Meta’s AI glasses empower creeps

The Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses. (Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Over the last year, Meta’s AI smart glasses have been used by deviant men to surreptitiously record videos of women and children.

One such example occurred in October, when the University of San Francisco Office of Public Safety issued an alert warning students that a male suspect wearing a pair of Meta’s glasses had been harassing women on campus. After recording his interactions, the man, who considered himself a pickup artist, shared the videos online under the account name “pickuplines.pov” without the women’s consent.

Such incidents could become more harmful if combined with the vast amounts of personal and biometric data that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, collects on its billions of users.

The New York Times reported last week that Meta is planning to add a facial recognition feature — powered by the company’s AI technology — to its smart glasses. The feature, which could launch as soon as this year, would allow users to rapidly obtain the identities and other personal information of individuals whose faces they capture using the wearable cameras.

When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson said, “We’re building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives. While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature — and some products already exist in the market — we’re still thinking through options and will take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out.”

The latest generation of the glasses, which Meta produces in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban and Oakley, uses five microphones and a 12-megapixel camera.

When the camera is recording, a soft white LED dot on the front frame of the glasses begins to glow. But that indicator can be difficult to see under direct sunlight. And given how new the technology is, many people may not realize they are being recorded, even in conditions where the light is readily visible. While the glasses are designed not to record when the light is obscured by a sticker or tape, an online cottage industry has emerged for inexpensive aftermarket modifications to disable the indicator permanently.

‘I didn’t consent to that being posted’

Last year, in Livonia, Michigan, a self-described dating coach admitted to tampering with a pair of Meta glasses to deactivate its LED indicator before he secretly recorded women and children in public. He then posted the videos online from his perspective, including to an Instagram account that promises “to show men that women can be approached.” Local police received harassment complaints related to the man’s behavior, but stated that he had not technically committed a crime, according to the local NBC affiliate.

With Meta selling seven million pairs of its smart glasses last year, similar stories have become commonplace. In Spain, a man was recently arrested for using the glasses to record women in public. The videos were shared on Instagram and TikTok as part of a marketing gimmick to help him promote his pickup artist tutorial program.

In the U.K., another TikTok user used the glasses to record himself hitting on women. “I had no idea it was happening to me, I didn’t consent to that being posted, I didn’t consent to being secretly filmed,” one woman who was recorded told the BBC. “It really freaked me out — it made me feel afraid to go out in public.”

Mashable, an online news site, also found several similar accounts, including an Instagram user who recorded footage of women’s bodies and shared it online without their consent.

Smart glasses first entered the mainstream in 2013 with the release of Google Glass. However, Google discontinued the consumer model less than two years later, in part due to privacy concerns about the eye-level camera that could be activated at any time.

The Meta smart glasses, first released in 2021, are far more widespread than past iterations of the technology. They are also significantly sleeker and more inconspicuous than the bulky smart glasses that launched the industry in the 2010s. The Ray-Ban Meta model, in particular, looks virtually like any other pair of rivet-square glasses, making it difficult to identify it as a camera capable of recording you and capturing your biometric markers.

‘The ideal form factor for AI’

Meta, for its part, appears aware of the backlash that would follow the addition of facial recognition to its smart glasses. An internal memo from the division that oversees Meta’s wearable products noted that a period of political turmoil would provide a useful window to debut the feature. “We will launch 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,” read the document, which was reviewed by The Times.

In an email, a Meta spokesperson described the memo as “a year old” and indicated the company has not yet committed to launching facial recognition. “Nothing ever materialized from it, so while it was an exploration to say we are planning would be an overstatement,” the spokesperson said.

One avenue the company is reportedly exploring would circumscribe its facial recognition product — or “Name Tag,” as Meta refers to it internally — to people with publicly accessible accounts on one of its platforms. In other words, when a user wearing the glasses comes across someone they don’t know, they would have the ability to identify them if the person they’re looking at happens to have a public Instagram account. (Meta reported in September that it had three billion active users on Instagram, including 225 million in North America, so its facial recognition technology would have a very large repository to pull from.)

When Meta launched its first-generation Ray-Ban smart glasses, it considered including facial recognition but ultimately decided against the feature. At the time, Meta was just coming off a $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for violating consumers’ privacy.

Today, Meta arguably finds itself in a more permissive regulatory environment, as a result of Mark Zuckerberg’s friendly, symbiotic relationship with Donald Trump and members of his administration. At the policy level, Trump has also opposed regulations that would hinder the growth of major American AI companies like Meta, including an executive order he signed in December that aims to curtail state-level AI regulations.

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, has marketed Meta’s smart glasses as “the ideal form factor for AI.”

“I think in the future, if you don’t have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, I think you’re… probably [going to] be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people and who you’re working with, or competing against,” he said during a Meta earnings call last year.