Later this week, Mark Zuckerberg is expected to announce its newest generation of smart glasses at Meta Connect in California. However, in the year since the Meta Ray-Ban Displays and Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 smart glasses debuted, the company’s reputation has been tarnished by numerous reports of individuals using Meta’s specs for creepy purposes.
There was a small but healthy industry of individuals who would modify Meta’s glasses to remove or disable the recording light so you could video someone surreptitiously. And the ease with which wearers could capture content and then post it to Instagram — another Meta-owned property — has led to a rash of harassing videos being posted to social media.
In late August, Meta finally addressed some of these issues. It issued firmware updates to its glasses that prevent recording if the light is damaged, disabled, or blocked, and it banned a few creators and blocked several hashtags on Instagram that were widely used to disseminate the harassing videos.
But is this enough, or has Meta’s reputation been tarnished irreparably? To find out how we got here, and to see what Zuckerberg & Co. could do to revive the brand, I spoke to three analysts to hear their thoughts.
How we got here
Meta has been called out more than other smart glasses makers for the simple reason that it has sold more devices than anyone else — as much as 80%, according to one report. And those glasses lacked the privacy protections they needed.
“Meta is treading a fine line between those who abuse their glasses and those who do not,” Ramon Llamos, a wearables analyst for IDC, said. “Safeguards like the recording light haven’t proven effective, and the stream of harassing videos has gone unabated even as several cases around unwanted recording have resulted in jail time.”
“The reason why Meta has been targeted is that they made the most popular glasses,” Carolina Milanesi, of The Heart of Tech, said. “People do not trust them, and they have not taken accountability. By doing so, they have made it much harder for everyone else.”
It’s not just Meta.
“There has definitely been a backlash against AI-enabled cameras, whether that is Flock used by law enforcement or smart glasses used to record people in public,” Avi Greengart of Techsponential said.
“However, Ray-Ban Meta sales have increased, so the challenge for Meta is to keep its momentum up heading into the holiday season: you want people to be delighted when they receive smart glasses as a gift, not horrified. To that end, Meta has several challenges: core use case, security architecture, and brand reputation.”
What Meta has to do
“No matter what additional steps Meta puts in place to improve privacy, Meta does need to fully explain its architecture and ensure that its glasses cannot record when they aren’t worn, can’t record without notification, and that captured footage can’t be viewed by Meta or its contractors,” Greengart said.
Llamos said that Meta could make it more obvious that its glasses are recording someone. “I’ve heard of possibilities like playing back a sound to alert that the glasses are recording,” he said, “but those could penalize people who have been using the camera responsibly.”
Milanesi said that Meta “needs to go beyond just talking and show some progress on the hardware side, either with the light, making it even harder for people to disable, and investing in bringing solutions like a shutter to market.”
What other brands have to do — and are doing
Of course, the backlash against Meta’s glasses has other companies rethinking their strategies. At the launch of the Apple Watch 12, for instance, John Ternus was careful to highlight the safeguards his company put in place with all the new Siri recording capabilities.
“One way to avoid people being upset that you’re recording video is to not record in a way that humans can ever view the footage, just use that data as context for AI, and ensure that the data is not used to train AI,” Greengart said.
“This is the approach Apple takes with its new Apple Watch summary tools. Meta can’t do this — at least not fully — because taking hands-free, in-the-moment photos and videos is a core part of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses value proposition. However, Meta could adopt this approach for images and video captured when you ask Meta AI to comment on what you’re seeing.
Llamos asked if AI could shoulder some of the burden. “Here’s an interesting solution: can AI tell the difference between an innocent interaction and one with ill intent?” Ramos said. “I don’t know, and right now I don’t think it can. That would require much training and learning, and the possibility for something to go wrong, like a false positive or not flagging an incident, is high.”
Brands are already thinking about how to address privacy issues, which is more about disclosure than anything else,” Milanesi said. “I say this because it is the people around you that need to be aware, not the person who is recording.”
What comes next?
The problem with smart glasses is as much behavioral as it is technical, argues Milanesi. “People just blaming the technology vs. the person are just thinking about poor use cases,” she said. “That is a human issue vs. a tech issue. What the brands must do is make sure the bad humans cannot do these things.”
It’s a point that Llamos agrees with. “Meta has repeatedly pointed to its suggestion to users to be more responsible in their use habits, but those have not proven effective,” he said.
Ultimately, Meta needs to prove it can be trusted — a tall order given its past indiscretions, but not impossible, especially if it can leverage the reputation of its other brands.
“People do trust some of Meta’s properties — WhatsApp has had end-to-end encryption integrated by default for a decade,” Greengart said. “The combination of bad behavior by users and Meta’s own lapses creates reputational debt that the company needs to tackle head-on.”
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