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Joziah was tabling on campus for his peer mentor job at the end of last semester at Florida State University when he noticed something strange happening across the quad: A trio of men, wearing Meta AI glasses, were stopping every young woman who passed by and asking them for their social media contacts.
“I recognized them from TikTok, because they’re kind of big, especially in Miami,” the 19-year-old told me. “ I’m seeing them literally go up to every single girl that’s passed by with them.”
He posted a video of the incident on his TikTok, which quickly garnered 200,000 views. Women who had seen the same event unfold flocked to the comments to share their frustration with the situation. “Literally I was one of their victims,” one user said. Another wrote, “They were so rude to ppl asking them what they were doing too.”
Others shared their fear of the same thing happening to them. “I literally have nightmares about this,” yet another wrote.
This isn’t the first time that Joziah, who asked to have his last name withheld to protect his identity, has had an uncomfortable encounter with the new wearable recording devices. During a football game, a stranger secretly recorded a video of his friend and posted it online, to her shock. When Joziah returned to his hometown over winter break, he went out with some female friends, during which they were recorded on Meta AI glasses and posted on social media without their consent. They learned about it after the clip, a POV video of the creator approaching Joziah’s friends at a bar, went viral.
“It definitely made me feel uneasy,” Joziah recalled of the experience. “I felt uncomfortable watching them go up to all these girls to record their interactions of them hitting on them.”
After pushing billions of dollars into the metaverse, Meta has now found overwhelming demand for its Ray-Ban display glasses, which allow users to take photos, stream content, and talk to an A.I. assistant. Waitlists for the product have surged, and the company’s pivot away from the metaverse and toward smart glasses has become aggressive: Hundreds of Meta workers in the Reality Labs division and virtual games studios were laid off, product rollout was paused to address the supply shortage, and it was reported that Meta and EssilorLuxottica, Ray-Ban’s owner, are discussing possibly doubling production capacity for the A.I.-powered glasses by the end of this year, all in a bid to capitalize on the growing demand as well as get ahead of competitors.
But its usages—specifically its ability to capture photo and video—have raised questions about how the devices will be applied in real life, especially in settings among children and young adults. Issues around academic dishonesty, classroom surveillance, and harassment have been growing in recent years but have been exacerbated as students gain access to the controversial wearable.