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A TikTok video shows a teenage girl walking through the front doors of a large high school. It’s filmed point-of-view style using smart glasses, and a hashtag in the caption reads “#metaglasses.”
“Excuse me, could I get your Roblox?” the adolescent boy wearing the head-mounted camera badgers the girl.
“No,” she responds, glaring unhappily as she quickly moves past him. She keeps walking, but the boy filming follows her.
“Come back! Pleasepleaseplease!” he wheedles as the girl continues to walk away. “Your LinkedIn, at least? Your LinkedIn, please? Your Reddit? Come on, your Reddit? I know you have a Reddit!”
The girl, clearly uncomfortable with the unwanted attention, doesn’t turn around.
The video has the distinctive style of the invasive “rizzcam” and other “POV” videos in which self-styled “pickup artists” and other online creators use smart glasses to record themselves harassing women at malls and boardwalks or pestering employees at their place of work for content. But the people in this video aren’t adults. Everyone in the clip — the girl, the boy filming, and hallway passersby — is a teenage student.
A Futurism review found large numbers of videos recorded at middle and high schools using smart glasses — almost always Meta’s AI Glasses, designed in partnership with the eyewear titan Ray-Ban — and shared to social media platforms TikTok and Instagram. Recordings take place in school hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms, and feature interactions with other students as well as with staff and faculty.
Much of the behavior on display is plainly harassment and bullying, often filmed without the subjects’ knowledge or consent and uploaded online to humiliate them further. Strikingly, every single one of the many smart glasses videos we found were captured by teen boys — and their bad behavior was overwhelmingly directed at girls.
In some clips, neither the boys’ classmates nor teachers appear to realize they’re being recorded. In others, they do — and express frustration and distress, making it clear that they don’t want to be in the video. (We’re not linking directly to any of this content due to concern for the privacy of the many minors who appear in the footage.)
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