Meta glasses are a workplace menace - The Verge

Public-facing workers are being filmed, harassed, and creeped out by AI-powered smart glasses.

In 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.

Emily, who works at a popular Seattle tourist destination, deals with vlogger questions and videographers trying to get close-up shots of the food her attraction sells. As a worker in an area with lots of foot traffic, being in the background of a video was just part of the job. More recently, though, the encounters have left her feeling deeply uncomfortable. The worst is when a much taller man stands over her and films her with his Meta glasses. She thinks — hopes — he is not filming down her shirt. But that’s what it feels like.

“If someone was [holding] a phone up from that angle, I could obviously be like, ‘Hey man, please stop that,’” Emily says. The glasses make it much harder to tell what, exactly, a customer is filming. (Emily asked that The Verge only use her first name and not name her workplace, citing concerns of getting targeted.)

Emily works as a cashier and interacts with up to 2,000 people a day. Even before Meta released its AI-powered smart glasses, people from all over the world visited and recorded videos at Emily’s workplace. But the new method of filming has quickly become part of her daily working environment: On some days, she says up to 10 people an hour will come in wearing smart glasses. The most preferable situation is that a customer filming her will use the video for relatively innocuous purposes, like a travel vlog or a food review.

“Worst-case scenario, they’re doing something significantly more nefarious with it,” Emily worries. “That is what’s significantly more scary to me … That feels like it’s a very easy way to get content of young women specifically.”

Many of the encounters filmed using Meta glasses are explicitly gendered, like a genre of videos where men approach women with pickup lines and make content out of the encounters. Meta glasses have a light that indicates when they’re recording, but some people have tampered with the glasses to secretly record without being noticed. Meta says it is working on disabling filming capabilities if the glasses detect the light has been damaged or covered.

Emily is conscious of the fact that she’s a young woman working in a public place all the time, which adds to the baseline discomfort she feels.

“I also want to emphasise how creepy I think the general surveillance aspect of it is, not just as a young woman, but as a person living [among] other people,” she says. “It does add to the feeling of constantly being watched.”

Meta has maintained that privacy features are built into its smart glasses.

“People use our glasses because they’re genuinely helpful – from listening to music, to live translation or hands-free calls. For those wearing them and the people around them, trust matters. That’s why we built privacy into our AI glasses from the ground up,” Meta spokesperson Dina El-Kassaby said in an email. El-Kassaby pointed to the LED indicator light that blinks when a user is taking a photo or video, and the tamper-proofing the company has started to roll out.

El-Kassaby said Meta has begun blocking hashtags on its platforms associated with harassing content, including “rizz,” “pickup artist,” and “cold approach,” and has removed thousands of pieces of content under its bullying and harassment policy. The same rules apply to content filmed on other devices, like a smartphone, El-Kassaby says. But for years, the contemporary social media ecosystem has depended on strangers unwittingly becoming content — everything from this new wave of Meta glasses-powered “pranks” to people-of-Walmart-style gawking. A social internet cleansed of all content that takes advantage of others would be quite empty.

For the first few weeks, Jennifer didn’t think much of her new boss. Then one day, he was wearing a different pair of glasses at their job at a Sprouts grocery store in the Atlanta area.

She looked at him and asked, “Are those Meta glasses?”

“Yeah, they are,” he said. “What of it?”

Jennifer recalls starting to shake because their presence — and her boss’s lack of concern about how violating a recording device in the workplace could be — was so disconcerting.

Sprouts workers are barred from wearing headphones on the store floor because it’s a safety hazard when operating heavy machinery, Jennifer says, and non-managers are not allowed to have their phones with them. (She asked that The Verge use a pseudonym so she could discuss her experience freely.) What’s more, Jennifer says Sprouts stores prohibit videography and photography inside — customers who come in know the store has security cameras, but are likely not expecting employees to have glasses with built-in cameras in them, too. An employee wearing Meta glasses could break that trust with customers. Store employees also handle sensitive data at their jobs, including customers’ names, email addresses, and credit card information.

Jennifer says she was given an ultimatum: Accept the working conditions or quit. She resigned.

Jennifer imagines her manager wearing Meta glasses in the break room, or the bathroom — places where a worker expects a certain level of privacy. “It essentially collapses the social contract, in my opinion, to allow this,” she says.

Jennifer also worries that women and children shopping in the store are particularly endangered by the technology, and noted that the recording light on her boss’s glasses looked like it had been obscured in some way. Jennifer told The Verge that she filed a complaint to HR and asked that Sprouts make a formal policy around smart glasses, but found the company to be largely unresponsive and unhelpful. Instead, she says, she was given an ultimatum: Accept the working conditions or quit. She resigned.

