Meta's Smart Glasses See Everything. Who's Watching the Watchers?

Meta’s latest Ray-Ban smart glasses can now identify people, objects, and text through their built-in camera. The company describes it as a helpful AI evolution. To many privacy advocates, it’s something else entirely: a wearable surveillance device from a firm with a long history of privacy missteps.

The feature, which uses Meta’s powerful AI to process what the wearer sees, has ignited a familiar debate. Critics argue it reintroduces facial recognition through hardware that’s always on, pointed outward, and looks like ordinary sunglasses. A small LED light indicates recording, but it’s easily missed. In 2024, a Harvard student project demonstrated how the glasses, paired with existing tools, could identify strangers and pull up personal data in real time, making theoretical fears tangible.

Meta defends the technology, stating it requires user initiation and is built with privacy reviews. It also points to its partnership with Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica. Yet skeptics see a pattern: introduce a feature, absorb criticism, and make minimal adjustments while keeping core functions. The company’s past is a guide. It paid $650 million to settle an Illinois lawsuit over its previous facial recognition system, which it shut down in 2021 citing societal concerns. Now, a similar capability returns on people’s faces.

Regulation lags behind. Europe’s AI Act restricts real-time biometric ID in public, but its application to consumer products is unclear. The U.S. lacks federal privacy law, relying on a patchwork of state statutes Meta’s lawyers already know well. With Apple, Google, and others racing into AI wearables, the pressure to ship advanced features is intense. For Meta, the strategic bet on smart glasses as the future may simply outweigh the recurring cost of privacy backlash. The public, meanwhile, is left with a new reality: their image may be processed by a glance from a passerby, with little say in the matter.