There’s a growing number of reasons to be skeptical about camera-equipped smart glasses, and you can now add extortion to that list. According to a report from the BBC, a woman who asked not to be named was recently filmed covertly while shopping in London by a man wearing smart glasses. That interaction was later posted to social media, where it racked up tens of thousands of views.
That story, unfortunately, isn’t a new phenomenon. As other investigations have noted, smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are used regularly by men—specifically men—to record women discreetly for content purposes. What makes this particular case reported by the BBC worse is that the man in question allegedly asked for money in exchange for taking the video down, claiming that removal was a “paid service.”
According to the BBC, the video was eventually taken down after being reported for violating TikTok’s rules on harassment and bullying, and the man’s account was banned. The footage was, however, later reposted to a different social media site. The BBC reached out to the person who filmed the interaction, who, of course, denies trying to extort anyone, and the police—who were reportedly contacted—say they don’t have enough information to launch an investigation.
In a nutshell, this is exactly the type of thing that has people up in arms about smart glasses as a category. While recording people discreetly can be done with a phone, holding a glass slab in front of someone’s face is a lot more likely to be clocked. The fact that the woman in this incident didn’t know she was being filmed at all should tell you a lot, since it means the privacy light (and LED that lights up when you record) on the smart glasses being used was obscured or not visible enough to catch her attention.
For now, it remains to be seen whether makers of smart glasses have a real solution for preventing spying outside of shipping smart glasses that don’t have cameras for photography or video recording. Wherever there’s a camera, there’s going to be someone pointing it at something they shouldn’t.
