Meta Glasses, the wildly popular smartglasses designed with Ray-Ban and Oakley, have sold roughly 7 million pairs in 2025 alone, nearly tripling combined sales from 2023 and 2024. But a class-action lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court alleges that Meta engaged in false advertising regarding its privacy assurances, with critics warning that the devices represent a major erosion of personal privacy.
Secret Recordings and LED Tampering
Ryan Clarkson, one of the lawyers bringing the suit, said: “Here we have a leap in the erosion of our privacy rights through this slick technology that big tech promises will enrich our lives.” The lawsuit follows a joint investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, which revealed that Meta was storing recordings made by glasses wearers, contrary to its promises. Kenyan whistleblowers working for the content moderation firm Sama, subcontracted by Meta, reviewed content including videos of people going to the toilet or getting undressed. “I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording,” one contractor told the newspapers.
Meta responded in a statement: “Unless users choose to share media they’ve captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user’s device. 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 this data to protect people’s privacy.” However, Clarkson disagreed: “These products aren’t designed for user control and privacy. In my opinion, they’re designed to maximise profits, and to turn every person who buys one into a Trojan horse of surveillance.”
Fashion-Driven Success and Privacy Concerns
Unlike earlier smartglasses such as Google Glass, which was discontinued in 2015 amid backlash, Meta Glasses have succeeded partly due to their fashion appeal. The Italian corporation EssilorLuxottica, which owns Ray-Ban and Oakley, raked in about $33.8bn in 2025, with roughly 12% of its sales attributed to Ray-Ban. “Ray-Ban is fashionable in a perennial sort of way, not a fleeting sort of way,” said Amy Odell, fashion journalist and author of the Back Row newsletter. “Zuckerberg is right that in order to get these things to sell, they do have to be great glasses first.”
But the glasses have been widely used for exploitation and privacy violations. Online creators—primarily men—have used them to troll boardwalks, college campuses, and streets outside bars, posting interactions without consent. Some have recorded racist videos, entering massage parlors staffed by Asian women and asking for “happy ending” massages, while others have filmed women at the beach. Brek Mettra, a mother of two in Utah, was secretly filmed in her home by a vintage clothing seller using Meta Glasses during a Facebook Marketplace transaction. “I honestly felt extremely violated,” Mettra said, adding that she does not remember seeing an LED light on the glasses.
Facial Recognition and the ACLU Warning
In February, the New York Times reported on an internal Meta Reality Labs document discussing plans to integrate a facial recognition feature called “NameTag” into the smartglasses. The document, dated May 2025, said Meta planned to launch NameTag “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.” Meta responded that NameTag was something it was “still thinking through” and promised to “take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued an open letter to Meta signed by 75 organizations, condemning the feature as “a red line society must not cross.” A June Wired investigation revealed that latent code for NameTag was secretly rolled to Meta smartglasses as early as January 2026, containing architecture for a system that would save faces as biometric “faceprints.” Cooper Quintin, a security researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation Threat Lab, said: “You don’t put code like this in your app unless you’re planning to release that feature very soon.” Meta quietly deleted the inactive code days after it was discovered.
Backlash and Regulatory Gaps
Resistance against the tech is intensifying. Activists plastered London bus stops with anti-glasses guerilla ads depicting Jeffrey Epstein in Ray-Bans with the tagline “glasses for people who don’t do consent.” A professor in Germany built an app called Nearby Glasses that detects when smartglasses are close by. In July, singer Lorde told a crowd at a Madrid music festival: “You don’t know if someone’s wearing sunglasses, or if they’re wearing those fucked-up fucking … can I just say, for the record, fuck the glasses! Don’t get the glasses. Not sexy.”
Meta announced an update to detect when an LED light has been “physically tampered with or destroyed” and stop filming. Ghost Metas, a vendor that disabled the LED, paused his business due to the update, citing “too much risk.” However, other LED disablers told the Guardian they are still working. “The new update hasn’t been impacting the glasses at all,” said one disabler in early August. “I’ve done hundreds and [only] one person is having problems out of hundreds, so I chalk that up to him being a dumbass.”
Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced a crackdown on harassing content, saying: “If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we’ve heard of and seen, then we’re going to take the content down.” Instagram deactivated several accounts, but dozens of pickup artist videos filmed with Meta Glasses remain easily discoverable, with captions such as “POV MILF RIZZ” and “POV COLLEGE RIZZ.” After the Guardian notified Meta, the accounts were deactivated.
Cooper Quintin called for federal privacy legislation: “The argument for federal privacy legislation is stronger every day, and Congress’s seeming commitment to do nothing is also stronger. I think privacy is a human right, and we should expect it. We used to expect it, and I don’t know why we as a society have largely just given up on that.”
