What Do We Do About the Cameras Everywhere?

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Meta has been selling millions of its camera-equipped glasses, making all of us fodder for content creation—when we’re on the street, at the store, and in our workplaces. Host Charlie Warzel talks with the Verge reporter Mia Sato about how regular people are being affected as these glasses increase in use, the backlash to Flock cameras, and what happens when we’re always being recorded.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Mia Sato: I think Meta is kind of like perpetually getting in its own way. You know, it just can’t seem to figure out how to have people soften up to the company. And that’s why you see this rollout just being like a complete disaster, really.

Charlie Warzel: Hey there, quick question. Is it a bad thing if people start referring to your AI-powered face computer as “pervert glasses”?

I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re talking about Meta smart glasses and the slow and steady erosion of our public expectation of privacy, and whether or not Americans are actually mounting a genuine backlash to the surveillance state.

Big tech companies have been trying to crack spatial and face computing for a long time.

Arguably the most notable example was Google Glass, a Star Trek–looking headset that was, technologically speaking, pretty impressive, but cost about 1,500 bucks and mostly just repulsed people. The prototype program for Google Glass fizzled out, but not before I tried a pair 13 years ago, visiting Google’s headquarters one day. Google Glass may have failed, but it did produce the most cursed photograph that exists of me.

Plenty have tried to make smart glasses a thing. Snapchat released its first version of its spectacles in 2016, but the product just didn’t really catch on. And that’s in part because the technology wasn’t quite there, or it was wonky or cumbersome, or there wasn’t enough memory or storage. And then, in 2021, Meta released its smart glasses. Its first collaboration was with the sunglasses company Ray-Ban. And Meta’s proposition here was that the glasses looked a lot more like actual glasses.

Initially, the camera could record about 30 to 60 seconds of video, and the glasses let people listen to music or take calls, and the videos that were captured could be shared across Meta’s platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, using a special stories app. And from the launch, two things happened. First, the glasses caused a somewhat expected controversy around privacy, like all these devices tend to do. But second, the glasses were successful. People bought them.

And for creators, especially, the product was something between a gimmick and a genuinely new, useful camera tool. And so Meta decided to invest in them. In 2023, they infused the glasses with AI software that allowed the glasses to describe what a user was looking at in their field of vision. Very fancy. And all the while, Meta has tried to dodge controversy, around whether the glasses will eventually deploy facial-recognition technology and over what data the company retains or uses to train its large language models.

And for a while, the glasses were mostly just this. It was a curio used by creators and mostly despised by privacy advocates. But all that has really changed over the past year. In 2026, the glasses had become more popular and more prevalent, and there have been more examples of people abusing them. People filming women on the street for pickup-artist videos. Strange black markets popping up to hack cameras so that the recording light doesn’t show.

And as more people wear the glasses, more people are concerned that they’re being surreptitiously recorded at sporting events, at dinner parties, at the store; maybe even being recorded while having sex. And this negative reaction, which started on social media, has spread thoroughly throughout popular culture. This summer, the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel referred to Meta’s device as “pervert glasses.” And yet the glasses keep selling. Celebrities are attaching their names and likenesses to them, and the abuses continue to pile up. And so it all seems like we are headed toward a genuine reckoning for both Meta, but all of us really.

What is really going on here? Are these glasses here to stay? Are they impacting the lives of regular people? People who are just trying to go about their days and do their jobs? What happens to all of us in a world where we’re always being recorded? And crucially, what can you do if someone comes up to you on the street wearing a pair of these glasses?

Mia Sato is a reporter and features writer at The Verge who has reported extensively on the ways that these glasses are upending people’s lives. What I like about her work is that it’s always situated on the ways that emerging technologies affect regular people. And so she joins me now to talk about all of this.

Mia, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Sato: Thank you for having me.

Warzel: So before we get into the current state of the Meta Glasses, the cameras everywhere, the panopticon world that we live in, I wanted to walk just a little bit through the history of these glasses with you. Kind of get your reaction to some of it. And this all starts on my birthday, September 9th, 2021. Facebook launches the glasses. Did you expect them to take off? I mean, this is—I’ll just put myself out there. I, at every moment with a facial wearable technology, like a camera-on-your-face kind of situation, I always expect it to fail. I mean, everyone was very excited about Apple’s Vision Pro a couple of years ago, and I was just like, I don’t think we’re ready for it yet. But like—did you expect this to be an actual product category for Meta that was gonna work, or did you sort of feel like it was destined for the same dustbin?

