Meta ban on Ray-Ban glasses harassment already falling short

Meta rolled out a ban on people using its Ray-Ban smart glasses to harass strangers in public, and Futurism reports that within days the crackdown was already leaking. An investigation by Oligarch Watch that Futurism draws on still found hundreds of these videos live on Meta's platforms after the policy was announced.

The genre is exactly what it sounds like. Self-styled pickup artists wear the glasses to record women in public without consent, then post the footage to Instagram with sneering commentary about their bodies. Accounts named in the reporting include 'dkdanny,' which reportedly has over half a million followers and racks up millions of views on videos insulting women's weight, and 'moreno.rizz,' who approaches women with crude pickup lines. Another account called '_mypointofvue' was flagged for filming an underage girl at a shopping mall.

The stakes here are bigger than one grim niche of content. Meta has staked a large slice of its consumer AI story on wearables that quietly record the world around you, and public perception of that hardware is starting to congeal around the 'pervert glasses' nickname. The company told Futurism it 'built privacy into the camera for the glasses from the ground up,' pointing to an LED indicator that lights when the device records. Futurism notes Meta did not address the workarounds that let creators sidestep that deterrent.

The honest caveat is that the reporting leans heavily on a single Oligarch Watch investigation. What the piece does not give you is a number for how many videos Meta actually removed against how many stayed up, or a median time to takedown, or a view into whether banned creators simply reopen accounts. As Futurism puts it, one of the world's largest tech companies relying on random journalists to police abhorrent content is not a serious strategy.

The interesting thing to watch from here is whether rival wearable makers use this as an opening on privacy indicators that cannot be quietly bypassed, and whether advertisers running alongside these videos start asking Instagram harder questions about brand safety than Meta's own moderation has answered so far.