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Meta’s camera-equipped AI glasses have quickly turned into a massively controversial accessory.
They’ve been used by all kinds of charlatans and brutes to harass strangers, from pickup artist “manfluencers” filming themselves approaching strangers to juvenile pranksters recording members of the public without their consent.
Consequently, the backlash to Meta’s “pervert glasses” has reached a fever pitch, with owners choosing to leave them at home to avoid embarrassment.
Sensing a threat to its bottom line, Meta has slowly started treating the issue with some degree of seriousness. Now it’s vowing to crack down on creeps misusing its allegedly “privacy-first” glasses, as Business Insider reports: in an Instagram story, the platform’s head Adam Mosseri said the company would ban any user uploading videos showing them harassing others.
“If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we’ve heard of and seen, then we’re going to take the content down,” he said. “We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we’re trying to fight that every way we can.”
According to BI, two large pickup artist accounts on Instagram have been deactivated. A spokesperson later confirmed that the accounts were banned for posting harassing content filmed with the glasses.
Take it all together, and it’s one of the clearest indications yet that Meta is struggling to control the narrative about how its flashy glasses are being used by the public. The eyewear’s concealed cameras, in particular, have sparked a thorny debate over privacy and consent. It remains trivially easy to record somebody in public with them without their knowledge.
On its website, Meta advises users to “turn off your glasses in sensitive spaces like the doctor’s office, locker room, public bathroom, school or place of worship.”
“Obey the law,” the website reads. “Don’t use your glasses to engage in harmful activities like harassment, infringing on privacy rights, or capturing sensitive information like pin codes.”
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