Sato: I think at the time, and what I still believe, is that this will not be adopted in the way that Meta says it will or hopes it will. And to me, the most straightforward reason is that not everyone wants to wear glasses. Like, sometimes people don’t want something on their face. And this was kind of the thing that I couldn’t get over with the Vision Pro and other headsets and stuff is like—that’s a really big barrier to entry. Having something on your head, having something on your face that covers, you know, your hair, your makeup; like, there are all sorts of weird human things that that is just like a barrier, literally.

Warzel: So I’ve picked out a couple of events here that I think are related in the history of these glasses. And the first is in 2024, Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that images and videos shared with Meta AI—for an example, the look and ask features—may be used to improve Meta’s AI models. So these glasses, you know, the input outputs are going to be used to train artificial-intelligence systems. The second is in April 2025, in an email to glasses owners, Meta said that AI features, including Meta with a camera, would be on by default—and that voice recordings would be stored by default, with no opt-out.

This year, confusingly, Meta tells The Guardian that, “unless users choose to share media that they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device. And when people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience. We take steps to filter the data and protect people’s privacy.”

These feel like important revelations to me, because so much of the concern about these glasses is that they’ll be used to surveil others. But isn’t it just as important of a story how much these glasses are surveilling their owners?

Sato: Totally. You are giving up an incredible amount of information about yourself and what you do every day simply by maybe wearing these glasses. And I think, you know, there’s obviously the fears around how other people—who are sort of unwitting participants in your glasses journey—how their information is being captured and stored and used later. But it’s kind of incredible to me that with this sort of back-and-forth flip-flopping, more glasses users aren’t asking, like: I just wore them all day. What do you know about my life? That’s a huge reason why I personally wouldn’t use these glasses. Because I am like—there are some things that I actually would prefer Meta not know about me. They know a lot already. But there’s some stuff that I would like to keep for myself.

Warzel: Right. And so, okay, this brings us to earlier this year, February 2026. And The New York Times publishes a report that I think cast the company in as poor a light as I’ve ever seen an internal memo cast on a tech company. The story alleges that Meta is talking internally about adding facial recognition back into its glasses. And the Times gets a hold of a document from May of the previous year, which described these plans to release Name Tag, which is its codename for a facial-recognition product. They plan to release it to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company didn’t actually do. But this was part of what they were gonna do.

And there’s a line from the internal memo that made news, which is: “We will launch 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.” That’s according to a document from Meta’s Reality Labs, which works on hardware including smart glasses.

I just want, first, to get your reaction to that. Like what are people supposed to make of that? That this company that is making this stuff is hoping that people will be busy enough attending to the other horrors of the world so as not to focus on the actual product that they’re rolling out. Like—tell me what to make of that.

Sato: I mean, we have so many gadgets and tech that is beyond what people could have imagined we had, right? We have computers in our phones, and that is amazing. And I think we kind of skip over the fact that the idea of glasses that can record people around you and maybe even recognize who they are is literally like the spyglasses of the kids’ movies that I watched growing up, right? Like, that’s like Spy Kids—would love to have glasses that can record your whole day, and you can ask them later what you saw. As Meta, some leaked plans have suggested Meta’s working on, or recognize the people around you. So the capability is so sci-fi, futuristic spyware that I just want to make sure we take a moment to be like: This is really crazy technology that we’re talking about.

And the point about accessibility—the role of glasses in disability spaces, this is something that Meta has harped on quite a bit. And it’s true, and my colleagues at The Verge have done great work about how these tools can be used for accessibility purposes. But there’s a pattern of Meta kind of putting them into these spaces and almost trying to deflect from the larger privacy and surveillance concerns that people have, including people who are disabled. Like, disabled people also deserve privacy.

So there’s a real push and pull between, like, “What can these glasses be used for?” and “What settings could we use, could we put them in?” Versus, like, “What is the worst version of how someone could use this technology?” Which is always going to be the thing that the public thinks about. Like—what danger does this pose to me, to my kids, to my life day to day?

And you know, right now, a lot of the news stories that we’re reading, and the story that I wrote, was about some of the people who are doing the worst version of that. So it’s sort of like a shadow cast over Meta and this new line item that they hope will become a major part of how people interact with their company.

Warzel: And this, to me, this idea of “We wanna launch during a period of time when people—but especially like, you know, civil-liberties groups—aren’t gonna be paying as much attention about this.” To say nothing of taking advantage of horrific world events or political events? It suggests that they know this is creeping people out, to some degree. That, to me, feels like they have lost in that sense the cover of saying, No, no, no—we think this is just going to be a great thing for the world. Like—everyone should want these, and they’re gonna empower people to do great things.

