By Sara Doczi, EFA Intern
Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg described the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses as one of the “fastest-growing consumer electronics in history.” It’s an extraordinary claim, but the numbers are not easily dismissed: despite civil society and digital rights groups, major news outlets, and researchers repeatedly flagging serious privacy concerns, Meta and EssilorLuxottica (the parent company of Ray-Ban and Oakley) sold over 7 million pairs in 2025 alone.
Mark II of a Previous Failure
The current success and demand for these wearable devices is surprising to anyone who remembers Google’s attempt at smart glasses over a decade ago. Google Glass launched in 2013 and was discontinued just two years later, after wearers were dubbed “glassholes”, and a journalist was even assaulted in San Francisco simply for wearing them.
On the surface, Meta’s glasses don’t seem all that different. They’ve earned the nickname “Pervert Glasses,” and one TikTok user went viral after accusing a woman of breaking his pair on the New York subway. Yet unlike Google Glass or Snapchat’s Spectacles, Meta and EssilorLuxottica’s product has survived since 2021 across multiple generations, with sales only climbing.
So what’s changed?
Why They Blend In, And Why That’s the Problem
Part of the answer lies in fashion. A pair of Ray-Bans is an instantly familiar, premium fashion accessory. When Google Glass leaned hard into a futuristic, unmistakably “wearable tech” look, the Meta design team eventually realised that the leap from ordinary glasses to smart glasses should not feel too drastic and that the camera should blend into the product as part of the form factor. In other words, miniaturize the camera so it is hard to detect.
Ray-Bans’ familiarity is aided by familiar faces such as social media stars and influencers sporting the technology. Meta’s US ambassadors, Kylie Jenner, Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt have, in the eyes of many, steered thinking of this invasive technology away from futurism and into ‘coolness’ and style.
That same subtlety, however, is both the secret to their popularity and the source of the sharpest criticism. For many users, particularly those who value the miniaturized features, hands-free filming during sports, or the built-in speakers, the appeal is simple: all of the covert surveillance functionality but with none of the unwanted attention.
But a recent study from the University of Sydney found that much of the content filmed and posted using the glasses involves harassing behaviour, with women disproportionately targeted. Rather than a sleek lifestyle accessory, the glasses are used as a tool of surveillance and harassment.
The Problem of Consent
The videos in question aren’t new to the internet. Pick-up lines tested on unsuspecting women, pranks involving foul-smelling candles, and informal “street interviews” are formats that have existed for years, along with the criticisms that follow them. The issue isn’t approaching a stranger in public. It’s what happens after: women who reject a “nice guy” on camera often find themselves subjected to waves of online harassment when a recorded clip is posted on social media.
What makes smart glasses different (and more troubling) is consent. Someone filmed with a smart phone, GoPro, or professional camera is at least aware it’s happening and can ask for filming to stop, move out of frame or for footage not to be posted. With glasses designed to look like any other pair of Ray-Bans, many women only discover they were filmed once the harassment begins online.
Meta’s answer to covert filming is the small LED light above the lens, which activates during recording; newer models even disable the camera if the light is covered. In practice, though, workarounds exist. Services like “Ghost Metas” specialise in disabling the light entirely. And even when it works as intended, the light is easy to miss, placing the entire burden of detection on the person being recorded, often while they’re already in an uncomfortable situation.
Covert filming in public isn’t new, of course. Phones can be angled discreetly, hidden in pockets, and tiny spy cameras have long been available. Meta isn’t inventing new forms of gendered harassment or new anxieties about being filmed without consent. It is normalizing covert surveillance and this makes women and others feel less safe in public spaces.
A Bigger Problem: What Meta Does With the Footage
Beyond the culture of covert filming lies a deeper issue: how Meta itself handles the recorded footage. Swedish newspapers recently revealed that the glasses may not be quite as “designed for privacy” as their marketing suggests.
