A proposed class action filed in federal court in Chicago accuses Meta of mining Facebook and Instagram photos for AI work without telling the people in them.
The plaintiffs are parents and their children in Illinois and California. They say Meta pulled biometric information from family photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition feature for its smart glasses, and to train generative image models including Emu and Muse Image.
The suit argues the practice broke state privacy laws that require notice and consent before a company collects biometric identifiers. WIRED reported in June that NameTag code had been quietly embedded in the Meta glasses companion app.
Meta has not responded publicly to the filing. The company has previously said it draws on publicly shared posts to improve products and offers opt-outs in some regions.
The case adds to a growing pile of training-data litigation against AI developers. Courts remain split on whether scraping public photos is a privacy violation, a copyright question, or both at once.
If a class is certified, it could cover millions of users across the two states and force disclosure of what Meta kept and how long it holds the data.