Sato: It’s also, you know, a reality that Meta is feeling the heat for these glasses. Like they are synonymous and some people have called them “pervert glasses” or “glasses for creeps,” right? Like, the rollout is so messy. It’s such—it’s really just not a good look. And I think Meta, just even zooming out from the hardware stuff, Meta has lost a lot of public trust over the last decade, and over the last like five years. And it’s facing all of these battles. Not just that people think the glasses are creepy, but that it’s facing all these court cases. And it’s being sued by parents and states for, you know, its products and how it harms young people—

Warzel: And losing—

Sato: —and losing. And so this idea that, Now, let’s give this company glasses that can recognize faces, or can record your entire day and spit it back out to you. When you ask the AI questions, like, that is just a nonstarter for a lot of people. And I think Meta is kind of like perpetually getting in its own way. You know, it just can’t seem to figure out how to have people soften up to the company. And that’s why you see this rollout just being like a complete disaster, really.

Warzel: So just wanna say in response to that Times report, Meta issued a statement and said, “We’re building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives. While we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature”—meaning facial-recognition stuff—“and some of these products already exist in the market, we’re still thinking through options, and we’ll take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out.” That was in response to the February stuff.

How damaging do you think that instance was to the reputation of this gadget? Like, do you think that really stuck through to people? Like, those types of things are the reason why you have folks like Jimmy Kimmel calling these pervert glasses?

Sato: Yeah, I think it’s the big part. Because, again, it’s one thing to have glasses. It’s one thing to have a phone that can record video. It’s one thing to have glasses that can record video, and it’s an entire other thing to have glasses that can scan your face and tell the wearer who you are, right? Like, it is such an escalation of the technology. And I will say that a lot of the—some discussions about this technology, you know, it can be rife with misinformation and misunderstanding. But I think this idea that, “Well, it’s only, you know, a stone’s throw away to put facial recognition in these glasses”—this seemed to sort of confirm those fears that people hold.

What is the worst possible thing that these glasses could do? Well, maybe recognize—if you are a creep wearing these glasses, you can find women on the street and try to identify them, right? Like, that is sort of like the worst-case scenario, the thing that people fear the most. And when things like this leak, it sort of confirms underlying fears, or underlying assumptions that people had that had not been confirmed previously. So I think it was a major part of it.

Warzel: So Meta has not released facial-recognition software. In June of this year, though, Wired reported that Meta discreetly moved to infuse facial-recognition tech into its smart glasses, as evidenced by a piece of code discovered in the Meta AI app by Wired journalists. It’s an unreleased feature. So, as we stand, they don’t have facial recognition yet. But do you think that, based off everything you just said—like the reports, the backlash—the feeling that it is, like, you know, having facial recognition is crossing the Rubicon, right? But it’s also like the killer application for this, right?

As like the people who are evangelists for this product see it as, you know, this sort of sci-fi endgame, right? Of being able to look all this stuff up, to have the computer on your face that can really process and index all this information. Like, do you think that it’s coming for these glasses? Or do you think that it’s like a bridge too far right now, ’cause it’s like the No. 1 thing that also creeps people out?

Sato: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to say, because I know Meta comms and PR people were really getting into it over the Wired story. They were really upset about it. But there’s a reason they’re working on it. You know, and it’s hard to put that aside. It is clearly, I think, a bridge too far for a lot of people, for a lot of the public. Even the glasses themselves seem to be a bridge too far. And we can talk a little bit about how, after my story, the reaction was so unified in a way that I have not seen for many pieces that I’ve written. People hate it.

And so if you’re Meta looking at, you know, the reaction to the glasses themselves and then sort of the uproar with the facial recognition, you have to slow the roll a little bit. So it doesn’t surprise me that they tried to sort of weasel out of it a little bit—like, This is not shipped. Like, you know, we work on things all the time. But at the same time, it is something in development. And there have been other leaks about what type of capabilities they might envision the glasses being infused with. So like one, I believe the Financial Times reported about always-on smart glasses where they’re not actively, you know, capturing video with the privacy light that they have right now—but that every couple seconds they’re taking a photo, and they’re capturing audio. And you can query Meta AI and say, like, you know, What was that restaurant that I walked by earlier?

So these are all things that the company is thinking about that they might consider releasing in the future. So yeah; I don’t know. I think the question is more like: When will Meta read the room that this is all too much for for a lot of people?

Warzel: Yeah. The idea of taking the photo every few seconds, I mean, that just feels like the largest possible data liability that a company could possibly present itself with. Just especially with—I think some people think of these two as like sunglasses, right? And obviously they make Meta sunglasses, through Ray-Ban, through Oakley, other people. But also, some of these are just clear-frame glasses that, like, people have on all the time, right?

Sato: Yeah. Yep.

