Mark Zuckerberg Can't Stop Being an Asshole

Dangerous douche bag with too much money 

There is now a plethora of vendors (easily discoverable online) who specialize in disabling the flashing LED light embedded in Meta’s smartglasses that blinks when wearers capture photos, videos and audio. After the LED is disabled it’s impossible for someone to know they’re being filmed.

The success of these companies is parallel to the runaway success of Meta Glasses, designed in partnership with established glasses brands Ray-Ban and Oakley. Meta said that it sold roughly 7 million pairs in 2025 alone, practically tripling combined sales numbers from 2023 and 2024. Influencers, athletes and global celebrities such as Chris Hemsworth and Teyana Taylor have embraced the tech in sponsored posts and buzzy ads. The glasses mark a turnaround for a company that made big missteps by overinvesting in virtual reality “metaverses” and trailing behind in the AI race. 

The reality of how people are using the glasses has been less benign. They have been widely used for exploitation and privacy violations, much of which has been bragged about on social media by bad actors themselves. Online creators – primarily men – have used the glasses to troll boardwalks, college campuses and streets outside bars in search of women to hit on, and then post the interactions. Some men have recorded overtly racist videos in which they enter massage parlors staffed by Asian women and ask for “happy ending” massages. Others have used the glasses to record bathing suit-clad women at the beach.

Videos are captured and posted online without the consent of their subjects, often by influencers who want to humiliate the subjects they’ve filmed. To protect against this, on every pair of glasses there’s an LED light that’s supposed to let people know the glasses are recording. Meta makes assurances that the glasses won’t record when the LED light is blocked or obscured. But it’s easy to modify the glasses to block the light without triggering the refusal failsafe.

Other tech giants have tried – and failed – to successfully market smartglasses. In 2013, Google released Google Glass, but discontinued them in 2015 amid backlash that resulted in a journalist getting assaulted in the street for wearing a pair. Snapchat tried for years to push Spectacles, first released in 2016, to no avail. (It’s now slated to release augmented-reality glasses called Specs later this year, though between their awkwardly bulbous appearance and $2,195 price tag, they may be dead on arrival). Apple’s Vision Pro, meanwhile, has seen disappointing sales since its release in early 2024. Beyond headwear, there have been products like an always-listening version of Amazon’s Halo Band bracelet, which the Washington Post once called “the most invasive tech we’ve ever tested”. Amazon scrapped the always-on microphone in 2021, again in response to people finding the update wildly creepy, and the Halo line was discontinued entirely by 2023.

Meta succeeded, in part, by making a number of privacy assurances about the glasses, promising users they are “designed for privacy” and that Meta doesn’t have access to recordings made by using the glasses. However, a joint investigation by the Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten revealed that Meta was, in fact, storing recordings made by glasses wearers. The papers interviewed Kenyan whistleblowers working for the controversial content moderation sweatshop Sama, which is subcontracted by Meta to sort through and annotate content that may be fed into Meta’s AI models.

“In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed,” one contractor told the Swedish newspapers. “I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.” Other Sama employees shared stories of reviewing content collected while glasses wearers were having sex, looking at their or their partner’s naked body, or viewing sensitive documents that revealed personal identifying information. The reporting quickly prompted a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco federal court, which alleges that Meta engaged in false advertising in relation to its privacy assurances.

People have been secretly recorded in their workplace; one lawyer said that he was covertly filmed by potential clients during a free consultation. Some Meta Glasses wearers have recorded videos of trips to hospitals and children’s dentist’s offices and shared them online. Others say they’ve been harassed by Meta Glasses wearers in spaces they had previously felt safe in. Karina and Kyle, a young couple who asked to be identified by their first names to protect their privacy, are avid ravers who, earlier this year, had a disturbing encounter with a man who was using Meta Glasses to record young women’s bodies at a large EDM festival in Las Vegas.

Being secretly recorded is currently the primary fear associated with Meta Glasses. But covert recordings may just be the first step in a more sophisticated surveillance apparatus integrated with another deeply controversial technology: facial recognition.  In February, the New York Times reported on an internal Meta Reality Labs document in which the company discussed its plans to integrate a facial recognition feature called “NameTag” into its smartglasses.  In the document, dated to May 2025, Meta said that it planned to launch NameTag “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”.

A few months later, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued an open letter to Meta signed by 75 organizations condemning the integration of a feature like NameTag into smartglasses as “a red line society must not cross”.  By then, though, NameTag was already further along than was publicly known. A June Wired investigation revealed that latent code for NameTag was secretly rolled to Meta smartglasses as early as January 2026. While technically unreleased and inaccessible to consumers, the code contained the architecture for a system that would save faces viewed through Meta smartglasses as biometric “faceprints” and store them on users’ devices.  “You don’t put code like this in your app unless you’re planning to release that feature very soon,” said Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation Threat Lab, who independently reviewed the NameTag code discovered by Wired.  A few days after it was discovered, Meta quietly deleted the inactive code.

ICE officers have already been caught using Meta Glasses to surveil demonstrators, and earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security requested millions of dollars in order to build facial recognition into smartglasses. A woman could brush off an advance by a stranger in a bar, or on a bus or at a workplace, only for that stranger to already know her name, which they may use to find her address and other information. Other vulnerable demographics – LGBTQ+ people, immigrants, people of color – may also be stalked, harassed and targeted by abusers receiving assistance from facial recognition.