The New York Times reported that Meta is considering adding face recognition technology to its smart glasses. According to an internal Meta document, the company may launch the product “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.” 

This is a bad idea that Meta should abandon. If adopted and released to the public, it would violate the privacy rights of millions of people and cost the company billions of dollars in legal battles.   

Your biometric data, such as your faceprint, are some of the most sensitive pieces of data that a company can collect. Associated risks include mass surveillance, data breach, and discrimination. Adding this technology to glasses on the street also raises safety concerns.  

 This kind of face recognition feature would require the company to collect a faceprint from every person who steps into view of the camera-equipped glasses to find a match. Meta cannot possibly obtain consent from everyone—especially bystanders who are not Meta users.  

Dozens of state laws consider biometric information to be sensitive and require companies to implement strict protections to collect and process it, including affirmative consent.  

Meta Should Know the Privacy and Legal Risks  

Meta should already know the privacy risks of face recognition technology, after abandoning related technology and paying nearly $7 billion in settlements a few years ago.  

In November 2021, Meta announced that it would shut down its tool that scanned the face of every person in photos posted on the platform. At the time, Meta also announced that it would delete more than a billion face templates. 

Two years before that in July 2019, Facebook settled a sweeping privacy investigation with the Federal Trade Commission for $5 billion. This included allegations that Facebook’s face recognition settings were confusing and deceptive. At the time, the company agreed to obtain consent before running face recognition on users in the future.   

In March 2021, the company agreed to a $650 million class action settlement brought by Illinois consumers under the state's strong biometric privacy law. 

And most recently, in July 2024, Meta agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle claims that its defunct face recognition system violated Texas law.  

 Privacy Advocates Will Continue to Focus our Resources on Meta  

 Meta’s conclusion that it can avoid scrutiny by releasing a privacy invasive product during a time of political crisis is craven and morally bankrupt. It is also dead wrong.  

Now more than ever, people have seen the real-world risk of invasive technology. The public has recoiled at masked immigration agents roving cities with phones equipped with a face recognition app called Mobile Fortify. And Amazon Ring just experienced a huge backlash when people realized that a feature marketed for finding lost dogs could one day be repurposed for mass biometric surveillance.  

The public will continue to resist these privacy invasive features. And EFF, other civil liberties groups, and plaintiffs’ attorneys will be here to help. We urge privacy regulators and attorneys general to step up to investigate as well.  

We are calling on technology companies like Meta and Google to stand up for their users by resisting the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) lawless administrative subpoenas for user data. 

In the past year, DHS has consistently targeted people engaged in First Amendment activity. Among other things, the agency has issued subpoenas to technology companies to unmask or locate people who have documented ICE's activities in their community, criticized the government, or attended protests.   

These subpoenas are unlawful, and the government knows it. When a handful of users challenged a few of them in court with the help of ACLU affiliates in Northern California and Pennsylvania, DHS withdrew them rather than waiting for a decision. 

These subpoenas are unlawful, and the government knows it.

But it is difficult for the average user to fight back on their own. Quashing a subpoena is a fast-moving process that requires lawyers and resources. Not everyone can afford a lawyer on a moment’s notice, and non-profits and pro-bono attorneys have already been stretched to near capacity during the Trump administration.  

 That is why we, joined by the ACLU of Northern California, have asked several large tech platforms to do more to protect their users, including: 

1.  Insist on court intervention and an order before complying with a DHS subpoena, because the agency has already proved that its legal process is often unlawful and unconstitutional;  
2. Give users as much notice as possible when they are the target of a subpoena, so the user can seek help. While many companies have already made this promise, there are high-profile examples of it not happening—ultimately stripping users of their day in court;  
3. Resist gag orders that would prevent companies from notifying their users that they are a target of a subpoena. 

 We sent the letter to Amazon, Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Reddit, SNAP, TikTok, and X.  

Recipients are not legally compelled to comply with administrative subpoenas absent a court order 

 An administrative subpoena is an investigative tool available to federal agencies like DHS. Many times, these are sent to technology companies to obtain user data. A subpoena cannot be used to obtain the content of communications, but they have been used to try and obtain some basic subscriber information like name, address, IP address, length of service, and session times.  

Unlike a search warrant, an administrative subpoena is not approved by a judge. If a technology company refuses to comply, an agency’s only recourse is to drop it or go to court and try to convince a judge that the request is lawful. That is what we are asking companies to do—simply require court intervention and not obey in advance. 

