It’s probably not a great sign when your flagship new tech product, pitched as the inevitable successor to the smartphone, gets the nickname “pervert glasses”.
Meta’s smart specs have developed a PR problem that not even a multi-market, million-dollar ad campaign can seemingly fix, however much Kylie Jenner might pout into the camera. It’s getting to the point where wearing them could seriously damage your health, thanks to other people’s fists.
A cursory look at Bluesky – admittedly the most anti-big-tech of the social media platforms – shows a strong consensus view of the tech as “creepy”, “invasive” and, yes, exclusively the preserve of the perv. The tech website Engadget recently carried a series of quotes from Meta glasses owners saying they were increasingly scared to wear them outside for fear of reprisals.
It turns out that people don’t want to be filmed all the time, and there’s a growing sense that, if you wear a pair, you’re effectively fair game (though of course TNW does not condone violence of any kind against people wearing perv glasses.)
Suggested Reading
The evangelicals who want to control kids’ mobile phones
And now, the fightback: a newly-released Android app, called Nearby Glasses, uses the glasses’ unique Bluetooth signal to help you find and locate people wearing them in your immediate vicinity.
The backlash isn’t wholly surprising. The current glasses lack all the AI and mixed-reality benefits that Meta insists are on the way, and they don’t really have much utility beyond taking point-of-view photos and videos. As a result, their takeup has largely been limited to tech neophiliacs and “content creators”.
So it is that stories abound of users doing pretty awful things. On 6 January, David Williams, 47, pleaded guilty to voyeurism at Warrington Magistrates’ Court after recording sex with a woman without her explicit consent using smart glasses.
A BBC investigation in January found dozens of male influencers on TikTok and Instagram using Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses to secretly film women for “pick-up” content. Fundamentally-speaking, the people – ok, the men – using Meta glasses seem like dicks.
The company, of course, isn’t helping. While it has tweaked the tech so as to make it (theoretically) impossible to obscure the light signalling that filming is taking place, minimising the possibility for the most egregious misuses, there are a number of other less-positive developments coming down the line.
A patent registered by Meta earlier this year is for a system that’s designed to continuously listen to your voice, detect how you’re feeling, and build a timeline of your emotional trends, all through data captured by the specs.
Suggested Reading
AI job interviews are good for only one thing
The patent specifically states that “the AI assistant may listen to a user(s) at predefined times to hear various types of communication, such as sighs, laughter, and/or the tone(s) of a voice(s)… The AI assistant may use these inputs to quantify the user’s emotional state or generate other insights about the user… eg, a happier emotional state associated with a particular time of day or at a time when medication is taken, etc.”
Meanwhile, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has confirmed that the company is considering rolling out facial identification capability within its Meta AI glasses. Guys, you’re not making this better!
Of course, it’s probably too early to declare the technology a bust – there’s every possibility that we’re at the pre-iPod MP3 stage of its development. But the current hatred directed at Meta glasses speaks to a wider question about the public’s relationship to technology.
Tech-hatred has never been cooler, from people performatively trumpeting their “I never use AI, actually” purity online, to the current vogue for wildly overspending on oldschool iPods as a reaction against streaming and algorithmic curation. Lots of us, it seems, really want to signal to the world that we’re part of some sort of imagined resistance.
At the same time, though, lots of the numbers suggest that we’re using the stuff more and more. AI use in the UK is growing – over 50% of us are consorting with Claude, GPT or whatever, whether or not we want anyone else to know about it.
Time spent on social media continues to go up year-on-year. We say we don’t like it. Only 33% of UK adults now believe the internet is good for society, and only 12% of Brits say they trust Big Tech at all. But judge us by what we actually do, and the picture changes.
Maybe that’s the future, then; analogue on the streets, digital at home. As for the Meta glasses, they’re not yet that useful, not that attractive and currently make everyone else think you’re probably some sort of awful voyeur. And yet they’ve sold over seven million pairs and counting. Perhaps they’re not quite as cooked as we might like to think.
Most popular
Andy Burnham’s ruthless reckoning for the Starmerites
Inside the notebooks that built Bruce Lee
Do you care that Burnham is a Catholic? You should
The trouble with Diane Morgan’s Ann Droid