Warzel: So, okay. These glasses have been out in the world for a while. A lot of creators, a lot of normal people, are using them in honestly pretty expected ways, right? And then there’s the creepy stuff. And a lot of that has really come out over the last year. So how, in your reporting and stuff you’ve come across, how are people abusing them?

Sato: It’s really weird. They will wear the glasses. Like, some bad actors, let’s say, will wear the glasses into a store and harass the workers who are working there. They might sort of be recording them without the person realizing, and they’re pulling some sort of prank. I use the word prank really loosely. It’s not funny, which is a big problem. But you know, they might ask the price of an item over and over and over. And the person will answer; the worker will answer. And they’ll be like, Well, no, I’m saying: What is the price? What is the price of the item? And this goes on for minutes. They might pretend to be like a rude employee where they’re like getting in the way of other customers, just to get that reaction. And so it makes the worker the butt of the joke. So there’s that genre, right? Harassing people while they’re at their job, and they can’t say no.

Warzel: And this is the reporting that you just did for The Verge where you went and spoke with a number of people who have had these exact instances, right? That happened to one of the people you spoke with. What ended up happening there? Like, what was the fallout from that?

Sato: So the worker that I spoke with that this happened to went home after their shift. They were obviously very shaken up, and one of their bosses found these videos on social media, posted to social media on TikTok and Instagram. And combined, these videos had more than half a million views. They were, you know, viral by a lot of people’s standards. And they were trying to sort of get them removed. Finally, when I reached out to Meta and asked about them, they removed the entire Instagram profile that had, you know, done these videos. But it sort of creates, you know, a heightened fear, a new fear for workers where they could go into their job and try to help a customer and end up being in a video where they are taken advantage of for content.

And Meta—I should say that Meta says that type of content is not allowed on its platforms. It doesn’t want secret recordings of people. It doesn’t want videos that are harassing of people. And so when I asked the company about it, they did say it violated their bullying and harassment policy. But this type of content is very easy to find online.

Warzel: The prank genre is a staple here. Can I—I wanna keep on this. Because the story that you wrote for The Verge about this, obviously, as you said, it really resonated with lots of people. But what were some of the other examples? Because I think it’s really helpful to have them out there, these individual use cases.

Sato: Yeah. There are some more I guess relatively innocuous worker examples; I spoke with workers. So one person works at a very touristy place in Seattle. And she is a young woman and said the adoption of these glasses just skyrocketed, very quickly. It was like she was seeing these glasses every day, multiple times a day, and now she says she sees like 10 people an hour come into her workplace wearing Meta Glasses. And it’s a touristy place, so there’s always been recording. But now she kind of described it to me as like, You can tell that they’re wearing glasses, and sometimes you can tell that they’re recording. But you can’t really tell what they’re recording, because, you know, it’s eye level. So they’ll be looking around, but what they’re capturing is much broader than just exactly where they’re looking.

And she hasn’t been harassed, but she was like: I’m a shorter woman, and when men come in wearing them and record me, they’re looking down at me. And it really feels like they’re looking down my shirt—that they’re recording down my shirt. So there’s this general sense of like—I don’t know what this video is being used for. Are they gonna make a vlog about it? Are they gonna put it in their food review or, you know, tour or vacation blog? Like, who knows? But I all I know is that I’m in a bunch of people’s videos, and I find that really weird.

Warzel: I think when we talk about these glasses, the idea of surveillance is this amorphous concept, right? You’re filming people without their consent. But there’s a piece in your story where you write that, in the case of these businesses, store employees are also handling sensitive data at their jobs, right? And this includes things like customers’ names, email addresses, credit-card information.

And it strikes me that—I mean, this is obvious, but like surveillance is about so much more than people, right? It is also about everything else that is being consumed, and whether that is for, you know, either public consumption or a stranger’s consumption. What else aren’t we thinking about when it comes to the fallout of these cameras just being everywhere?

Sato: I think that this is sort of maybe a drier fallout, but like—the liability that so many people are opening themselves and their employers and everyone else up to when you have a camera attached to your face. So like one of the examples I include in the story is a woman who was working at a grocery store. And her boss came in one day wearing Meta Glasses, and she was very worried obviously about the safety of customers—if they were being recorded by these glasses. Or you know, kids coming in. But a big part was: You are handling customers’ credit cards. You know you can, in their loyalty program, you can see their name and their email address and their phone number, and stuff like that. And so I think a big sort of underappreciated part of this is that when you have glasses attached to people’s faces, you are collecting a lot of data that you probably are not supposed to be collecting.

And a privacy and law expert was kind of saying to me, like—the more you collect, the greater the risk is of leaks and misuse. Right. You are just opening yourself up to so much potential liability. That the store, you know, without a specific policy against these glasses, is just kind of throwing your hands up and saying, like, Yeah, my workers can wear these. And it’s just like—are you thinking about how to explain to customers down the line if there is a data breach, if there is a leak on Meta’s side, that their credit-card information is in that too?

