You’re under watch! Why Big Tech and privacy experts are divided over smart glasses

ROHIT (NAME CHANGED) was over the moon when he was gifted Meta Ray-Ban glasses on his 24th birthday. His first use of the ₹40,000-a-pair glasses was to record his PoV when he drove around the city on his motorcycle. Maybe his PoV (“Hey Meta, record that moron weaving through traffic”) could be turned into reels on safe driving, traffic violations, or post-monsoon potholes. He couldn’t wait to show off the glasses to his friends when they met after a day. But Anjali (name changed), one of his closest friends, said something that brought Rohit down to earth. She found it creepy that anyone wearing the specs could record women in public spaces, feeding into a problem that already exists. One friend defended Rohit, “Well, it’s not my fault if people walk into my frame. I would love to have a pair.” Unlike pen cameras or even smartphone cameras in shirt pockets, which rarely get what you want, a pair of Meta Ray-Ban glasses is the ultimate in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) with a tiny video camera positioned on the frame. The AI bit enables you to ask questions about what you are looking at. (“Hey Meta, is that a Monet or a Renoir?” you mumble, before trying to impress your artsy date at the gallery.) A media investigation published in January found dozens of male influencers across TikTok and Instagram using Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses to secretly film women for exactly this kind of content. One woman, aged 21, was on her lunch break from a London store when a man struck up a conversation and filmed her without her knowledge. The footage went up on TikTok, hit 1.3 million views, and included her phone number, after which she was flooded with messages and calls. The man’s use-case? Giving men tips on how to approach women. Another woman was filmed on a beach during a conversation in which she shared details about her employer and family that she would never have disclosed had she known a camera was running. Scroll Instagram for “Meta glasses”, and you'll find a wave of creators calling the device “surveillance tech” and, less politely, “pervert glasses”. The nickname reflects a phenomenon called “rizz-camming”: using smart glasses to secretly record themselves flirting with strangers and then posting the footage. One woman thus filmed on the subway was so mad that she smashed the man’s Meta Ray-Bans after she realised what was happening. In July 2026, India’s Parliament issued an advisory to its members to refrain from using smart glasses, smartphones and pen cameras in any way that “compromises security, privileges and privacy of members in any part of the Parliament Estate.” Yet, none of this is slowing sales. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses have sold more than 7 million pairs and command roughly 82% of the global smart glasses market. (Meta isn’t racing alone. Google is preparing Android XR smart glasses with hardware partners, including Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Snap has unveiled its next-generation AR Spectacles, and Apple is rumoured to be entering the category as well.) In June, Meta launched its first fully in-house smart glasses line, still manufactured with EssilorLuxottica but no longer carrying the Ray-Ban name, designed in collaboration with Kylie Jenner. The Starfire, her edition, starts at $399, a hundred dollars more than the standard Adventurer and Fury models. It has a split existence, being publicly labelled predatory hardware in one feed and glamorous must-have tech in the next. India, an unlikely fast mover According to Counterpoint Research’s market tracker, global shipments of smart glasses grew 210% year-on-year in Q1 2026, and India, of all markets, is outpacing that. “India is emerging as one of the world’s fastest-growing markets, with shipments surging 37x YoY and 112% QoQ in Q1 2026,” says Flora Tang, principal analyst at Counterpoint Research. “However, the Indian market remains at an early stage, accounting for only around 6% of global smart glasses shipments.” Meta is the market leader with a 38% share, followed by Fire-Boltt and Titan, including Fastrack. Tang expects the category to keep accelerating, “supported by marketing investments from global brands and growing ecosystem participation from local firms such as Lenskart, Reliance and Sarvam AI.” But she is equally clear that privacy concerns will decide what happens next. “OEMs will need to continue strengthening privacy safeguards while working with regulators to establish clear industry standards,” she says. Race to your face The “why now” behind this convergence of companies is worth looking at, because it seems not to be really about glasses. Aloknath De, founder and CEO of TechCrafter International and former corporate vice president at Samsung Electronics, doesn’t read this as a platform shift the way smartphones were. “Smartphones brought together the internet, communication, apps, and camera into one device, creating a new computing platform,” he says. “But smart glasses, the likes of smartwatches and smart rings, are extensions of the wearable ecosystem.” What makes glasses distinct, he says, is that they share the user’s field of view. “Smart glasses can see the user’s environment and provide exact information needed at that moment. It reduces the friction between the users and digital services,” he says. On why every major firm is suddenly building the same device, De draws a sharper line between motives. “Meta and Google see smart glasses as an AI-native platform. Search, advertising, and recommendations become powerful when the device knows what the user is looking for.” Apple and Samsung face a different calculation. Says De, “Apple and Samsung have built massive smartphone businesses. So, if a new computing platform comes and they are not in that business, then they might lose control to others, in the same way Microsoft underestimated smartphones initially and paid the price.” His larger point is about ecosystem control, not any single device. “Whoever owns the operating system and ecosystem of smart glasses captures long-term value, just as Microsoft did with PCs and Apple and Google did with smartphones.” The lawsuits that followed The backlash isn’t limited to social media outrage or café debates. The issue is now in a U.S. federal court. In March 2026, plaintiffs Gina Bartone and Mateo Canu filed a class action against Meta and Luxottica in the Northern District of California, alleging that the companies paired