GoKawiilIn August, Toru Hinkle was stocking shelves at their job at Target when they noticed two customers and asked if they needed any help. The men requested a price check on an item — but even after Hinkle told them the item was $20, the customers asked for the price again and again.
“After a while, I realized that I’m basically being pranked, and I noticed the glasses,” Hinkle says, referring to the frames with a blinking light. They were the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and the customers were filming. Hinkle eventually called a store manager over, but the pranksters antagonized her, too — asking the price repeatedly, deliberately misgendering Hinkle as “ma’am” and the female manager as “sir.” At one point, Hinkle attempted to stop the recording by saying “Meta, stop recording” out loud, hoping to trigger a voice control setting. The customers pretended to be confused by the accusation that they were recording Hinkle.
The confrontation made Hinkle queasy. “I felt like this pit in my stomach just started to build up,” Hinkle recalls. “After this whole exchange happened, the rest of the shift, I was just quiet and didn’t even talk to anyone because I was just so shaken up by it.” Another customer called the police, Hinkle says, and the two men were escorted out of the store. Target declined to comment.
The entire exchange was turned into content for social media
The two customers were, in fact, recording Hinkle, and the entire exchange was turned into content for social media. Another Target manager came across the video while scrolling online, without even looking for it. One clip featuring the incident with Hinkle viewed by The Verge had almost 400,000 views on Instagram and 155,000 views on TikTok.
Meta has sold millions of pairs of its AI-powered smart glasses over the last several years — but as sales boom, so too has the backlash to the devices. The glasses allow wearers to listen to music or take calls, but the feature that has sparked outrage is the ability to record using them: Many people see them as a new notch in the surveillance apparatus at best, and “pervert” and “creep” glasses at worst.
Ordinarily, if you are recorded against your will, you can try to leave the area or otherwise resist being recorded. But many people are encountering smart glasses for the first time while at their job, especially those who interact with the public, like retail and service workers. In the workplace, smart glasses exacerbate the power imbalance between the customer and the employee, or the boss and subordinate. Resisting invasive technology is risky when you depend on your job to pay rent or buy groceries. It’s harder still when many workplaces don’t yet have policies around a new gadget that the public is grappling with in real time.
Service and retail workers in particular have become a target for stealth — and annoying — smart glasses recording. People wearing Meta glasses are going into stores and harassing or “pranking” employees, using the footage for content and making unwitting workers the butt of the joke. The video made of Hinkle and their manager without their consent is the exact kind of content that Instagram has claimed it will now remove — yet the account that uploaded it was filled with similar “prank” videos harassing workers at their jobs.
There’s little recourse for those who have been unknowingly recorded. In one of the videos posted to social media that Hinkle is featured in, the Meta glasses wearer is seen chumming it up and dancing with a police officer who arrived at the Target store.
“You boys stay out of trouble,” the cop says as he fist bumps the person recording. Instagram banned the account — and along with it, removed the video of Hinkle — after The Verge asked the company about it.
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