Meta Glasses Get a Tamper-Detection Fix, But the Real Problem’s Still There

Meta’s smart glasses are supposed to tell you when someone’s filming you. But, of course, people have found ways to tamper with them and disable the light. According to Meta, they’re putting an end to this. They have (finally) built a tamper-detection feature for its smart glasses that stop the glasses from filming if you modify the light.

[Related Reading: Meta’s Camera Glasses Are Being Banned by UK Restaurants and Theatres Over Privacy Fears]

The company laid this out in an FAQ addressing concerns about the glasses’ capture LED. It’s worth noting that the glasses already stop working if someone tries to cover that light. But a workaround for disabling it altogether surfaced last year. As you can expect, it didn’t take long for a small industry of people offering to strip the feature out for a fee to spring up around it.

Meta says it’s aware of “sophisticated efforts” to modify or destroy the LED, and it’s now updating the glasses to shut the camera down entirely if tampering is detected. The company’s own words: ““No other kind of camera has done this and we’re proud to lead the industry forward” (cue eye roll).

I remembered watching a video about Meta glasses by Cristophe a few weeks ago. In that video, he demonstrates covering the light with tape. It’s supposed to make the camera stop working. But instead, it just tricks the glasses into “low light mode” so they keep recording anyway. Wonderful.

Search for this video to post here, the “Meta smart glasses” on YouTube turned up dozens of “how to” videos walking people through disabling the LED.

Part of a Bigger Privacy Problem

This isn’t happening in a vacuum, and it isn’t new, either. We’ve been covering this since 2021, when the original Ray-Ban Stories launched, and people almost immediately flagged how easy it was to film someone without them noticing the indicator light. A year later, Meta’s own human rights report admitted the “informed consent” problem, then offered a promise to look into it further… And that’s it.

[Related Reading: DuckDuckGo Launches “Smart” Glasses With “0% Surveillance Risk”]

By 2023, Meta was relaunching the glasses anyway with better cameras and audio, privacy concerns still unresolved. Five years on, tamper detection is the most concrete step Meta’s taken. Or actually, is planning to take since the update rollout date is still unclear. Meta’s VP of Wearables, Alex Himmel, told The Verge back in June that new privacy safeguards were coming “within weeks.”

As USSA News writes, most of the current heat traces back to facial recognition. An internal memo from last May reportedly laid out plans to add facial recognition once the company judged civil liberties groups would be less likely to push back. Then, last month, facial-recognition code quietly showed up in Meta’s AI app. Surprise, surprise, it’s the same app used to control the glasses. It’s not active yet, but it’s built to match faces against biometric data already stored on the wearer’s phone.

Now, tamper detection is a real step toward addressing the consent problem. However, but it does nothing for the facial recognition question, which is shaping up to be an even bigger fight, and certainly a huge privacy issue. How, and if, Meta will resolve this, still remains to be seen.

[via USSA News; Image credits: cavebear42, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

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