privacy-centric marketing claims like “designed for privacy, controlled by you” with insufficiently clear disclosures about transmission, cloud processing and human review of captured media. The suit draws on a February 2026 investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, which found that workers at Sama, a Kenya-based subcontractor, were reviewing video clips captured through Meta’s AI glasses as part of an AI training pipeline, footage that reportedly included bathroom visits, nudity, sexual activity and other private moments inside users’ homes. Meta’s response has been to draw a sharp distinction, saying that media captured by the glasses stays on the user’s device unless the user chooses to share it with Meta or others, and that when content is shared with Meta AI, contractors sometimes review it to improve the product while filtering out identifying information. Meta has also pointed to its capture LED, a white light that blinks whenever content is being recorded, as proof the device was built with bystanders in mind. Meta’s own FAQ page states plainly, “The capture LED has no off switch,” and that from its second generation of glasses onward, “the camera is automatically disabled if we detect that the capture LED has been blocked.” Yet, a simple YouTube search shows videos demonstrating how the light can be covered or disabled. Why this hits women first Pratishtha Arora, CEO of Social & Media Matters, a not-for-profit digital rights and advocacy organisation, starts with what’s actually different about this device compared with a smartphone. “A smartphone has to be lifted and pointed; women can see it and react,” she says. “We should understand that smart glasses will remove that entirely; there will be no gesture to notice, no chance to object or stop it. That loss of visibility is itself the harm.” She connects that directly to how such cases get investigated. “This will likely raise Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) cases while making evidence far harder to gather. Most cases today rely on some digital trace a survivor can point to; here, a woman may only learn she was filmed once footage surfaces elsewhere, weeks later.” She is careful not to frame this as strictly a male-on-female problem, noting that “the same covert capability enables abuse across any gender, and our frameworks need to reflect that,” but the fact is that women already report feeling unsafe online. “Smart glasses strip away the one safeguard — visibility — they had left,” she says. On the legal gap, Arora locates exactly where the DPDP Act’s architecture breaks down for a bystander. “DPDP was written around a data principal-data fiduciary relationship: you sign up, you consent, and you get rights to access, correct, or erase,” she says. “Now, if a bystander is filmed on the street, that person has none of that relationship. Erasure requests need an account or formal link to the platform doing the processing, which a filmed stranger simply doesn’t have.” Her conclusion is blunt: “The person with the least power in the transaction, the one who didn’t choose to be recorded, has the fewest legal tools to do anything about it.” India hasn’t yet seen a case at the scale of the global covert-filming pattern, but Arora treats the silence as borrowed time. “I’d treat that as a head start, not a reassurance,” she says. Her prescription runs across three fronts moving together, with policy through a clear consent and disclosure standard for public-space recording by wearables, plus faster criminal recourse. Second, the platform or the glasses should have persistent, visible recording indicators, not a blink, and a real bystander complaint channel that doesn’t assume you have an account with the company. Third, public awareness, which she argues has to move first because “law and platform design will always lag the technology.” Where India’s law actually stands Supratim Chakraborty, partner at Khaitan & Co, reads the compliance side of the same gap. On which law governs a stranger being recorded by someone else’s smart glasses, he says, “Where the recording involves identifiable individuals, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) 2023 may apply. However, the DPDPA exempts processing of personal data under certain circumstances, including for personal or domestic purposes.” According to him, the applicability of this exemption will require a case-by-case assessment depending on the context of use of such smart glasses. He thinks the more interesting question is structural: whether laws “designed around conventional cameras and smartphones adequately address always-on, AI-enabled wearable devices that can collect, analyse, and contextualise information in the background.” On bystander consent, he is direct. “Obtaining consent from every incidental bystander in a public environment is unlikely to be viable or practical for users of smart glasses.” That leaves an open question of who is responsible when something goes wrong, and Chakraborty is clear that it isn’t a single party. “Responsibility is unlikely to rest with a single participant,” he says. “A device manufacturer may determine certain processing purposes associated with the hardware, an operating system provider or AI service provider may determine purposes relating to AI functionality, while individual application developers may independently determine purposes for their own services. The individual user may also assume legal responsibility in certain circumstances, particularly where they independently decide how captured information is collected, shared, or used.” What manufacturers say Pavan Gandhi, co-founder of Kaze.AI, which is collaborating with Sarvam for its smart glasses venture, sees AI-powered eyewear as part of a much larger shift in computing. “There is a tectonic shift in technology with LLM and Gen AI at its forefront,” he says, adding that the company believes it can “bring leading innovation from India.” On privacy, Gandhi says Sarvam is working with enterprise customers to address data protection requirements under the DPDP Act. “Our system will not start working until there is explicit consent from the parties involved.” On data processing, his opinion is that the architecture would vary depending on the use case, balancing efficiency, cost and processing requirements. Rohit still has his glasses. He still records rides. But what he no longer does is wear them in crowds.

You’re under watch! Why Big Tech and privacy experts are divided over smart glasses

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