We’re All Being Recorded. What Do We Do About It?

Galaxy Brain

Host Charlie Worzel and reporter Mia Sato discuss the rise of Meta's smart glasses and their role in eroding public privacy. The episode exp

Key takeaways

• Meta smart glasses have achieved commercial success despite significant privacy controversies.
• Internal leaks suggest Meta has explored adding facial recognition features, codenamed 'NameTag'.

Main topics

• Meta smart glasses
• Privacy erosion

Notable quotes

Meta is kind of like perpetually getting in its own way.

Conclusion

The episode highlights a fundamental breaking of the social contract a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I think meta is kind of like perpetually getting in its own way. You know, it just can't seem to figure out how to have people soften up to the company. And that's why you see this rollout just being like a complete disaster, really. Speaker 2 (0:19) Hey there, quick question. Is it a bad thing if people start referring to your AI-powered face computer as Herbert glasses? I'm Charlie Worzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we're talking about meta smart glasses and the slow and steady erosion of our public expectation of privacy and whether or not Americans are actually mounting a genuine backlash to the surveillance state. Big tech companies have been trying to crack spatial and face computing for a long time. Arguably, the most notable example was Google Glass, a Star Trek-looking headset that was, technologically speaking, pretty impressive, but cost about $1,500 and mostly just repulsed people. The prototype program for Google Glass fizzled out, but not before I tried a pair 13 years ago visiting Google's headquarters one day. Google Glass may have failed, but it did produce the most cursed photograph that exists of me. Plenty have tried to make smart glasses a thing. Snapchat released its first version of its Spectacles in 2016, but the product just didn't really catch on. And that's in part because the technology wasn't quite there, or it was wonky or cumbersome, or there wasn't enough memory or storage. And then, in 2021, Meta released its smart glasses. Its first collaboration was with the sunglasses company Ray-Ban. And Meta's proposition here was that the glasses looked a lot more like actual glasses. Initially, the camera could record about 30 to 60 seconds of video, and the glasses let people listen to music or take calls. And the videos that were captured could be shared across Meta's platforms like Instagram and Facebook using a special story set. And from the launch, two things happened. First, the glasses caused a somewhat expected controversy around privacy, like all these devices tend to do. But second, the glasses were successful. People bought them. And for creators especially, the product was something between a gimmick and a genuinely new, useful camera tool. And so Meta decided to invest in them. In 2023, they infused the glasses with AI software that allowed the glasses to describe what a user was looking at in their field of vision. Very fancy. And all the while, Meta has tried to dodge controversy around whether the glasses will eventually deploy facial recognition technology and over what data the company retains or uses to train its large language models. And for a while, the glasses were mostly just this, a curio used by creators and mostly despised by privacy advocates. All that has really changed over the past year. In 2026, the glasses had become more popular and more prevalent, and there have been more examples of people abusing them. People filming women on the street for pickup artist videos. Strange black markets popping up to hack cameras so that the recording light doesn't show. And as more people wear the glasses, more people are concerned that they're being surreptitiously recorded at sporting events, at dinner parties, at the store, maybe even being recorded while having sex. And this negative reaction, which started on social media, has spread thoroughly throughout popular culture. This summer, the late night host Jimmy Kimmel referred to Meta's device as, quote, pervert glasses. And Speaker 1 (3:27) yet the glasses keep Speaker 2 (3:28) selling. Speaker 1 (3:29) Celebrities Speaker 2 (3:30) are attaching their names and likenesses to them, and the abuses continue to pile up. And so it all seems like we are headed towards a genuine reckoning for both meta, but all of us, really. What is really going on here? Are these glasses here to stay? Are they impacting the lives of regular people, people who are just trying to go about their days and do their jobs? What happens to all of us in a world where we're always being recorded? And crucially... What can you do if someone comes up to you on the street wearing a pair of these glasses? Mia Sato is a reporter and features writer at The Verge who has reported extensively on the ways that these glasses are upending people's lives. What I like about her work is that it's always situated on the ways that emerging technologies affect regular people. And so she joins me now to talk about all of this. Speaker 2 (4:24) Mia, welcome to Galaxy Brain. Thank Speaker 1 (4:27) you for having me. Speaker 2 (4:28) So before we get into the current state of the metaglasses, the cameras everywhere, the panopticon world that we live in, I wanted to walk just a little bit through the history of these glasses with you, kind of get your reaction to some of it. And this all starts on my birthday, September 9th, 2021. Facebook launches the glasses. Did you expect... them to take off. I mean, this is, I'll just, I'll put myself out there. I, at every moment with a, like a facial wearable technology, like a camera on your face kind of situation, I always expect it to fail. I mean, everyone was very excited about Apple's Vision Pro a couple of years ago. And I was just like, I don't think we're ready for it yet. But like, did you expect this to be an actual product category for meta that was going to work? Or did you sort of feel like it was destined for the same? you know, dustbin? Speaker 1 (5:19) I think at the time, and what I still believe is that this will not be adopted in the way that Meta says it will or hopes it will. And to me, the most straightforward reason is that not everyone wants to wear glasses. Like sometimes people don't want something on their face. And this is kind of, you know, the thing that I couldn't get over with the Vision Pro and other headsets and stuff is like, that's a really