Meta apparently thinks we're too distracted to care about facial recognition and Ray-Bans
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- Meta is planning to add facial recognition to its smart glasses, The New York Times reported, citing sources familiar with the matter.
- Why now? Because people are distracted by bigger things going on in the world, the story said, citing an internal memo.
- The company told Business Insider it's still thinking through options. I have some ideas about why we're all distracted.
Since Meta's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses launched in 2021, there's always been a lingering, controversial question about whether they could be used for facial recognition.
The question has surfaced again more recently, according to a New York Times report on Friday. And this time, the story says, there's a reason the company thinks it could add facial recognition without kicking up too much of a fuss: because we're all busy worried about so many other things going on in the world.
It's not clear whether Meta will follow through on the plans. "While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature — and some products already exist in the market — we're still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out," Erin Logan, a Meta spokesperson, told Business Insider in a statement.
Since their launch, the Meta Ray-Ban glasses have been a surprise hit, with Ray-Ban owner EssilorLuxottica saying it tripled sales in 2025 and is struggling to keep up with demand.
In 2024, some Harvard students rigged Meta Ray-Bans to perform facial recognition by sending camera photos to a third-party service for scanning. At the time, Meta was adamant that people understand the glasses themselves weren't performing facial recognition, and that this wasn't a capability of the device itself. Which was true, but a truth somewhat orthogonal to the public horror about the idea of people using facial recognition glasses in public.
Thus far, legal and privacy issues surrounding facial recognition, not technical limitations, have kept the feature at bay. So what's changed?
The New York Times viewed a document that gives us a clue:
Meta's internal memo said the political tumult in the United States was good timing for the feature's release. "We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns," according to the document from Meta's Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.
This is straight out of the playbook for a celebrity announcing their divorce during the Super Bowl to minimize attention. Basically, at least one person at Meta was apparently considering the fact that — waves hands — so many other horrors are going on in the world that people will be too distracted to focus on this.
And what, exactly, might this unnamed Meta person be assuming are the "other concerns" keeping civil society groups' resources focused? I have some ideas:
- The ongoing threat of AGI destroying humanity
- Meta's own legal battles over whether Instagram was designed to be addictive to teens
- The potential for home security cameras to create a dragnet for ICE or other law enforcement
- The fact that Clavicular was brutally frame-mogged by an ASU frat leader
- The wait until at least 2029 for a sequel to "K-Pop Demon Hunters" and the extreme pressures from first graders around the globe to make that happen sooner
- Instagram posts that still won't unfurl in Slack, creating an ongoing national nightmare for gossipy office workers, despite Meta assuring Business Insider that it was working on a fix
- Local political battles over data centers, including one larger than Manhattan that Meta hopes to build to fuel its AI needs
- OpenAI killing its 4o model, causing widespread grief from people who had developed an affinity for their chatbots.
- Elon Musk's new plans to build a self-growing city on the moon
Frankly, any of these is a big enough distraction to keep me from complaining about facial-recognition glasses!