Warzel: Amidst all of this, Meta announced this summer, as you alluded to there, that it’s gonna ban some of that content that’s filmed with the company smart glasses on Instagram. And you wrote a piece arguing: “Meta just created a moderation nightmare for its smart glasses.” Walk me through why it’s a moderation nightmare.

Sato: A lot of content on the internet depends on taking advantage of other people. And it’s unfortunate, and it’s not fair, and that is the way it is. And you know, when Meta first announced, like: We won’t allow these worker-harassment pranks—or like, another genre of Meta Glasses content is men going up to women and trying to do pickup lines on them to see how they react. Meta said: We don’t want this on Instagram. We don’t want this on on Facebook.

Warzel: Cool.

Sato: But the reality is that, even without the glasses, this type of content was being created. And it was abusive and harassment then, too. But Meta was, you know, like—all that content exists everywhere. And I think about all of the different environments where someone is being recorded without their knowledge.

One example that I immediately thought of was like the people who walk through homeless encampments, or, you know, areas where there’s maybe open drug use, and they record it. Sort of almost like—it’s a very extractive type of content, where you’re making it for people to gawk at. And that type of content, as far as I can tell, is allowed on these platforms, because I see it all the time.

And if we are taking a stand against content that takes advantage of other people, or records them without their consent or their knowledge, surely a lot more will fall under this category. And I don’t really see any evidence that Meta is taking action on that. In fact, even the content that explicitly they said they would remove, like the pranks, it took a random tech reporter to ask the company about it to ban this account that had hundreds of thousands of followers, and hundreds of thousands of views.

So, you know, my argument there with the moderation question is: Where is the line for so much other content, other than the couple that we’ve raised? What is allowed, and what isn’t? Because in some ways, a big part of social media is recording people without their consent. It’s like a massive—you know, recording Karens or like ”People of Walmart,” right? To use a throwback. A lot of content is about strangers. And you never go up and say, “Hey, do you wanna be in my video?” You’re just taking photos; you’re just taking recordings of them. And so I found that moderation decision really interesting. To me, it read more like: Don’t make us look bad on our own platforms by using these glasses that are already incredibly unpopular. Don’t put the bad stuff on Instagram.

Warzel: What was Meta’s response to this reporting that you’ve done recently around these glasses?

Sato: They have given the same canned answer to a lot of reporters who have written stories about Meta Glasses and their misuse. Meta basically told me, you know, we have built privacy into these glasses from the ground up. They have the LED light that indicates when it’s recording, right, like on the lenses. And they also said that they had been banning certain hashtags from being recommended that are like associated with the content. So like #riz, you know, for these pickup-line videos, or #coldapproach, I think, was another hashtag that they said that they had kind of blocked. And of course they did say, you know, We’re taking down this content; we’ve taken down thousands of pieces of this content; and we’ve banned big accounts with millions of followers who had been posting this content.

So, you know, their response to a lot of the criticisms or the reporting is often like: Well, there is this LED privacy light built into them, and we take it seriously. And they’ve made certain software updates where if the camera detects that you’ve covered the light, supposedly it will stop recording. I think, you know, it’s a rolling update, so maybe it’s not applied to all glasses right now. And people are obviously always trying to find ways around it. But they’ve tried to make it so you can’t tamper with the light, so that people don’t know when you’re recording.

Warzel: It seems like a bit of an arms race, right? Because there’s been reporting in places like The Guardian and other outlets that follow people who run businesses essentially that help, you know, jailbreak these devices, right? To disable the red light, which obviously is against Meta’s terms of service. That’s not what they want people to use, but I think it’s worth noting here that there’s just like this entire economy built around trying to make these even more surreptitious than they already are.

You know, what really strikes me about what you’re reporting on this subject is that Meta has created essentially a first- and second-order problem, right? In the first, they’ve done arguably more than any other company to create this culture of social-media clout and engagement chasing: the pranks and other things for views, this whole content-creation ecosystem. Like, they didn’t set the terms of that at Meta, but Facebook is the OG social network, right? They helped build that world that we’re all living in, the content landscape.

And then they drop this product into it—a product that is tailor made for these types of creators and these types of people, to be used in these environments. And they’re now using it to turn people’s lives into content in a way that’s even more focused than, you know, the camera phone. And I’m curious, like: Where’s this all going? Like, what is the end goal here for Meta with these things?

