biometric data collection.
Anyone who has ever posted a selfie, tagged a friend, or let a photo of themselves end up on someone else's Instagram — the class covers images uploaded since September 4, 2021, which is most of a normal person's adult photo history. Two groups feel it hardest. People in their twenties and thirties, who grew up documenting everything publicly and now have a decade of faces online they can't retrieve; the trade they made was free apps for photos, and nobody told them faces were part of the deal. And parents: one of the plaintiffs is suing on behalf of a 10-year-old, a child who never signed a terms-of-service agreement in her life.
Two things are worth watching. First, whether Meta ever explains where the NameTag faceprints came from — the complaint says only Meta knows, and in June Meta declined to answer WIRED's questions about whether NameTag would be opt-in or how it would keep faceprints. Second, whether the feature ships at all: Meta says "nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything." No date, no hearing schedule, no deadline has been named. What happens next, nobody has said.
Meta removed the NameTag code from the app the day after WIRED's June 4 report, then argued the feature never existed because consumers couldn't use it. Its CTO, Andrew Bosworth, called the reporting "incredibly misleading" and "absolutely dishonest" — and weeks later described NameTag on a podcast as something that could recognise people you'd met before, adding: "I think [it] would be a great feature." Both things can't be true.
Sources: WIRED, "Meta Sued Over Training Data for Its AI and Face-Recognition Systems", September 11, 2026 (reporting by Dhruv Mehrotra); Meta statement quoted therein.
Иск утверждает, что Meta превращала обычные фото из Facebook и Instagram в «отпечатки лиц» для очков с распознаванием — и под класс попадают миллионы людей, которые никогда на это не соглашались, с претензией в $5000 за нарушение.
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