A Kenya-based subcontractor was reportedly hired to review footage from the glasses for AI training and data annotation purposes. According to the whistleblowers from the firm, the footage they reviewed included people using the bathroom, having sex, and getting undressed.
This goes beyond the risk of footage ending up online. These companies aren’t neutral custodians of user data; they have every incentive to use it for their own commercial benefit and they will.
The scandal also exposed a deeper flaw: the recording mechanism can be hard to detect not just for bystanders, but for wearers themselves. The system, it seems, was never designed to make an active recording obvious. Two lawsuits have since been filed, one specifically addressing users being unaware their glasses were recording.
Meta has since cancelled its contract with the Kenyan firm. But given the company’s long history of opaque and expansive privacy policies coupled with embarrassing public privacy mea culpas and backflips, there’s little reassurance that user data won’t be used for unrelated and harmful purposes.
Beyond Meta: The Bigger Picture
Perhaps the most unsettling part of this story isn’t Meta’s glasses themselves, but what their success seeks to normalise. What happens when Google, Samsung, or perhaps most significantly, Apple release their own versions? Apple, in particular, has a track record of making once “out-there” technology feel mainstream and acceptable. These competing products are in the pipeline now and close to market release.
The idea of a device worn constantly on one’s face, capable of recording at any moment, holds enormous value for tech companies: far beyond AI training data. The New York Times reported in February on a rumoured feature called “Name Tag,” which would let wearers identify people they look at through the glasses using a vast AI-powered database, potentially surfacing a person’s name, job, and social media with nothing more than a glance. What then happens with this data, no one knows.
After Meta quietly embedded biometric faceprint-generating code into their glasses earlier in 2026 without notice or public transparency, it clearly signalled their intention to create a distributed surveillance network through their glasses platform. This reverses Meta’s 2021 pledge to sunset facial recognition after major privacy breaches and resulting settlements. Despite being caught out red handed by the media (yet again), the Meta features may still yet be rolled out. Meanwhile more “price accessible” options are appearing on the market fast: Australian consumers are able to enjoy the technology with Kmart’s smart glasses only costing them $89AUD upfront.
These are not “smart glasses.” They are not just a camera. They are a mobile Big Tech surveillance platform designed expressly to facilitate AI use and dependency, making Silicon Valley billionaires and oligarchs richer by exploiting and monetizing every aspect of our everyday lives; owners of these devices and those whose images are captured by them.
As we get used to wearable surveillance technology, we find ourselves in more and more of a digital panopticon, both in public and even inside our own homes. Meta’s glasses didn’t invent the privacy risks and harassment they’ve enabled, but they’ve made it easier, more discreet, and more scalable than ever before.
In the vast amounts of data about us, and access to us that big tech companies already have, smart glasses may seem inconsequential, but there is a significant difference between reaching for a phone with a camera and wearing the technology to film people almost instantaneously, without any physical change or notice of intent to film.
An AI system capable of recognising anyone a wearer looks at wouldn’t just erase the concept of a stranger; it could track people’s movements through stores, restaurants, and all other public spaces.
The end goal for tech companies is clear: collect as much first and third party personal data as you can, build a hyper detailed marketing database to sell our personal data on real time bidding platforms and provide hyper-personalised, contextual, location based advertising based not just on our on-line browsing history, but on our real-world and real time movement, interactions and behaviour in public and private spaces. Even Orwell could not dream of such comprehensive levels of surveillance and data collection.
Without strong regulation that provides both a deterrent effect and remedy for harm, the capabilities and range of smart glasses will continue to grow all the while normalizing covert, private surveillance. The question we need to ask ourselves isn’t just whether we’re comfortable with this technology, but whether we’ve had any real say in it at all and what our government is going to do to solve this problem.
You never agreed to be part of a surveillance network. Big Tech is counting on you not to notice. EFA has advocated for digital rights since 1994. Help us push for privacy laws that actually keep pace with modern technology that impacts us all. tech on people’s faces. Donate to EFA today, even $5 keeps the fight going.
Image credit: Giorgio Trovato/Unsplash