Sato: Well, I think—you know, Meta is an ads business. So presumably, the more information they have about what you do all day and what you see all day, the better their targeted ads will get. I assume that they’re thinking about how to monetize this. The other thing is like Meta—for as central as it’s been to social media for 20 years—in recent years, they’ve also really been playing catch-up, right? Like, TikTok changed the game, and Meta changed its business around TikTok. And so what Meta has always been concerned about is scale. It has more users in TikTok, more content. And what it needs is people on its platform in different ways.

And I think there’s sort of a catering to that type of creator. Creators who can amass views, even if people don’t really like their content or, you know, people find it sort of morally objectionable. And so I think, you know, there’s a reason why creators were some of the first people to adopt these glasses. Because who else is recording all day? Who else is recording their interactions? The people that do use them, it creates a frictionlessness for content creation. And so I, you know, have to assume that a big part of these glasses is that they want creators livestreaming, for example, right? Like, streaming is a huge part of the online ecosystem. Ads, obviously, I assume they’re working on ways to incorporate that, or to try to monetize it in the future. And it’s strange, because I think it is really butting up against a real social backlash around being watched. And I think it’s interesting that, you know, this is happening at the same time when there’s like nationwide outrage over Flock cameras. I think these two are intrinsically related. You know, they’re coming from the same frustration of the feeling that you cannot escape the grips or the eyes of these huge, behemoth tech companies.

And so yeah; I’m curious at what point Meta, you know, sort of decides to go all in or to pare things back. Like, it wouldn’t be the first time that Meta tried something and then it didn’t work, right? Its namesake was a complete flop, the Metaverse. At what point do they sort of feel the public outcry is too much to bear?

I think they’re obviously taking a pretty defensive posture and trying to assuage some of these fears, but there’s sort of an incompatibility that I see between the public reaction and Meta’s plans.

Warzel: There’s a lot I wanna unpack there. I think before we get into a little more of the broader backlash against surveillance, you know, we have: This summer Meta announced

announces its new line of glasses, and Kylie Jenner is the face of that campaign. And there’s a line from Taylor Lorenz, a tech reporter who writes a Substack. She wrote this July: “Influencers are declaring a hot surveillance summer. West Village fashion girlies are posting AI glasses selfies, and for thousands of people, cameras on your face have officially gone from creepy to chic.”

And I’m curious if that is, in your understanding, a bit of a micro-phenomenon thing, something that’s already burned out. Like, are these glasses actually popular? Are non-influencer types wearing them? I mean, my understanding is that they’re hard to keep in stock, you know, and Meta has sold millions of pairs of glasses. Like it’s hard to deny, and they’re the market leader, right? Like when you talk about smart glasses, it’s Meta.

Sato: I think, you know, the example of the West Village girlies wearing the Kylie Jenner glasses. That was actually kind of smart on Meta’s part, because they made the glasses cute. Like, not everyone wants to wear the classic Ray-Ban shape, and the sort of design element was a step up. I guess I would question whether that is just an isolated phenomenon in these small pockets of types of creators, versus like—I don’t know that they’re convincing their followers to go out and buy them, which is sort of the whole point. A lot of the influencer marketing with these glasses; they sent them to influencers. And I had seen a few videos of even content creators that I follow, and the comments are not good. You know what I mean? Like, their followers are mad at them for taking a Meta Glasses brand deal. So I think it’s sort of hard to gauge.

Meta obviously wants it to be part of your work life, your social life. You know, just going around listening to music. They talk a lot about, like, you can listen to music too, and take calls and stuff. But I do think this is kind of the direction that tech companies are thinking. Apple, you know—there’s been leaks of Apple working on earbuds that have cameras on them. Which, if glasses were a problem, earbuds will really make people upset. So it’s definitely a trend that other companies are wading into. I just wonder, you know, how long people have the energy to be upset and to push back on it.

Warzel: In keeping with this idea of the backlash, you mentioned it—I think everyone really feels that the Flock cameras, right? These, you know, their license-plate scanners. They’re taking photos; they’ve attracted a lot of attention. Some vandalism, a lot of  news stories. In part because of reports that police officers are using them to follow or harass people in their lives, but also just because people are getting, like, dogged with tickets in their neighborhood, or just feeling like these things are showing up everywhere. And like, you know, where’s this information going?

The vibes are so bad around the glasses that ICE recently barred the camera glasses from the force. And I mean, if you’ve lost ICE, where are we there? So we’re in this moment of the backlash. But why do you think that is? Because we’ve had license-plate scanners before; the glasses have actually been around for a while. Like, what do you feel like has changed in recent months, or in the last year, around this broader trend of surveillance, and people really having their, you know, spidey senses open to it?

