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Reframing smart glasses as 'pervert glasses'

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Smart glasses are the latest "luxury surveillance" wearable gadgets on the market, and they're already drawing a ton of heat over privacy concerns.

These internet-connected eyeglasses are equipped with cameras and microphones, and some have AI built-in. This allows the glasses to capture and process audio and video of anyone nearby, but with no way for them to automatically opt out. When someone holds a phone camera to your face, at least you know it's happening. With smart glasses, you might not be aware that they have been recording you the whole time.

Data-hungry advertising tech giants like Meta and Snap have launched their own smart glasses with help from fashion brands Ray-Ban and Oakley and celebrity endorsements to drum up demand. Apple and Google are reportedly also preparing their own rival wearables.

But much of the consumer response has been fierce backlash over fears about surveillance and tracking. Some have developed apps that can detect when a person nearby has a pair of smart glasses, while others have physically taken matters into their own hands when faced with assholes wearing camera glasses on the subway.

In a recent story exploring consumer sentiment about surveillance, Vogue Business described smart glasses as legal but existing in "a gray space between what the law permits and what society deems acceptable." This has given rise to people calling out these wearables as "pervert glasses," following similar unsolicited encounters with creeps wearing them to harass people. For any benefits that smart glasses may offer their wearers, the tradeoff is that they violate the privacy of other people.

Per Vogue Business, which quotes sociotechnologist Dr. Sarah Saska, it's easy to understand why:

"The immediate risks are covert and sexualized recording, filming people in vulnerable moments, capturing children, harassment, stalking, and footage that can fuel extortion or deepfakes. The ‘creep’ framing is provocative, and it points to something real.

But I worry that it shrinks the problem to one creep on a train taking a picture, when the structural danger is always-on cameras becoming ordinary, human workers reviewing footage, and data pooling in an ecosystem owned by one company. Once that hardware sits on millions of faces, it becomes infrastructure that police, immigration agencies, employers, and the company itself can draw on. The creep is one manifestation of a much larger system."

The term "pervert glasses" took off earlier this year largely in response to an investigative news report revealing how Meta's smart glasses enable the exposure of personal information and sexual activity of their users. Contractors in Nairobi working for Meta described their experiences to reporters, including having access to highly sensitive and intimate videos uploaded by owners of Meta's smart glasses, from bank details to imagery of naked people.

The reporting also brought broader public awareness about where recordings from smart glasses get uploaded to and who has access to that footage, including tech company employees and contractors, as well as government authorities demanding access to it.

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I think this backlash against smart glasses is justified from a security and privacy perspective. Using technology to secretly record someone else isn't new, but bringing this audio- and video-collecting wearable tech into the mainstream has the potential to make it easier to carry out cybercrime and fraud by lowering the bar to entry for abuse.

The ability to covertly record and play back something displayed on someone's phone or computer screen or while someone taps in their password on a keyboard presents a major security problem — especially if that person is unaware of it happening. Recording sensitive data also creates a future risk of that information getting compromised, hacked, or obtained by a legal authority.

It is understandable why some are reframing smart glasses as "pervert glasses," by rejecting the sanitized marketing of tech companies and calling these products what they see them as: surveillance devices. It also speaks to the distrust that some consumers have with tech giants after years of abuses and scandals misappropriating people's data.

There are valid concerns that smart glasses on the market today could soon bake-in more privacy invading tech, like facial recognition. Once the tech companies get their hardware into the hands of consumers, it's easier for the companies to justify rolling out future software updates that normalize new or expansive surveillance capabilities.

We've already seen the nightmare scenario of hobby hackers adding live facial recognition to smart glasses that can identify and reveal the identities of people on the street in real-time, proving how invasive and creepy this technology can be. Meta is reportedly considering adding facial recognition to its smart glasses and app. The digital rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that adding facial recognition to smart glasses "would obliterate the privacy of everyone."

It doesn't have to get that far. To the argument that certain technologies and surveillance are in some way inevitable, I don't believe that to be true. It certainly doesn't have to be. You don't need to buy or use these invasive technologies, and you can reject them. Friends don't let friends wear pervert glasses.

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Smart glasses equipped with cameras, microphones, and AI are a creeping privacy and security nightmare, prompting backlash.

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Smart glasses equipped with cameras, microphones, and AI are a creeping privacy and security nightmare, prompting backlash.