Meta Claims to Have Bricked Thousands of Smart Glasses

Meta claims that it has disabled the camera on thousands of pairs of smart glasses that the company detected had been tampered with.

The glasses have been besieged with issues, dubbed “pervert glasses” because of certain people filming others without consent and posting the footage online.

A blinking white LED light is supposed to let others know that the smart spectacles are recording, but some users have found a way to conceal it.

Back in July, Meta said it would disable photo and video-taking capabilities for any user found to have blocked the recording light, and now the company tells Semafor that thousands of glasses have been bricked.

In a Threads post last week, Meta’s vice president of augmented reality Alex Himel said that an update had strengthened protections against the LED light tampering.

“The camera won’t start recording if the LED is blocked, but some people try to bypass this by starting a recording and then covering it up,” Himel wrote. “A fix for this is starting to roll out — the camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording.”

Himel tells Semafor that less than 0.1% of users have been caught altering the camera record system, which would put the number of suspect users in the thousands, although Meta didn’t provide specific numbers to Semafor.

Without the camera, the smart glasses are essentially a pair of expensive Bluetooth headphones.

“It’s been a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game,” Himel adds. “I don’t think we’ll ever be done… There’s always new ways to get around the safeguards that are in place. So we’re going to keep monitoring and evolving the measures that we have.”

It’s difficult to gauge how many “glassholes” have been affected by Meta’s latest attempt to put an end to their anti-social behavior.

A Reddit post from four days ago by a person who claims to film people without consent says that he is “blown” by the recent update and asked if there were any other workarounds.

The Redditor was rounded on in the comments for being creepy, but at least a few replies suggested that it is still possible to record without the light.

Nevertheless, the fact that this recent update is affecting bad actors is good news after some terrible stories have come to light of mainly young women being recorded without their consent by so-called “pick-up artists” and later being abused online after the footage was shared.

The reaction has been severe: last week, a trendy New York nightclub threatened to permanently ban anyone trying to enter with the glasses, and even a budget-friendly chain of pubs in the U.K. has banned them.

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