Smart glasses: Preferred eyewear for creeps?

The smart-glasses backlash is here, again, said Anthony Cuthbertson in The Independent (U.K.). Twelve years after privacy concerns killed off Google Glass—whose wearers were labeled “glassholes”—Meta has successfully revived the technology. Last year, it sold 7 million pairs of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which you can use to “make phone calls and take photos or videos without needing to pull out your phone.” Integrating the technology into “one of the world’s top-selling sunglasses” was a stroke of branding genius, and for a while it looked like Meta’s smart glasses were “a contender for the most impressive consumer hardware of the 2020s.” But not everyone is on board. Critics have taken to calling them “pervert glasses” because of their association “with creeps who use them to film people without their consent”—on the street, at the beach, and even in private settings. A video went viral on TikTok in August “of a woman calling out a doctor wearing the smart glasses during a consultation in which the patient was required to remove clothing.”

We clearly don’t know how to handle “spy-like smart glasses,” said Mia Sato in The Verge. Retail and service workers, “in particular, have become a target for stealth” recording by customers trying to prank them for likes on social media. It’s not just a problem for public-facing workers: Imagine “a co-worker at your office starts wearing them,” and everything you say or do around them can be “captured for limitless dissemination.” You know it’s bad when “even ICE thinks smart glasses are a privacy liability,” said James Pero in Gizmodo. The agency recently sent out a memo banning its immigration officers from using them. It’s not philosophical; ICE just doesn’t want all the information the glasses “gobble up incidentally” going back to Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company is giving all smart glasses a bad name, said Anthony Spadafora in Tom’s Guide. But those marketed as augmented reality or extended reality typically don’t even record video. They have a private display, like a small computer screen, that can relay incoming messages, play TV shows, or even act as a portable workstation. They’re fun and useful. But the recent backlash against Meta means people may soon be shunned for wearing “any high-tech frames in public.”

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Apple also has plans to join the smart-glasses race, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. But the company will have to choose “whether the risk of blowback is worth it given the relatively tiny size of the smart-glasses market.” Sure, people trust Apple more than Meta, and its iPhone ecosystem will give whatever product it launches a huge advantage. But Apple also “has vastly more to lose” by getting smart glasses wrong. “Once your hardware has been labeled ‘pervert glasses,’ it’s hard to turn things around.”