Meta Disables Cameras On Thousands Of Tampered Smart Glasses

Meta says it has disabled the camera on thousands of pairs of smart glasses after detecting that users had tampered with the recording light.

As we’ve covered before, Meta’s smart glasses have run into repeated so-called “pervert glasses” incidents. People were secretly filming others without consent and posting the footage online. The devices use a blinking white LED to signal when they’re recording. However, it didn’t take long for some pervs users to find ways to hide it. Meta told Semafor that thousands of glasses have now been bricked as a result.

This is just the latest chapter in a much longer saga. We wrote about Meta’s earlier tamper-detection fix back when the company first started addressing the light-covering workaround. Still, the underlying privacy and facial recognition concerns remain unresolved. Around the same time, several UK restaurants, pubs, and theatres started banning the glasses outright over privacy fears. Velues from Soho House to Wetherspoons began telling customers to leave them at the door.

Back in July, we reported that Meta planned to disable photo and video capabilities for anyone caught blocking the recording light. Finally, that plan is now in effect. Meta’s vice president of augmented reality, Alex Himel, explained the update in a Threads post last week. Earlier versions only blocked recording from starting if the LED was covered, but some people got around that by starting a recording first and covering the light afterward. Himel wrote that “a fix for this is starting to roll out” – the camera will now stop working mid-recording if the light gets covered.

It’s hard to say exactly how many people have been caught by the update. According to Himel, it’s “thousands”. But it seems that these thousands of people aren’t willing to stop yet. A Redditor who admitted to filming people without consent recently posted to the forum asking for new workarounds after finding himself locked out. Commenters called out the behavior, though a few replies suggested some workarounds may still exist. As Himel told Semafor, “It’s been a little bit of a cat and mouse game.” He added that he didn’t think it will ever be done ands that there are always new ways to find a workaround against safeguards. “So we’re going to keep monitoring and evolving the measures that we have.”

This is a win, given the disturbing number of incidents involving young women recorded without consent by so-called “pick-up artists” (eww). These folks would later share the footage to harass or embarrass them online. The update appears to be hitting its intended target, at least for now.

[via PetaPixel; Image credits: By cavebear42 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

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