Meta AI Glasses Owners Now Afraid to Wear 'Pervert Glasses'

Meta's camera-equipped AI Glasses have picked up an unflattering nickname online, and the label is starting to bite into how the product gets used. Futurism, citing Engadget's reporting, says some owners are now leaving their expensive smart glasses at home because the social cost of being seen wearing them in public has come to outweigh the novelty of using them.

The reason is not really about the hardware. Influencers, mostly men, have been using the glasses to inconspicuously and non-consensually record women, then post the footage online for content. Some wearers reportedly went further and tried to extort victims of covert recordings. Sit that alongside longer-running concerns about Meta's handling of biometric information, and the company's move to infuse facial recognition capabilities into the tech, and it is easy to see why commenters started calling them 'pervert glasses.'

The interesting part is what that label is doing to actual buyers. A travel creator named Danielle told Engadget the product is 'like a fancy paper weight' for her now, saying 'a lot of men and their behaviors have ruined this product.' A freelance video producer, Will Kujawa, told the same outlet he was 'blown away' by the pile-on when he posted about maybe buying a pair, and thought twice. That is not a regulatory problem or a hardware recall, it is a norms problem, and norms problems are the harder kind for a platform company to fix.

Why this matters if you are not thinking about eyewear: Meta's whole ambient-computing pitch, and Mark Zuckerberg's stated belief that smart glasses will eventually replace the smartphone, depends on people being willing to wear cameras on their faces around other people. If the socially acceptable use case shrinks to 'at home,' the flywheel gets a lot slower, no matter how good the demos are. That is also an opening for rivals to compete on visible consent signals rather than raw capability.

The honest caveat is that the reporting leans on a handful of interviews and online sentiment, not sales data. It doesn't quantify how many owners have actually shelved their glasses, doesn't update the status of the privacy lawsuit, and doesn't tell you whether Meta has responded to the extortion allegations. Meta is still spending: a recent campaign with billionaire reality TV star Kylie Jenner suggests the company's read is that this is a marketing problem, not a product one. The next signal worth watching is whether that push resets perception or feeds the backlash.