Meta Bricks Thousands of Smart Glasses to Stop Secret Filming

A Privacy Crisis Goes Viral

A woman discovered she had been secretly filmed by a man wearing Meta's AI-powered smart glasses when friends and people she hadn't spoken to in years sent her a video posted on social media. It went viral — racking up roughly 200,000 views across platforms. She had no idea she was being filmed, nor was she asked before the video was posted. "I had no say," she said, adding that other women have shared similar experiences. Her story is far from unique. It's become a symbol of a much larger problem that has forced Meta into crisis mode.

It's a growing trend, with content creators increasingly using wearable AI tech to record everyday people in prank pickup-line videos — often without their consent. The glasses have been dubbed "pervert glasses" because of certain people filming others without consent and posting the footage online. The backlash has been swift, loud, and impossible for Meta to ignore.

What Meta Is Doing About It

Meta has disabled the photo- and video-taking abilities for thousands of its glasses users after detecting they had tampered with the light that discloses that the device's camera is on. The company rolled out an update that can detect whether the LED light has been covered or destroyed, following reports that some wearers were recording random people without their consent or harassing people to film content for social media.

Previously, Meta had targeted users who were modifying the hardware to disable the LED, but it left the door open to an easier loophole — starting the recording and then covering the LED. While the glasses would block a recording from starting when the LED was covered, this loophole allowed users to cover the LED after the recording had already started. The new update stops the camera from recording if the light is covered mid-session. Meta is also going after the broader ecosystem enabling abuse: it is removing ads and posts promoting LED removal from Facebook and Instagram, banning the accounts behind them, and pursuing legal action against people selling the modification.

An Arms Race With No Easy Finish Line

Meta has yet to stop all of the tactics people have found to surreptitiously record others. There's also a thriving market for cheap accessories that can bypass the recording light without detection. Meta now estimates that less than one tenth of a percent of all glasses sold have been tampered with, but given the sheer volume of units in circulation — over 7 million sold last year alone — even a fraction of a percent represents tens of thousands of potential bad actors.

Legal experts note that the technology itself isn't necessarily the problem, but that people don't know they could be filmed. "If you're holding up your phone to somebody's face, they're going to know," one attorney explained. In that situation, there could potentially be an argument for implied consent. With inconspicuous glasses, however, that assumption becomes much harder to make — meaning privacy and consent laws can potentially be invoked.

A Booming Market With Big Stakes

Meta has been trying to get ahead of a growing backlash against the product, and Instagram has also banned the accounts of some of the people behind these videos. The company knows the stakes are high — not just reputationally, but commercially. The smart glasses market is exploding, with Apple, Snap, and Google all developing competing products, and analysts projecting the sector will grow more than 60% by 2029.

One of the reasons Google Glass got such a violent reaction from the public was because no one appreciated being recorded without their knowledge. Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses seem to be better received, but the company is doing its part to ensure it won't meet the same fate. Whether software patches alone can solve what is fundamentally a social and legal problem remains an open question — and one that every tech company entering this space will eventually have to answer.