Meta smart glasses, whether they carry the Ray-Ban badge or not, are facing a major trust and branding crisis. Sentiment towards glasses with cameras built in has shifted from mild distrust to a growing belief that they are utterly creepy. That shift is not happening because of the technology itself. It is happening because of how people are using it, and how easily the one privacy feature Meta built into the hardware can be defeated.
The YouTuber that got me thinking
I was recently watching a YouTuber called Spanian. He landed on my autoplay and I had never seen nor heard of the guy before, which is maybe shocking given he has over a million subscribers. Because I used to live in the Netherlands, his Amsterdam travel vlog stayed on in the background.
To be honest, he wasn’t my cup of tea. But then he started talking about his Meta glasses and how much he loves them. They unlocked shooting content he would normally miss. He talked about visiting Macau and not being able to film inside casinos, and how much he would love to go back with his Meta glasses on. In Amsterdam, he wore them liberally in coffeeshops, places where filming is usually forbidden or at the very least deeply frowned upon. In fairness to him, he didn’t film in the Red Light District. Still, I was left with one massive question. Does he have the indicator light blocked?
In one coffeeshop, a staff member helped him pick out some weed, offered him tea and showed him where to sit. He filmed all of it on his glasses, glancing around while nobody seemed to take the slightest notice. That raised my suspicions, though I should be clear that suspicions are all they are in Spanian’s case. The simpler explanation might just be that most people still have no idea what that little white light means, or that there’s a camera sitting on his face at all. I mean given where they are, it would make sense they’re not totally aware of what’s going on. Honestly, I’m not sure which explanation is worse.
The indicator light is being modded into oblivion
There is no shortage of cases where Meta glasses have unquestionably been modified to kill the indicator light. Meta’s position has always been that the capture LED pulses whenever the glasses record, and the software refuses to record at all if it detects the light being covered. Stick a bit of black tape over it and the camera locks you out until it’s cleared. Tampering with any of this breaches Meta’s terms of service, and the company says it aggressively targets anyone advertising tampering tools, removing thousands of violating ads and Marketplace listings while pursuing legal action where appropriate.
That all sounds reassuring until you realise a cottage industry of aftermarket modders has sprung up to make the light useless anyway. Journalist Joanna Stern went undercover on this recently, and the wider reporting on the Ray-Ban Meta LED mod found ads for the service across 30 US states, with one modder claiming eight or nine enquiries in a single day. Just today I saw a TikTok of a Meta glasses owner meeting a modder in a carpark. Glasses handed over, and ten minutes later the indicator light was gone. Not an isolated incident at all.
From what I’ve seen, the mod itself is worryingly simple and takes somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes. The glass housing over the LED gets drilled through, the light itself is destroyed, then resin gets poured in and cured under a UV lamp. The finished job is near impossible to spot from a few feet away. Simple as. Crucially, because the LED circuitry is severed completely rather than just covered, the software never detects a blockage. The camera records away happily, which tells you there was never a hard hardware connection between that light functioning and the camera capturing. The whole privacy feature was a promise, not a mechanism.
Sentiment has shifted, and I say that as a fan
I have a pair of second generation Meta glasses and, as a content creator, they are incredible. They offer genuinely high quality capture in an extremely natural way. I’ve shot some really memorable moments on mine, not least a clip of Rio Ngumoha scoring a last minute winner for Liverpool away at Newcastle last year. Nothing else I own could have caught that moment the way the glasses did.
Anyone who has been to a gig can see why a camera in your sunglasses can be a good thing. It’s a few less phones in your eye line. You can record memories and live in the moment. That’s to be celebrated.
But scrolling through social media recently, I saw Corey Taylor, lead singer of Slipknot, at a signing with a sign up saying no Meta glasses. When metal frontmen are putting up signage about your wearable, the vibe has well and truly turned. Sentiment has shifted, partially because of the poor etiquette of some users and partially because modders have rendered the indicator light near useless as a privacy feature. The public can no longer assume an unlit pair of smart glasses isn’t recording, and that assumption was the entire social contract these things were sold on.
Meta’s real problem is only starting
Meta is facing a real mess here. Sales of the glasses keep climbing, but so too are the scenarios where wearing them will be restricted. Gigs, signings, casinos, changing rooms, coffeeshops. Expect the list to grow. Lawmakers are already circling too, with a bill introduced in Pennsylvania that would make it illegal to sell or record with smart glasses that don’t have a functioning indicator light. Honestly this should be the bare minimum. Once legislation starts, it rarely stops at one state, and Europe tends not to be shy on this front either.
I for one am shocked that Meta didn’t have privacy front and centre of the hardware design, given the company’s stellar history in that department. Read the sarcasm if you like. The fix isn’t complicated to describe, even if it’s harder to engineer. The camera should be physically incapable of recording without the light working. Until that’s true, every pair of Meta glasses in the wild, modded or not, carries the suspicion of the worst ones. And that suspicion, more than any modder in a carpark, is what will kill the product.
But realistically, the damage now might already be done. The thin trust people had in the likes of the indicator light is already gone and now I wonder if it will ever come back. Add to that the fact Meta is not the only glasses manufacturer and the news gets worse. Welcome to the Glasshole 2.0 era.
