According to Ray-Ban manufacturer EssilorLuxottica, sales of Meta AI glasses tripled in 2025 with over seven million pairs sold.
Supported by major marketing campaigns featuring celebrities such as Kylian Mbappé and Kylie Jenner showcasing the wearable technology, Meta appears to have struck gold in a wearable technology market that has struggled to gain widespread consumer adoption over the past decade. Meta is now estimated to make up more than 80% of all AI or smart glasses sales, according to the BBC.
Meta AI glasses are compatible with prescription lenses, meaning they can be worn as everyday eyewear while providing a wide range of built-in smart features.
Controversially, they provide a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera that allows users to capture photos and videos hands-free, raising major questions around privacy and consent.
Reports have emerged of women being harassed and filmed in public using the glasses without their consent, with footage of some encounters later posted on social media and attracting hundreds of thousands of views. The resulting backlash has seen some critics nickname the devices “pervert glasses.”
Channel 4 News highlighted the case of 17-year-old Beth Knight, who was approached while waiting for a train and secretly recorded by an adult man using the glasses. The footage was later uploaded to his social media account, where he described himself as a “pick-up artist.”
Similar concerns have emerged in Ireland. Cork musician and recent MTU graduate Willow Esteve told the Irish Examiner that she was filmed without her knowledge while working in a city-centre shop by content creator Vladyslav Morhulets, a student of MTU who is known online as Rendy Vlad.
Esteve said she noticed no recording light on the glasses and only discovered the footage after it appeared on social media the following day. She described the experience as a “major violation” of her privacy and called for stronger measures around the technology.
The Irish Examiner also reports that the same content creator used Meta glasses to record a young woman experiencing a medical emergency while being treated by paramedics on a street in Cork City, before uploading the footage to TikTok.
According to TikTok, the video was removed for violating the platform’s rules on sexual abuse.
These cases have also drawn attention from Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which has questioned whether the glasses’ LED recording indicator provides sufficient notice to those being filmed.
This misuse of smart glasses is also attracting legal scrutiny internationally, and the controversy has now begun to move beyond public backlash and into the courts.
Paris prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into suspected sexual harassment involving smart glasses, with the city’s cybercrime unit testing the devices to better understand their potential use in criminal offences.
France’s data protection authority has also reported receiving complaints about their use in workplaces, as questions grow over whether existing privacy laws are equipped to deal with increasingly discreet wearable cameras.
Concerns over covert recording have been heightened by services offering to disable the glasses’ built-in privacy feature.
The Guardian reported on Ghost Metas, an American business specialising in disabling the white LED designed to alert bystanders when Meta glasses are recording. The business owner claimed to have modified around 100 pairs and told the newspaper that one customer had expressed their intention to secretly record women in strip clubs.
Meta has responded by strengthening safeguards against this type of tampering.
Beginning with its second-generation glasses, the company introduced technology that automatically disables the camera when the recording LED is blocked and has since expanded the feature to detect when the light has been physically altered or destroyed.
Meta has also said it will remove advertisements and listings for tampering services and take action against accounts offering them.
But what about concerns for the user? Privacy concerns are not limited to those caught on camera.
Questions have also been raised about how the personal data of people wearing the glasses is processed when using Meta’s AI features.
A joint investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten found that workers at Sama, a Meta subcontractor in Nairobi, Kenya, were tasked with reviewing and annotating material used in the company’s AI systems.
One worker told the newspapers: “We see everything – from living rooms to naked bodies. Meta has that type of content in its databases.”
Employees described encountering highly sensitive footage, including people undressing, having sex and using bathrooms, as well as images in which bank cards were visible.
The investigation found that for the glasses’ AI features to work, some user data must be sent to and processed by Meta’s systems.
The findings have since been cited in legal action against Meta.
More than 70 people who bought, used or were recorded by the glasses are suing the company in a proposed class-action lawsuit in California. Citing the Swedish investigation, the plaintiffs allege that intimate and sensitive footage was exposed to overseas contractors reviewing and labelling data for Meta’s AI systems..
Responding to the allegations, a spokesperson for Meta said “If you use Meta AI, we may review that data to help improve our products and people’s experiences.”
A separate proposed class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of families in Illinois and California raises further concerns over facial recognition.
The lawsuit alleges that Meta used images uploaded to Facebook and Instagram to create biometric information for “NameTag,” an unreleased facial-recognition feature developed for its smart glasses. The existence of the technology was first revealed by WIRED in June 2026, after an analysis of code within Meta’s AI app found a system designed to recognise faces captured by the glasses.
The plaintiffs allege that Meta collected and stored biometric information derived from social media images without users’ consent.
Meta denies the allegations, stating that NameTag has not been released and that no final decision has been made on whether the feature will become available. The company also says it is not building a universal face database.
On 24 September, Meta unveiled Ray-Ban Meta Audio, a new camera-free version of its AI glasses offering many of the original audio features, including phone calls and music, without the built-in camera that has fuelled the outlined privacy concerns surrounding the technology.
In an interview with NBC chief tech analyst Joanna Stern, Zuckerberg denied that the recent privacy backlash influenced Meta’s decision to launch the camera-free design. Stern asked whether the audio-only glasses were a response to consumers who felt uncomfortable with cameras being worn on people’s faces.
Whether removing the camera will ease privacy concerns, while still convincing consumers to embrace the technology, may prove to be the real test of their appeal.
