In 2025, Meta sold seven million pairs of its AI smart glasses. They were designed in collaboration with Ray-Ban and look exactly like the iconic Hollywood frames — except one detail sets them apart, a detail small enough to be missed by the average passerby. The usual little, silver rivet on the corner of the frame has been replaced by a tiny camera, activated by a single touch and capable of capturing 3K resolution and up to eight hours of footage on a single charge.
The camera includes what is marketed as a safety privacy feature: an LED light that flashes when the recording is active. However, a quick Google search reveals several tutorials on how to disable the blinking light, and a single piece of electrical tape can easily conceal it.
Meta markets these glasses as a hands-free companion that can effortlessly capture life as you live it. But there is a problem baked into the fact that the glasses work exactly as advertised.
There is already a cost to living in a world where anyone with a phone might be recording us. These glasses remove the only reassurance that remained — the visibility of the camera. You can see a phone but you cannot always see a tiny blinking light hidden within a glasses frame. The results are threatening, if not harmful, to women.
In January, after a night out in Vancouver, Canada, Kassy Zanjani was approached by a man in a fast-food restaurant. The man told her she was gorgeous, to which she responded that she had a boyfriend and the man walked away. Zanjani didn’t think much of the interaction until a week later, when a friend sent her a video of the entire exchange on Instagram. Zanjani told the U.K. Independent she believed the man was targeting intoxicated women who would be more vulnerable to being filmed for social media content.
Zanjani’s experience is part of a larger trend. In February 2025, on a beach in Sydney, Australia, a British woman named Millie was approached by a man who aggressively asked for her number. She felt uncomfortable and didn’t know how to get him to leave. She didn’t realize she was being filmed until a friend of hers in the U.K. sent her a TikTok of the conversation. By that point, the video had surpassed a million views.
“I felt absolutely embarrassed, distraught, upset, crying,” she told the Independent.
Another woman, named Oonagh, was sunbathing in Brighton, England, last June when a man approached and asked her out. When she later tried to report the viral video that came from the exchange, the local Sussex police told her there was nothing they could do. In most countries, the U.S. and U.K. included, it is legal to film people in public without their consent — but that doesn’t make it any less uncomfortable.
Another disturbing element to this story is that the men behind these lenses are often profiting from their videos. Entire accounts have emerged that are dedicated to this format: A man approaches a woman in public; the woman, unaware she is being recorded, responds as many people might — warmly, awkwardly or maybe even with a little irritation; the footage is then uploaded to a platform that attracts thousands of views from an audience that is overwhelmingly young and male who find the whole endeavor entertaining, or worse, pornographic. The content is then monetized and the woman is not compensated.
While researching this piece, I spent hours watching examples of this content and found a couple alarming trends within the comment sections. Hundreds of strangers are rating the woman’s appearance and speculating about her sexual abilities. I came across demeaning sexual comments like, “Did you clap them cheeks, bro?” and “Just rubbed one out.”
Viewers also have become dedicated to finding the women filmed, filling the comment sections with desperate pleas. “Please, does anyone know who this girl is?” one commenter wrote. Other men were answering, writing that they had uploaded the woman’s face to a facial recognition tool called TryFaceFind, which claims to match a photograph against Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Snapchat within seconds, and posting the results publicly in the thread.
The filming is the first act of violation, the identification is the second. Whatever comes next is left to the imagination of whoever is reading.
As Rebecca Hitchen of the U.K.-based nonprofit End Violence Against Women Coalition told BBC, this digital exploitation is “sadly, very predictable.” Advocates for women’s safety have been predicting the covert surveillance of women through new technology for years with increasing urgency. And it may only get worse as Meta plans to integrate facial recognition capabilities into future versions of the glasses.
The ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit, have warned that this technology would hand abusers, stalkers and even government officials the means of stripping people’s ability to move anonymously through public space. Domestic abuse organizations have called it a direct threat to survivors — the concern is that facial recognition could prevent survivors from being able to anonymously flee to new locations to rebuild their lives.
Wearable technology has become an increasingly common tool of abuse and control. Both Refuge and Women’s AID, two U.K.-based nonprofits, told The Independent that the “tragic reality” is that abusers would use such tools for “nefarious” purposes. Refuge reported a 62 percent increase in referrals to its technology-facilitated abuse team in 2025 alone.
In the end, beyond the harm being perpetrated against women, the men watching these videos are learning something damaging. They are learning that a woman’s reaction, however confused, uncomfortable, polite or angry it may be, is there to amuse them. That her presence in public is, by default, available for their entertainment and sexual gratification.
Meta’s response when pressed on the matter of women being filmed without their consent? Users are responsible for following the law. And the law, as noted, says that this is fine.
This post was written by Lily Turner, who is interning with Chills this summer. She is a rising senior at Wesleyan University, and a winner of the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for a 2024 KUOW radio story about sex education in public schools.
Good job Lily. I am Lauren’s father. She has previously told me about and is very impressed by you. I hope Wesleyan does for you what it did for Lauren. 😀
New Zealand has recently passed an anti stalking act https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2025/72/en/latest/ but I note the crime is based on 2 or more incidents against the same person. This means that the behavior you described does not meet the threshold of a crime. It is legal (with exceptions) to take photos of people in public places, but not if you are going to profit from them (I assume this excludes journalists, I haven't looked that far). Pretty grey. No nudity is allowed. I wonder if one thing that could be done is to make sure that as many people as possible know what the glasses look like and can tell when they are recording.