Buckle Up, the Smart Glasses Backlash Is Coming

Smart glasses are having a moment right now. At Meta’s Connect conference last month, which is normally reserved for the latest and greatest advancements in VR and XR hardware, the humble Quest was all but forgotten. In its place were not one, not two, but three new pairs of smart glasses, one of which has a display—a first for Meta. That pivot to smart glasses is also apparently dragging Apple in its wake, with reports that the company is deprioritizing an affordable Vision Pro to focus on its own pair (or pairs plural, actually) of specs.

The message is clear: smart glasses, as a category, have arrived, and with that big, bold promise of head-worn, AI-clad camera-equipped computers, is also impending (inevitable, I would say) backlash. Exhibit A: a new warning from San Francisco University. As reported by SFGate, the Bay Area college recently issued a campus-wide alert of a man wearing Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses and filming students (women, specifically) while asking them “inappropriate dating questions.†Those videos have already found their way to TikTok, Instagram, and the like.

I’m not going to name the account, which San Francisco University, maybe somewhat misguidedly, called out in its warning, but I watched some of the self-described “pickup lines†since they’re still viewable on Instagram, and can confirm they’re indeed inappropriate. Great. If you’re reading this and thinking, “Okay, so what? Social media has been a cesspool since before people were mad about ‘Obamacare.’ Why is this news?†Well, smart glasses, that’s why.

The fact that San Francisco University bothered to call out the way these videos were recorded (citing the specific name of Meta’s smart glasses and everything) says a lot, and in a lot of ways, that specificity is absolutely fair. As ascendant as smart glasses (or AI glasses, as Meta calls them) have been, there’s a chance that a lot of people may not have them on their radar yet. And the thing is, you should know how to identify them. Registering when someone is recording with their phone is pretty obvious (they’re usually holding it in front of their face and pointing it at you), but smart glasses are discreet. Yes, there’s a light on the front of the smart glasses that indicates that someone is taking a video or picture, but you still have to know where to look and what that light means.

What I’m getting at is, because of that lack of knowledge around smart glasses and the inherent discreetness of them, people will, and clearly already are, pushing the boundaries. And this example isn’t even the worst one. Last month, after getting to try Meta’s Ray-Ban Display glasses (the ones with a screen) myself, I proclaimed that “these are the smart glasses you’ve been waiting for.†I stand by that statement, but also what I said subsequently, which is that “it’s time to talk about smart glasses.†Specifically, it’s time to talk about how and when we use them.

Last month, I spoke to Anshel Sag, a principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy who covers the wearable market, about the potential for another Google Glass-scale backlash, and while he says he doesn’t expect the pushback to be quite as severe as in 2013 (Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses do a much better job of blending in), I’m not so sure they’ll slide by unscathed. As desensitized to privacy incursions as people are nowadays, we just haven’t had a real reason to be angry about smart glasses. They’re rising, but they’re just not that popular yet. If they do become as pervasive as companies are speculating, I suspect people will have a lot more examples like the one above that could change their tune. That’s just how outrage works. People don’t care about stuff… until they do.

And sure, this one incident at San Francisco University probably won’t move the needle. But what if there are more? What if someone records you with smart glasses without your knowledge, and it’s your face that ends up on some douchebag’s TikTok account? As much as I want to believe that people can use smart glasses responsibly, I think we all know where this is headed, and while the vast majority of people probably won’t abuse the ability to record their surroundings discreetly, an unfortunate and overrepresented subset just might. If smart glasses really are the next big thing, I’m willing to wager the road of public opinion might get a little bit choppy, and this little campus warning is just the start.