It is unclear how many administrative subpoenas DHS has issued in the past year. Subpoenas can come from many places—including civil courts, grand juries, criminal trials, and administrative agencies like DHS. Altogether, Google received 28,622 and Meta received 14,520 subpoenas in the first half of 2025, according to their transparency reports. The numbers are not broken out by type.   

DHS is abusing its authority to issue subpoenas 

In the past year, DHS has used these subpoenas to target protected speech. The following are just a few of the known examples. 

On April 1, 2025, DHS sent a subpoena to Google in an attempt to locate a Cornell PhD student in the United States on a student visa. The student was likely targeted because of his brief attendance at a protest the year before. Google complied with the subpoena without giving the student an opportunity to challenge it. While Google promises to give users prior notice, it sometimes breaks that promise to avoid delay. This must stop.   

In September 2025, DHS sent a subpoena and summons to Meta to try to unmask anonymous users behind Instagram accounts that tracked ICE activity in communities in California and Pennsylvania. The users—with the help of the ACLU and its state affiliates— challenged the subpoenas in court, and DHS withdrew the subpoenas before a court could make a ruling. In the Pennsylvania case, DHS tried to use legal authority that its own inspector general had already criticized in a lengthy report.  

In October 2025, DHS sent Google a subpoena demanding information about a retiree who criticized the agency’s policies. The retiree had sent an email asking the agency to use common sense and decency in a high-profile asylum case. In a shocking turn, federal agents later appeared on that person’s doorstep. The ACLU is currently challenging the subpoena.  

Read the full letter here

EFF intern Alexandra Halbeck contributed to this blog

When people talk to a chatbot, they often reveal highly personal information they wouldn’t share with anyone else. Chat logs are digital repositories of our most sensitive and revealing information. They are also tempting targets for law enforcement, to which the U.S. Constitution gives only one answer: get a warrant.

AI companies have a responsibility to their users to make sure the warrant requirement is strictly followed, to resist unlawful bulk surveillance requests, and to be transparent with their users about the number of government requests they receive.

Chat logs are deeply personal, just like your emails.

Tens of millions of people use chatbots to brainstorm, test ideas, and explore questions they might never post publicly or even admit to another person. Whether advisable or not, people also turn to consumer AI companies for medical information, financial advice, and even dating tips. These conversations reveal people’s most sensitive information.

Without privacy protections, users would be chilled in their use of AI systems.

Consider the sensitivity of the following prompts: “how to get abortion pills,” “how to protect myself at a protest,” or “how to escape an abusive relationship.” These exchanges can reveal everything from health status to political beliefs to private grief. A single chat thread can expose the kind of intimate detail once locked away in a handwritten diary.

Without privacy protections, users would be chilled in their use of AI systems for learning, expression, and seeking help.

Chat logs require a warrant.

Whether you draft an email, edit an online document, or ask a question to a chatbot, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that information. Chatbots may be a new technology, but the constitutional principle is old and clear. Before the government can rifle through your private thoughts stored on digital platforms, it must do what it has always been required to do: get a warrant.

For over a century, the Fourth Amendment has protected the content of private communications—such as letters, emails, and search engine prompts—from unreasonable government searches. AI prompts require the same constitutional protection.

This protection is not aspirational—it already exists. The Fourth Amendment draws a bright line around private communications: the government must show probable cause and obtain a particularized warrant before compelling a company to turn over your data. Companies like OpenAI acknowledge this warrant requirement explicitly, while others like Anthropic could stand to be more precise.

AI companies must resist bulk surveillance orders.

AI companies that create chatbots should commit to having your back and resisting unlawful bulk surveillance orders. A valid search warrant requires law enforcement to provide a judge with probable cause and to particularly describe the thing to be searched. This means that bulk surveillance orders often fail that test.

What do these overbroad orders look like? In the past decade or so, police have often sought “reverse” search warrants for user information held by technology companies. Rather than searching for one particular individual, police have demanded that companies rummage through their giant databases of personal data to help develop investigative leads. This has included “tower dumps” or “geofence warrants,” in which police order a company to search all users’ location data to identify anyone that’s been near a particular place at a particular time. It has also included “keyword” warrants, which seek to identify any person who typed a particular phrase into a search engine. This could include a chilling keyword search for a well-known politician’s name or busy street, or a geofence warrant near a protest or church.

Courts are beginning to rule that these broad demands are unconstitutional. And after years of complying, Google has finally made it technically difficult—if not impossible—to provide mass location data in response to a geofence warrant.

