Smart glasses keep getting smarter, but their reputation appears to be getting worse. At Engadget, Karissa Bell writes that online criticism of the devices critics have dubbed "pervert glasses" seems to have intensified, particularly after Meta released a new lineup that raised concerns about facial recognition technology and privacy. The Engadget piece includes interviews with several photographers, creators, and others who like the tech capabilities of Meta's smart glasses but won't wear them because of the public perception surrounding the devices.
A male videographer, Christian Eisenbarth, tells the outlet he won't don the glasses in public "mainly due to being afraid of being labeled a creep." A woman interviewed sounds a similar theme: "A lot of men and their behaviors have ruined this product." Earlier this year, Wired published a lengthy report headlined "The Rise of the Ray-Ban Meta Creep" that chronicled the problem. Think men filming themselves trying to pick up women at clubs, on streets, or at the beach, then posting the footage online. Another popular theme involved teens pranking retail workers.
Meta, which has sold millions of the glasses, just pushed a mandatory update that disables the camera if the LED recording light is disabled, a hack that some users were deploying so their subjects wouldn't know they were being filmed. That Meta made the fix "is the clearest acknowledgement by the company of the privacy-related backlash," writes Bell.
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