Sato: I do think it’s hard to disentangle it from the Trump administration. And this idea of, you know, a hostile presidency and the various ways that it’s watching what people do. And, you know, watching how people live their lives, and who’s here and who’s not, and your comings and goings. And, you know, tracking migrants and immigrants. And so I think already, people are primed to be fearful of being watched.

The other part, if I could connect it to the social-media side, is like: We’re now, you know, several decades into the content machine. And it’s really ramped up in the last, you know, since COVID, when everyone was stuck at home. And I think people are kind of sick of being fodder for someone. In the case of Meta Glasses wearers, you know, people are sick of being like the background characters to the influencers’ main-character life, right? Like, We don’t want to be in the background of your videos. We don’t want you to record us and then post us online.

And so I think part of it is like a backlash to influencers and to content creators as well, that you can kind of see percolating and bubbling up in other spaces. So I think there’s sort of a confluence of different things. And a lot of it is, you know, they’re mad at content creators who are then monetizing the content as they harass people, or, you know, as they try to pick up women and hit on them.

Warzel: I think that’s such an excellent point about just the fatigue—people being tired of being fodder for these people. But what do you think all this is doing to us who are living in this world where we’ve genuinely, at this point, lost the expectation of privacy? You know—you hear stories of kids that are afraid to dance at school dances. They’re afraid of being filmed. People are like, I don’t really want to go on a date.

I saw, I think it was a New York Post thing where there were just like two people kissing on a bench, and it turned into a story. What is it doing to us that we’re now living in this world with no expectation of privacy?

Sato: It really makes us all into punishers. I hate the feeling of, you know, quantifying every moment of everyone’s life in order to find something scandalous or objectionable, or something you disagree with, or even just like don’t like. And I think, you know, it’s interesting that the glasses and the content from the glasses is coming now—at a time when people are really used to seeing strangers who are not public figures, who are not celebrities, who are not journalists or politicians talking on their screen.

And the sort of rise of short-form video, where all you have to do is do a selfie video, and there’s a potential for it to get millions of views. That really creates an environment where a face on the screen is just that. You don’t sort of see them as just another private individual, because now they’ve chosen to make a video. And this idea that, you know, every moment of our lives should be up for consumption, should be up for criticism, should be available for people to comment on. We really sort of created those conditions over the last five years since TikTok.

I don’t know; it’s dark. It’s not a healthy society where you, like, see two people kissing or whatever in the park and think, Who are they cheating on? It’s not good to see a woman in public and say, Ooh, she would make a good video. Right? Like, that’s a really dehumanizing way to think about your fellow humans.

So yeah—we’ve been barreling toward this for a while. And I think, you know, the glasses just sort of supercharge it. And a lot of people also—I should say, some people—seem to find this content funny. Some people like it. And that is also kind of—well, they’ve learned that behavior over the last several years.

Warzel: What it reminds me of is—as social media, text-based social media started to curdle, right? Like, I think about being on Twitter and just seeing people start to become the worst versions of themselves, and like picking people apart in very specific ways. And, you know. What I feel like you’re describing, which is real, and what video-based social media has done, as well as all these, you know, surveillance tools is—it’s basically taken that, and it’s ported it like into the reality of your actual physical life. Like, you in physical space, right? And there’s no way to separate that. This is you kissing on a park bench. Like, that’s just who you are. You can’t distance yourself from that. And that, to me, feels like that is like a rot. Like if we don’t eradicate that somehow, it gets dark real fast.

Sato: Yeah. We should remember, too, that TikTok describes itself as an entertainment platform, not a social-media platform. I think about this with social platforms trying to move more and more into trying to get people to watch their content on a television, not on their phone. Like, YouTube is big on this. Instagram is saying it wants you to watch, like, Reels on TV. But you can see how people start to think that this is closer to a television show or like a reality-TV show, or a movie, rather than a post that a random person made one day. And that blurring of those lines, I think, contributes to it. Also the fact that like TikTok stars have gone on to become celebrities in their own way. And they just started as a teen girl in her room doing dances.

So the way that people consume this is not like—there’s a random Twitter account who posted something embarrassing, or posted something that people are dunking on. Now it’s become: I see this person as entertainment, because the platform that I found them on is an entertainment platform.

Warzel: To bring it slightly back to the glasses, I keep asking you a variation of a question of: Where does it all lead? And what we’re describing here, in some ways, is like a breaking of the social contract, right? A technologically enabled breaking of the social contract. And tech regulation is, in general, a rat’s nest, right? It’s very difficult. It’s always notoriously behind. But when we think about where we go with this—as a society that is kinda fed up with this but also has to deal with it—do you think the answer here ends up being regulatory? Or does it end up being cultural? Like, again, go back to Google Glass, when society’s like, Nope, not today. Sorry, we’re just not doing that. You look weird.