This is an old story: if a company stores a lot of data about its users, law enforcement (and private litigants) will eventually seek it out. Law enforcement is already demanding user data from AI chatbot companies, and it will only increase. These companies must be prepared for this onslaught, and they must commit to fighting to protect their users.

In addition to minimizing the amount of data accessible to law enforcement, they can start with three promises to their users. These aren’t radical ideas. They are basic transparency and accountability standards to preserve user trust and to ensure constitutional rights keep pace with technology:

1. commit to fighting bulk orders for user data in court,
2. commit to providing users with advanced notice before complying with a legal demand so that users can choose to fight on their own behalf, and 
3. commit to publishing periodic transparency reports, which tally up how many legal demands for user data the company receives (including the number of bulk orders specifically).

A California judge ordered the end of a dragnet law enforcement program that surveilled the electrical smart meter data of thousands of Sacramento residents.

The Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and police violated a state privacy statute, which bars the disclosure of residents’ electrical usage data with narrow exceptions. For more than a decade, SMUD coordinated with the Sacramento Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to sift through the granular smart meter data of residents without suspicion to find evidence of cannabis growing.

EFF and its co-counsel represent three petitioners in the case: the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen. They argued that the program created a host of privacy harms—including criminalizing innocent people, creating menacing encounters with law enforcement, and disproportionately harming the Asian community.

The court ruled that the challenged surveillance program was not part of any traditional law enforcement investigation. Investigations happen when police try to solve particular crimes and identify particular suspects. The dragnet that turned all 650,000 SMUD customers into suspects was not an investigation.

“[T]he process of making regular requests for all customer information in numerous city zip codes, in the hopes of identifying evidence that could possibly be evidence of illegal activity, without any report or other evidence to suggest that such a crime may have occurred, is not an ongoing investigation,” the court ruled, finding that SMUD violated its “obligations of confidentiality” under a data privacy statute.

Granular electrical usage data can reveal intimate details inside the home—including when you go to sleep, when you take a shower, when you are away, and other personal habits and demographics.

The dragnet turned 650,000 SMUD customers into suspects.

In creating and running the dragnet surveillance program, according to the court, SMUD and police “developed a relationship beyond that of utility provider and law enforcement.” Multiple times a year, the police asked SMUD to search its entire database of 650,000 customers to identify people who used a large amount of monthly electricity and to analyze granular 1-hour electrical usage data to identify residents with certain electricity “consumption patterns.” SMUD passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly “high” usage households to police.

While this is a victory, the Court unfortunately dismissed an alternate claim that the program violated the California Constitution’s search and seizure clause. We disagree with the court’s reasoning, which misapprehends the crux of the problem: At the behest of law enforcement, SMUD searches granular smart meter data and provides insights to law enforcement based on that granular data.

Going forward, public utilities throughout California should understand that they cannot disclose customers’ electricity data to law enforcement without any “evidence to support a suspicion” that a particular crime occurred.

EFF, along with Monty Agarwal of the law firm Vallejo, Antolin, Agarwal, Kanter LLP, brought and argued the case on behalf of Petitioners.

Amazon Ring’s upcoming face recognition tool has the potential to violate the privacy rights of millions of people and could result in Amazon breaking state biometric privacy laws.

Ring plans to introduce a feature to its home surveillance cameras called “Familiar Faces,” to identify specific people who come into view of the camera. When turned on, the feature will scan the faces of all people who approach the camera to try and find a match with a list of pre-saved faces. This will include many people who have not consented to a face scan, including friends and family, political canvassers, postal workers, delivery drivers, children selling cookies, or maybe even some people passing on the sidewalk.

When turned on, the feature will scan the faces of all people who approach the camera.

Many biometric privacy laws across the country are clear: Companies need your affirmative consent before running face recognition on you. In at least one state, ordinary people with the help of attorneys can challenge Amazon’s data collection. Where not possible, state privacy regulators should step in.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) has already called on Amazon to abandon its plans and sent the company a list of questions. Ring spokesperson Emma Daniels answered written questions posed by EFF, which can be viewed here.

What is Ring’s “Familiar Faces”?

Amazon describes “Familiar Faces” as a tool that “intelligently recognizes familiar people.” It says this tool will provide camera owners with “personalized context of who is detected, eliminating guesswork and making it effortless to find and review important moments involving specific familiar people.” Amazon plans to release the feature in December.

