Families sue Meta over photos allegedly used to train AI and build face recognition

A group of parents and children in Illinois and California sued Meta last week in federal court in Chicago, alleging the company harvested their Facebook and Instagram photos without consent to build a face-recognition system and train its AI image generators.

The proposed class action names Francisco Alvarez and his son, both of Illinois, along with California resident Jeremy Wahl and his 10-year-old daughter. It claims Meta violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, a law requiring consent before collecting fingerprints, faceprints or other biometric data, along with California privacy statutes.

The suit centers on NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition feature for Meta’s smart glasses. WIRED reported in June that code for the feature was hidden inside Meta’s glasses companion app, which has been downloaded more than 50 million times. That reporting found the system could convert faces captured through the glasses into biometric signatures and match them against a database of stored faceprints synced from Meta’s servers. The complaint alleges those faceprints likely came from Facebook and Instagram photos, pointing to comments attributed to Meta employees and a company patent describing face-matching against profile pictures.

The lawsuit also targets Meta’s image-generation tools, Emu and Muse Image. Meta has said Emu was trained on large volumes of Facebook and Instagram content, and chief product officer Chris Cox has described those platforms as a “data advantage” for the company’s AI. The complaint argues the training process extracted biometric information from people pictured in those photos without their knowledge. Muse Image, launched this summer, briefly let users generate images from other people’s public Instagram accounts before Meta pulled the feature within days, saying it had “missed the mark.”

Meta disputed the claims. “This lawsuit is without merit and misrepresents our work,” a company spokesperson said, adding that Meta has been transparent about how it uses people’s information to build AI products. On NameTag, the spokesperson said nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on releasing it, but that Meta is “not building a universal face database.” Justin Boley, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in a statement that people should not have to worry about their biometric data being misused just because their photos appear on a social media platform.

The proposed class could include millions of people nationwide whose photos were uploaded to Facebook or Instagram, or submitted to Meta’s AI tools through prompts, since September 4, 2021. Under Illinois law, plaintiffs are seeking $5,000 for each intentional or reckless violation and $1,000 for each negligent violation, or actual damages if higher, plus separate damages under California law. Meta has settled biometric-privacy claims before, paying $650 million in Illinois in 2020 and $1.4 billion to Texas in 2024.

The case now moves to Meta’s response in Chicago federal court, where the company is expected to contest the plaintiffs’ claims about where NameTag’s faceprint data originated, a question Meta has so far declined to answer directly.