Technology Miraj Islam September 24, 2026 0 Comments

“These should never have left the lab”: Smart glasses are used to secretly film women, and it makes me angry that we learned nothing from Google Glass 12 years ago.

One of the advantages of having written about technology for as long as I have is that you start to notice that the same ideas emerge decade after decade, in different shapes and sizes. Especially the bad ones.

12 years ago, Google invented something called Google Glass, a pair of glasses complete with a camera so you could record what you were looking at, and everyone hated it so outright that we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when they disappeared.

But now it’s 2026 and smart glasses are back, powered by AI and linked to a world-famous fashion brand, but fundamentally they still have exactly the same problem, which hasn’t been fixed yet: they allow people to record other people without their consent.

The curious case of Google Glass

(Image credit: Shutterstock/Hattanas)

Let’s remember what happened the first time smart glasses arrived.

Google Glass arrived in 2013. It places a small front screen and camera on the user’s face, allowing them to take photos and record videos from their point of view. Almost immediately, privacy became one of the biggest controversies surrounding it.

In 2014, women were explicitly raising issues of abuse. Wired reported that women were particularly interested in technology that could detect and block Glass because of concerns about men covertly recording them in nightclubs. “Even though they didn’t know if the device was recording, they felt threatened by its presence,” says Oliver, the creator of the detection device.

Google Glass users were called “Glassholes,” companies banned the device, and Google itself issued etiquette guidelines over complaints about people creepily filming others without permission.

In 2015, consumer glass effectively died. Privacy wasn’t its only problem (its price, awkward appearance, and lack of appealing everyday uses played a role), but by January 2015 Google had stopped selling the consumer Explorer Edition. Glass survived as an enterprise product before Google eventually discontinued the Enterprise Edition in 2023.

Smart glasses didn’t die with Google Glass. They had simply retreated to a laboratory to lick their wounds and wait for the next vital piece of technology that would make them relevant again. That technology was AI. In 2023, AI-powered smart glasses began to emerge, in partnership with leading fashion brands, with Meta leading the way with its Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

This time they looked much more like normal glasses. Meta had also found compelling use cases that Google Glass struggled to offer: its glasses could use AI to answer questions about what you were looking at, give you directions, and translate signs and conversations. But they could also record what, or more importantly, WHOyou were looking without needing that person’s consent.

It’s like women don’t exist.

(Image credit: Shutterstock/Alexander Fedosov)

Frankly, I don’t think Meta should have released them with that ability, but here we are. It’s as if we learned nothing from the Google Glass debacle. Almost as soon as the next generation of smart glasses emerged, they were used to harass women and record them without their consent or knowledge.

Researchers at the University of Sydney have been studying hundreds of social media videos involving smart glasses and found men using them to approach and record women without their knowledge, including in gyms, workplaces and beaches. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner says technology can amplify gendered harms because recording can be almost undetectable, specifically highlighting content from pick-up artists where women are often unaware they are being filmed.

Researchers analyzed 350 publicly available Instagram videos between 2023 and 2026. In a subset of covert POV videos, about 60% of interactions were classified as potential harassment. And in about 43% of the videos, women were subjected to more abusive online comments, sometimes exposing personal information.

These are real victims. CBS interviewed a woman who discovered she had been secretly recorded only after the resulting video went viral and attracted more than 200,000 views. His reaction said it all: “I had nothing to say.”

And France has now opened an investigation into alleged sexual harassment and discreet recording with smart glasses.

I don’t think these products were designed to harm women. That’s almost the point. Too often, the technology industry seems to design products around what the person using them can do, without paying enough attention to the person on the other side of the technology. And when the potential for abuse disproportionately affects women, that’s a particularly serious blind spot. Women have historically been underrepresented in the data and tests used for product design, and designers still describe the male body as the implicit default.

Meta clearly thought about privacy. The glasses have a recording LED specifically designed to alert nearby people when the camera is being used. But if your protection against covert recording is a small light on the front of the glasses (one that people have found ways to hide or disable), is that really enough?

Have you considered what happens when a man carrying a nearly invisible camera approaches a woman who is alone?

Meta Ray-Ban Audio smart glasses. (Image credit: Meta)

Yesterday at Meta Connect, Meta announced a new version of its smart glasses called Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses, which do not have a camera. They were barely mentioned in Zuckerberg’s keynote speech, but I wonder if they were released because of the existential threat to his business posed by the now commonly used moniker “pervert glasses.”

Ray-Ban Meta Audio does not have a camera. You can still listen to music, make calls, translate conversations, and talk to Meta’s AI, but the person sitting in front of you no longer needs to wonder if they’re being secretly recorded.

Meta hasn’t said audio glasses exist due to privacy backlash, and removing the camera inevitably removes some really useful features as well. For the visually impaired in particular, a camera combined with AI can be transformative.

But Ray-Ban Meta Audio proves something important: smart glasses don’t have to contain a camera.

Twelve years ago, women were already warning that placing discreet cameras on people’s faces could allow men to record them without their knowledge, and today researchers are documenting precisely that behavior.

Google Glass users became known as “Glassholes” because people hated that the person they were talking to was recording them. Twelve years later, we have the same discussion about “pervert glasses.”

That’s what makes me angry. This was not an unforeseeable consequence of some revolutionary new technology. We had already done this experiment and realized that they should never have left the lab in the first place.