The feature will allow camera owners to tag particular people so Ring cameras can automatically recognize them in the future. In order for Amazon to recognize particular people, it will need to perform face recognition on every person that steps in front of the camera. Even if a camera owner does not tag a particular face, Amazon says it may retain that biometric information for up to six months. Amazon said it does not currently use the biometric data for “model training or algorithmic purposes.”

In order to biometrically identify you, a company typically will take your image and extract a faceprint by taking tiny measurements of your face and converting that into a series of numbers that is saved for later. When you step in front of a camera again, the company takes a new faceprint and compares it to a list of previous prints to find a match. Other forms of biometric tracking can be done with a scan of your fingertip, eyeball, or even your particular gait.

Amazon has told reporters that the feature will be off by default and that it would be unavailable in certain jurisdictions with the most active biometric privacy enforcement—including the states of Illinois and Texas, and the city of Portland, Oregon. The company would not promise that this feature will remain off by default in the future.

Why is This a Privacy Problem?

Your biometric data, such as your faceprint, are some of the most sensitive pieces of data that a company can collect. Associated risks include mass surveillance, data breach, and discrimination.

Today’s feature to recognize your friend at your front door can easily be repurposed tomorrow for mass surveillance. Ring’s close partnership with police amplifies that threat. For example, in a city dense with face recognition cameras, the entirety of a person’s movements could be tracked with the click of a button, or all people could be identified at a particular location. A recent and unrelated private-public partnership in New Orleans unfortunately shows that mass surveillance through face recognition is not some far flung concern.

Amazon has already announced a related tool called “search party” that can identify and track lost dogs using neighbors’ cameras. A tool like this could be repurposed for law enforcement to track people. At least for now, Amazon says it does not have the technical capability to comply with law enforcement demanding a list of all cameras in which a person has been identified. Though, it complies with other law enforcement demands.

In addition, data breaches are a perpetual concern with any data collection. Biometrics magnify that risk because your face cannot be reset, unlike a password or credit card number. Amazon says it processes and stores biometrics collected by Ring cameras on its own servers, and that it uses comprehensive security measure to protect the data.

Face recognition has also been shown to have higher error rates with certain groups—most prominently with dark-skinned women. Similar technology has also been used to make questionable guesses about a person’s emotions, age, and gender.

Will Ring’s “Familiar Faces” Violate State Biometric Laws?

Any Ring collection of biometric information in states that require opt-in consent poses huge legal risk for the company. Amazon already told reporters that the feature will not be available in Illinois and Texas—strongly suggesting its feature could not survive legal scrutiny there. The company said it is also avoiding Portland, Oregon, which has a biometric privacy law that similar companies have avoided.

Its “familiar faces” feature will necessarily require its cameras to collect a faceprint from of every person who comes into view of an enabled camera, to try and find a match. It is impossible for Amazon to obtain consent from everyone—especially people who do not own Ring cameras. It appears that Amazon will try to unload some consent requirements onto individual camera owners themselves. Amazon says it will provide in-app messages to customers, reminding them to comply with applicable laws. But Amazon—as a company itself collecting, processing, and storing this biometric data—could have its own consent obligations under numerous laws.

Lawsuits against similar features highlight Amazon’s legal risks. In Texas, Google paid $1.375 billion to settle a lawsuit that alleged, among other things, that Google’s Nest cameras "indiscriminately capture the face geometry of any Texan who happens to come into view, including non-users." In Illinois, Facebook paid $650 million and shut down its face recognition tools that automatically scanned Facebook photos—even the faces of non-Facebook users—in order to identify people to recommend tagging. Later, Meta paid another $1.4 billion to settle a similar suit in Texas.

Many states aside from Illinois and Texas now protect biometric data. While the state has never enforced its law, Washington in 2017 passed a biometric privacy law. In 2023, the state passed an ever stronger law that protects biometric privacy, which allows individuals to sue on their own behalf. And at least 16 states have recently passed comprehensive privacy laws that often require companies to obtain opt-in consent for the collection of sensitive data, which typically includes biometric data. For example, in Colorado, a company that jointly with others determines the purpose and means of processing biometric data must obtain consent. Maryland goes farther, and such companies are essentially prohibited from collecting or processing biometric data from bystanders.

Many of these comprehensive laws have numerous loopholes and can only be enforced by state regulators—a glaring weakness facilitated in part by Amazon lobbyists.

Nonetheless, Ring’s new feature provides regulators a clear opportunity to step up to investigate, protect people’s privacy, and test the strength of their laws.