Meta Smart Glasses Earn 'Pervert Glasses' Nickname as Users Drill Out the Recording Light

Meta built a hit product. Now it's dealing with a nickname nobody at corporate headquarters wanted: "pervert glasses."

The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses record video and photos, take phone calls, play music, and run an AI assistant, all from a frame that looks like ordinary eyewear. According to IDC data cited by the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times, Meta controlled about 69% of the global smart glasses market in the first quarter of 2026, and the market's overall value more than tripled compared to a year earlier. Meta sells the glasses for $224 to $800 through Best Buy, LensCrafters, and its own retail stores, and has partnered with celebrities including Kylie Jenner and Blackpink's Jennie to push them.

The problem isn't the tech. It's what people are doing with it.

The Chicago Tribune and LA Times both reported cases of men using the glasses to secretly record women during pickup attempts, then posting the footage online, sometimes with mocking commentary, without the women's knowledge or consent. Gaby Luisa told the LA Times she was filmed outside an Arizona dance club this summer by a man who approached her with a pickup line. She found out later the video was posted to YouTube. "It's really weird to monetize off of people, and they're not even aware that they're being recorded," she said.

Meta built in a safeguard: a small white LED on the frame blinks when the camera is recording, and Meta told Fortune the light "cannot be switched off" and the camera disables itself if the light is covered. That's the theory. In practice, the Chicago Tribune and LA Times both reported that some users are hiring people to drill into the frames and disable the light so they can record in stealth mode. If that reporting is accurate, it means Meta's built-in safeguard has a workaround, and the company's public claim that the light "cannot be switched off" is being tested by people with a screwdriver and bad intentions.

Instagram has started disabling accounts that built large followings by streaming live, unconsented feeds from the glasses, according to Fortune. "We don't want harassing content on our platforms and take it down when we find it," an Instagram spokesperson told the outlet. That's an after-the-fact response, not a prevention. The harassment happens, gets viewed, gets reported, and then maybe gets removed.

Content creators are catching backlash even when they're not doing anything remotely creepy. The Guardian reported that Oliver Hooson, a UK creator with 224,000 Instagram followers, filmed himself making coffee at the Tour de France and got flooded with comments calling him a "PERV." He lost, by his own estimate, 50 to 100 followers over a video of him making a flat white. Rida Tharana, a creator with 1.6 million followers, publicly apologized for participating in a Meta promotional campaign after criticism that the glasses get "misused" to "record and harass women."

Is this backlash proportionate, or is it punishing ordinary people for a tool that a minority of bad actors are abusing? Hooson himself makes this point implicitly. He wasn't recording anyone without consent. He was making coffee. The "pervert glasses" label, as he told the Guardian, functions as "a defence mechanism" to shame people out of buying the product at all, regardless of how they actually use it. That's a real tension. Plenty of technology, cameras, phones, dash cams, gets used both responsibly and irresponsibly, and blanket stigma against the tool rather than the misuse is worth being honest about.

But the tension doesn't erase the underlying problem. Jim Waldo, a Harvard computer science professor who teaches technology privacy courses, told Fortune the core issue is that "the technology is changing" faster than social norms or law can keep up. His sharpest point: "They're making it safe for the consumer. They're not making it safe for the people around the consumer." That's the actual design flaw. Meta protects the wearer's experience. It does far less to protect the stranger standing next to the wearer who never agreed to be recorded, streamed, or drilled around a safety light.

No U.S. regulator has announced an investigation into Meta's smart glasses specifically, and no charges have been filed related to the recording practices described in these reports. Meta is facing a lawsuit tied to a separate matter, allegations that subcontractors reviewed user-recorded footage, according to Fortune, but that litigation is ongoing and the allegations are unproven claims made in a complaint, not established findings.

Jitesh Ubrani, a director at IDC, told the LA Times and Chicago Tribune it's too early to know whether the backlash will actually hurt sales. "A headline cycle like this is exactly the kind of thing that could slow momentum with mainstream buyers, even if early adopters don't blink," he said. Jacob Bourne, a technology analyst at eMarketer, added that the tech industry is already fighting to preserve "positive consumer sentiment" around AI broadly, and smart glasses are now caught in that same headwind.

Apple, Google, Samsung, and Snap are all working on competing smart glasses, according to the LA Times. None of them have to solve Meta's stealth-recording problem for their own products to succeed. But they're all watching what happens to Meta's reputation first.