GoKawiilTL;DR A Ray-Ban executive has responded with humor to a spoof ad in London that highlights potential privacy issues in Meta’s smart glasses.
Activists have replaced multiple Meta smart glasses ads across London with updated phrasing.
Recent reporting suggests privacy fears with Meta’s next-gen smart glasses could be more heightened.
While Meta and Ray-Ban continue to churn out new AI smart glasses, we’ve seen a wave of privacy-related concerns voiced about these glasses. Meta is definitely aware of at least some of these issues, as evidenced by a recent update. A Ray-Ban executive has now chimed in with a response, and it’s not what many would expect.
For some background, activists in London have replaced Meta smart glasses ads in certain public spaces with ones that look similar to official Meta graphics, but have updated phrasing to reflect some of the privacy fears people have.
In an Instagram story this week, Leonardo Del Vecchio, Ray-Ban President and Chief Strategy Officer at EssilorLuxottica, chimed in with a laughing emoji using an image of one such activist-replaced ad (via The Verge).
Following up on this, the executive posted another story, with the message, “If we can’t laugh about it why should anyone trust us?” While this is clearly a tongue-in-cheek reference to the growing criticism of the camera-equipped smart glasses, we’d wager that not everybody at Meta would be too happy with that response.
The modified ad put up by the activists reads, “The biggest advance in pervert technology since the trenchcoat,” while the rest of the phrasing appears unchanged from Meta’s original ad. These stories posted by the Ray-Ban executive are no longer live, as they disappeared after 24 hours. Meanwhile, another Meta smart glasses ad was modified by activists in London close to the company’s headquarters.
This follows a recent Financial Times report saying that Meta is developing a pair of smart glasses with a “super sensing” feature that can continuously grab audio and imagery from the wearer’s surroundings. More crucially, the company is supposedly considering turning off or disabling the LED indicator altogether during such recording.
However, the FT report pointed out that Meta is considering using only metadata from images and audio recordings rather than raw content. This could bring some respite from criticism, though it will be interesting to see how Meta navigates these challenges with its future smart glasses.
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