When it comes to developments in consumer tech, what may initially feel weird or superfluous often becomes normalised. Meta’s “smart” glasses are the sort of tiresome product that appeals to those keen to outsource so much of their experience of the world to tech. The marketing push is on and Meta is selling millions of them. They have various functions but the one drawing most attention is video recording.
One aspect of smart glasses does feel useful. Blind and visually impaired people may benefit from AI audio that provides descriptions of surroundings. But the majority of people who buy and wear these glasses do not need such an aid.
Wearing a bodycam on your face has proven especially popular with some content creators, who can now film their point of view hands-free instead of strapping another type of camera to themselves.
This brings us to privacy concerns. These are relevant to the user themselves. Earlier this year, workers at a Kenyan company that Meta outsourced content moderation and AI training to alleged that while doing data annotation work – labelling data to, for example, train an AI to recognise objects – they viewed seemingly private encounters filmed by Meta’s glasses, including people having sex and using the toilet. After these allegations were reported, Meta terminated its contract with the company, Sama, and more than 1,000 people lost their jobs.
Privacy concerns also extend to those caught in the field of vision of Meta’s glasses. Cinemas, theatres and courts are beginning to assess banning them. One can imagine other spaces, such as clubs and restaurants, banning or discouraging them too.
The glasses have earned the nicknames pervert glasses and creep glasses. The ramifications are obvious across non-consensual or secret filming, harassment and stalking. As usual, women will be the main cohort contending with this. Maybe the increasing recognisability of Meta’s glasses will be enough of an alert to the prospect that you’re being filmed, but it does feel the burden of preventing that is on the person in front of the glasses asserting themselves, not those wearing them. What if it is not safe to assert oneself? What it if feels too socially awkward?
Meta makes a big deal of how visible the act of filming is, with a light signifying the glasses are recording. So everyone else is in luck, I suppose, as we’ll know when to have awkward encounters with people asking them to stop filming. How this will play out as these glasses potentially become more common I’m not sure, but shouting “lights off” at people on the street or in a pub or at a funeral or on a flight or in the gym, like one does to a child staying up late in their bedroom, might enter our lexicon in a new way.
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Regardless of whether a light is on or off, the glasses arouse suspicion. There are countless tutorials online demonstrating how to render Meta glasses “stealth”, as the parlance goes. These modifications disable the light that turns on when the glasses are recording. Of course this is against the terms of service of the glasses but since when did people behave?
But the broader questions are around how much tech is too much tech. How integrated do we want tech to be in our social lives as well as our working lives? How always-on should hardware and software be on our bodies and in our behaviour when we’re going about our days? Since so many people have given so many of their hours in a day over to their phones, how many wearable additions should be integrated so that the individual almost becomes a phone themselves, with a camera at eye-level, monitors at wrist-level, and AI in your hand, your ears, and an augmented layer over your field of vision? At this stage, where does the human end and the machine begin?
This also raises questions about the boundaries of surveillance. Surveillance culture can only completely triumph if individuals — and not just the state or police and security forces — also redraw social norms when it comes to recording and monitoring.
But there’s another existential issue too and it’s one concerned with dissociation. When I watch Instagram reels of content creators filming with their glasses, the footage does not feel like real life but the perspective of a first-person point-of-view video game.
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Meta’s glasses, much like a phone held aloft filming, put a layer between a person and the real world. Even if this layer becomes frictionless or almost imperceptible to the wearer and the people they’re interacting with, it still exists.
When all the world feels like a video game, when the perspective is that of a player, when an environment or interactions are that of levels, when the feedback is that of rewards garnered from attention and likes, the experience of one’s life becomes mediated through a digital looking-glass. What consequences does this have for being present and maintaining a grasp on an authentic connection to real life, rather than everything existing as content to be captured and not entirely “real”? That is not just a tool or a product, it is a form of altered reality, a spectacle rendered through spectacles.