big barrier to entry. Having something on your head, having something on your face that covers, you know, your hair, your makeup. Like, there are all sorts of weird human things that is just like a barrier, literally. I've Speaker 2 (5:56) picked out a couple of events here that I think are related in the history of these classes. And the first is, in 2024, Meta confirmed a tech crunch that images and videos shared with Meta AI. For an example, the look and ask features may be used to improve Meta's AI model. So these glasses, the inputs, outputs are going to be used to train artificial intelligence systems. The second is in April 2025, in an email to glasses owners, Meta said that AI features, including Meta with a camera, would be on by default and that voice recordings would be stored by default with no opt-out. This year, confusingly, Meta tells The Guardian that, quote, unless users choose to share media they've captured with Meta or others, that media stays on the user's device. When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people's experience. We take steps to filter this data to protect people's privacy, end quote. These feel like important revelations to me. Because so much of the concern about these glasses is that they'll be used to surveil others. But isn't it just as important of a story that how much these glasses are surveilling their owners? Speaker 1 (7:19) Totally. You are giving up an incredible amount of information about yourself and what you do every day simply by maybe wearing these glasses. And I think, you know, there's obviously the fears around how... other people who are sort of unwitting participants in your glasses journey, like how their information is being captured and stored and used later. But it's kind of incredible to me that with this sort of back and forth flip-flopping, people, more glasses users aren't asking, like, I just wore them all day. Like, what do you know about my life? A huge, for me, reason why I... I personally wouldn't use these glasses because there are some things that I actually would prefer Meta not know about me. They know a lot already, but Speaker 2 (8:07) there's some stuff that I would like to keep for myself. This brings us to earlier this year, February 2026. The New York Times publishes a report that I think casts the company as poor a light as I've ever seen an internal memo cast a tech company. The story alleges that Meta is talking internally about adding facial recognition back into its glasses. And The Times gets a hold of a document from May of the previous year, which described these plans to release NameTag, which is its codename for its facial recognition product. They plan to release it to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company didn't actually do. But this was part of what they were going to do. And there's a line from the internal memo that made news, which is, quote, We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns. I just want first to get your reaction to that. Like, what are people supposed to make of that? That this company that is making this stuff is hoping that people will be busy enough attending to the other horrors of the world so as not to focus on the actual product that they're rolling out. Like, tell me what to make of that. Speaker 1 (9:21) We have so many gadgets and tech that is beyond what people could have imagined we had, right? We have computers in our phones, and that is amazing. And I think we kind of skip over the fact that the idea of glasses that can record people around you and maybe even recognize who they are is literally like the spy glasses of the kids' movies that I watched growing up, right? That's like spy kids would love to have... Glasses that can record your whole day and you can ask them later what you saw as meta, like some leaked plans have suggested meta is working on or recognize the people around you. So just the capability is so sci-fi, futuristic spyware that I just want to make sure we take a moment to be like, this is really crazy technology that we're talking about. And the point about, you know, accessibility. the role of glasses in disability spaces. Like, this is something that Meta has harped on quite a bit. And it's true, and my colleagues at The Verge have written great, done great work about how these tools can be, you know, used for accessibility purposes. But there's a pattern of Meta kind of putting them into these spaces. and almost trying to deflect from the larger privacy and surveillance concerns that people have, including people who are disabled. Like, disabled people also deserve privacy. So there's a real, like, push and pull between, like, what can these glasses be used for and what settings could we use, could we put them in versus, like... What is the worst version of how someone could use this technology, which is always going to be the thing that the public thinks about. It's like, what danger does this pose to me, to my kids, to my life day to day? And right now, a lot of the news stories that we're reading and the story that I wrote was about some of the people who are doing the worst version of that. So it's sort of like a shadow cast over meta and this new line item that they hope will become a major part of how people interact with their company. Speaker 2 (11:27) And this, to me, this idea of we want to we want to launch during a period of time when people would like, especially like, you know, civil liberties groups aren't going to be paying as much attention about this. It's to say nothing of like taking advantage of horrific world events or political events. It suggests that they know this is creeping people out to some degree. That to me feels like they have lost, in that sense, the cover of saying, no, no, no, we think this is just going to be a great thing for the world. Everyone should want these, and they're going to empower people to do great things. It's Speaker 1 (12:07) also a reality that meta... is feeling the heat for these glasses. Like, they are synonymous, and some people sort of have called them pervert glasses or glasses for creeps, right? Like, the rollout is so messy. It's such, it's really just not a good look. And I think Meta, you know, just even zooming out from the hardware stuff, Meta has lost a lot of public trust over the last decade and over the last, like, five years. And it's facing all of these battles, not just that people think the glasses are creepy, but that it's facing all these court cases and it's being sued by parents