“The issue is about the data that is collected, the footage, the audio, and the facial recognition that can be added to these glasses,” Jennifer says. “I want it so that it’s not acceptable for anybody to be doing that in the workplace.” Sprouts didn’t respond to The Verge’s requests for comment.

Spy-like smart glasses are no longer a distant sci-fi future; they’re here now, and more tech companies are reportedly developing them. Workers, meanwhile, are left in the lurch as laws and company policies catch up to their daily reality.

Experts say laws governing privacy in the US are scattershot, state-dependent, and often outdated. Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Boston University, says information privacy law generally states that if you are in public, you have a reduced expectation of privacy — though some instances, like recording someone in a locker room changing, could open up the person recording to liability.

Workplace protections around being recorded, though, are almost entirely governed by corporate policy. Some workplaces have explicitly banned smart glasses: In August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a policy that bars its employees from wearing Meta glasses because of the potential of capturing sensitive information. Some courthouses have also restricted smart glasses because they could be used to do things like identify jurors.

“The best hope for employees is through collective bargaining and policy-level rules around what kinds of recording technologies will be allowed and when they’ll be allowed to be used,” Hartzog says.

Having smart glasses in the workplace could also create new liabilities for corporations that permit the devices: Businesses are charged with being stewards of customer and employee data, and as surveillance increases, so will the amount of abuses and breaches that accompany that surveillance, Hartzog says. He recommends strong and clear policies prohibiting the use of smart glasses — for both employees’ and customers’ sake.

“We know that when people are being watched, they feel less free. They chill their behavior, they feel pressure to conform. They worry about even minor deviations from norms being used against them,” he says. “It’s just a sort of suffocating atmosphere to be a part of.”

“I’m here to watch you, and you’re here to perform for me.”

It’s not just service and retail workers who have come face-to-face with unwanted recordings while they’re working — creatives and performers are also grappling with a strange new reality. Earlier this summer, comedian Electra Telesford was onstage in the middle of a joke when she noticed blinking lights coming from the crowd. In an audio recording of her set that she shared with The Verge, Telesford can be heard addressing the man in the audience directly.

“Are your glasses blinking?” she asks.

He responds that he’s recording her.

“That’s what they’re there for,” he says, defiantly. “I’m here to watch you, and you’re here to perform for me.” The audience member refuses to stop filming even after being asked to. Rather than argue back and forth, Telesford cuts her set short and walks offstage.

“I was like, ‘I can’t do anything about it except get myself out of view of the camera on your face,’” she says of the exchange. “That’s all I can do.”

At a comedy club or a more formal venue, audience members are typically told that recording isn’t allowed before a show starts. Events at bars, like the one Telesford was performing in, are typically more relaxed, she says. After the set, producers and hosts of the event spoke to the audience member and explained that comics are working on material for future opportunities where they can be paid for their performances, like television; having sets posted somewhere public could prevent performers from getting other distribution deals, since the material would no longer be exclusive. Going forward, the bar plans to announce at the beginning of performances that recording with Meta glasses is not allowed, Telesford says.

“It’s definitely kind of tarnished every other interaction I’ve had,” Telesford says, even in front of audiences where the glasses aren’t present. “Every time I’ve been onstage since, it’s been a worry, a concern.”

Being surreptitiously (or blatantly) recorded while at work isn’t just a problem for public-facing workers; it’s just as easy to imagine concerns that could arise if a coworker at your office starts wearing smart glasses, or if a medical professional wears them while providing care to a patient. Smart glasses reframe person-to-person interactions, creating a watchful technological mediary between two people. There’s a stark difference between having a casual, private conversation and the threat of everything you say or do being captured for limitless dissemination without your consent.

Meta’s current smart glasses can only record for a few minutes, but it has ambitions to make the tech even more integrated into daily life. The company is reportedly developing smart glasses that record all the time, continuously pulling in data from audio and photos that the wearer could ask Meta AI about. What’s more, with the “super sensing” mode, the LED indicator light would not be on except when the wearer is actively taking photos and videos that are saved. The number of routine encounters that are recorded, saved, processed, and accessed later could skyrocket, effectively quantifying even the most mundane or private parts of our lives.

Hartzog, the law professor, says, “This is just another way for employees who already have less power in their roles to be further marginalized and dissected, and is part of a larger story about the way in which being an employee means taking on increased suffering as part of the job.”