GoKawiilJoy Hui Lin, a book researcher living in Paris, was walking through the trendy Le Marais district last summer when two male university students chased her down to ask about her outfit.
Lin wasn’t surprised. It’s common for Instagram accounts to do street photography in the area and she prides herself on her fashion—that day, she was in “a nice sundress and a very big stylish hat,” she tells WIRED.
“It was all very cute until the end of the conversation, when one of them was like, ‘So, these glasses have been recording this whole time.’” She clocked the device, a black-framed pair of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses (commonly referred to as Meta Ray-Bans), which can record video from the user’s point of view.
Lin was taken aback at the young man not asking permission to film her—especially as he was now inquiring whether he could share the video online. It felt like a “violation,” Lin says. The man in the glasses, she adds, “didn't seem to understand that it could be very off-putting to record someone first without asking.”
This type of encounter is becoming more common, to judge by a proliferation of social media accounts in which content creators use smart glasses to record their public interactions for huge audiences. These conversations aren’t always so innocent as an interview about personal style. Instagram Reels and TikTok are infested with footage of users pulling juvenile pranks on retail workers, for example. And many of the top influencers in the Meta Ray-Ban scene, including Sayed Kaghazi (@itspolokid) and Cameron John (@rizzzcam), who have more than 3 million Instagram followers combined, are men prowling sun-soaked beaches and corridors of city nightlife so they can showcase their attempts to pick up women.
Their unsolicited, occasionally pestering flirtations in public spaces with these women have helped to inspire a contemptuous nickname for the Meta specs: “pervert glasses.” (Neither Kaghazi nor John returned a request for comment.)
Like their forerunner, the doomed Google Glass, the Meta Ray-Ban (and Oakley) glasses, which range in price from $299 to $499, are up against a privacy-minded backlash. But the picture today is complicated by a few factors. For a start, Meta’s glasses automatically send footage to the company, which has overseas contract workers review it, as an investigation by Swedish newspapers found. The videos described in that February report included sensitive content people may not have realized they were recording and uploading, such as nudity, sex, and bathroom activities. This has already prompted an ongoing consumer protection lawsuit.
On top of that, Meta’s glasses are equipped with potentially invasive AI services—already, the Meta app that runs on the device can collect your videos for further AI training—that it plans to continue expanding. They are far more popular than any other smart glasses to date, with Meta selling 8 million pairs in 2025 alone, and are rather inconspicuous compared to their nakedly futuristic predecessors.
Lin told the man who filmed her that she didn’t want the footage to appear on his Instagram account, and later confirmed he hadn’t uploaded it. But the “unsettling” experience, she says, led her to reflect on how most people don’t necessarily recognize that a stranger talking to them face-to-face could be quietly capturing their likeness. It has made her a little warier of anyone in glasses who approaches her on the street.
Lin is hopeful, however, that more nations will begin to follow Denmark’s lead as it pioneers individual copyright protections over one’s own likeness, a move that guards against unwanted AI deepfakes and possibly invasive recording, including with smart glasses.