Those Cute Glasses are Filming You

Smart Glasses, sometimes called A.I. Glasses, have become more commonly used over the last year, and like with seemingly any new technology, their primary use appears to be harassing women. The BBC reports, “Women leaving the beach, going into a shop, or simply standing outside are now being approached by men, usually wearing Meta’s Ray-Bans, often in order to film the women’s responses to casual questions or pick-up lines without their knowledge or consent.” The footage is then shared online in an attempt to shame the women in the videos.

Currently, the most popular version of smart glasses are Meta’s—they make up over 80% of smart glasses sales. Thanks to a partnership with glasses manufacturer Luxottica, Meta’s glasses look like classic Ray-Bans, but feature an almost invisible camera in the frames, small speakers in the arms, and lenses that function as screens, showing the wearer information about what they’re looking at—just like so many sci-fi movies predicted. Smart glasses wearers can start recording video or take a photo with a quiet voice command, or with a quick touch of the frames. In fact, capturing video with the glasses is so easy that users don’t always realize they are recording.

Even if you don’t know anyone personally who owns Meta’s glasses, it’s very possible you’ve encountered these frames out in public, and not even been aware of it. Women are reporting that they only realized Meta glasses had been filming them, when they see videos of themselves being harassed going viral online. Since photography in public is generally considered legal, these women have had very little luck getting the videos taken down—one woman described asking the person who secretly recorded her to remove a video, and the video maker said they would only do so for a fee.

So are these smart glasses unavoidable? Or is there something that can be done about them?