Sato: Yeah.

Warzel: Or third option—is this an example of these companies just steamrolling people? Like, where they’re dropping it into the world, forcing us to deal with it. Even if a lot of people are like, I don’t like what this is doing. I’m curious how you think about the next steps here.

Sato: Yeah, I think a really straightforward sort of way to fence this in that doesn’t require regulators is, like, private businesses saying: You can’t wear these here. Which is something that is, you know, not that strange. We’re used to entering environments under rules that are not laws. Like, there’s no law that you can’t wear sneakers at this nice restaurant. It’s just a policy that they enforce.

Warzel: Right.

Sato: So if private businesses say, Well, you can’t record here anyway. You can’t do videography here anyway. So we can’t take the risk with you wearing these glasses here. I mean, that’s something that any private business can just, you know—that’s a rule that they can send down tomorrow. And in the case of my story, I think a lot of these incidents could have been avoided if there were clearer rules. But because it’s emerging tech, there’s a lot of gray area, and like things being sussed out still.

You know, I’m not advocating for anyone to do this, but a really common response that I saw in the comments of my story was people just straightforwardly saying, If I see these glasses, I’m gonna take them off your face and like step on them. Which, a lot of it might be internet posturing. But also, that is a big way of people enforcing norms in society; like, I’m going to hurt you, or I’m going to, like, socially shun you.

Warzel: Right. Shame.

Sato: Because I don’t like this thing. So I think that’s definitely a big part of it. And some people actually did—I did see comments that said, like, I bought these glasses for a trip with my family, but because of all the bad actors recently, I’ve just felt really weird wearing them. So I don’t wear them anymore. So that is definitely an example of that sort of, like, reining it in through social pressure.

Warzel: I thought maybe a way to end this would be, as long as these are out in the world, people do have to deal with them. They do have to come up with the norms, or what have you. And I was listening to a Verge podcast that you were on, where you fielded a very memorable question from a listener about how to use or not use these glasses consensually in the bedroom. And also fears that if he purchased these glasses, Meta might end up with a lot of footage of him using the bathroom, which he didn’t want. But he also really wanted the glasses.

And I thought your advice was reasonably sound. So I wanted to ask you, just as we wrap up here, some of your thoughts—like, guideline-etiquette rules for using these glasses or encountering these glasses in the wild. And so I guess, first up, even if you disagree with the fact that someone has purchased these in general, what’s your etiquette advice for people when it comes to using them around other people, out in the world?

Sato: Well, I think, if you’re with your friends, it depends on the setting, I guess. But I would say maybe let people know. Just say, you know: I’m wearing these glasses; I’m not recording; I’m not doing anything with them. You know what I mean?

Warzel: Sounds like a super-cool thing to do at a party. Hey guys, I’m wearing these glasses.

Sato: I know. Informed consent when you hang out with your friends. But that’s another part of this—like, these glasses really are a hindrance. Because who wants to say: Just so you know, I’m wearing these glasses that a lot of you really hate. But, like, I’m not doing the thing that you really hate. So don’t worry. But you know, I would probably say you should let people know. Because I think a lot of the bristling comes from the fact that people are realizing after the fact. Like: Wait a minute; are those Meta Glasses? And then it becomes a problem.

Obviously, like don’t cover the light. That’s really creepy. That’s really weird and strange, strange thing to do. And I get that, you know, it’s useful for other things; like, some people really like listening to music that way. I get it. But you have to be sort of prepared for people to push back on it. Which I think is like—you know, that’s something that you don’t have to do if you have normal glasses.

Warzel: This wonderfully brings us to the last question, which is: If you see them out in the wild, and you feel like somebody might be up in your space, possibly filming you or just making you a little uncomfortable, what is your advice—having talked to a lot of these people and reporting on these situations? What’s your advice for somebody who finds themselves in that situation?

Sato: Yeah, I will say my understanding is that if you get close enough and say, Hey Meta, stop recording, it could work. There, the users can disable the voice-activation setting where it’s like, that doesn’t work. But it responds to any voice, not just the wearer’s voice. So if you think someone is recording—like, you see the light on the glasses on—you could try getting right up to them. And say, Hey Meta, stop recording, to see if that works. It might not always, but may be worth a shot if you really are feeling harassed.

Warzel: Hey Meta, delete my account. Just unplug the servers.

Sato: Hey Meta, forget I exist.

Warzel: Jeez.

Mia, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain to talk about this. And thank you for your reporting, which I think has really shown the human impact of all this technology in the world. Thank you for all your work.

Sato: Yeah; my pleasure.

Warzel: If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, or on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work, and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Hadley Robinson; the video was edited by Denny Thomas; and the audio was engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

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