We’re All Being Recorded. What Do We Do About It?

0:00Tired of rage scrolling through AI Slop and Clickbait just to get a handle on today's news? Meet InPress, the algorithm-free news app that makes it fun and rewarding to stay informed. Track your media literacy and rediscover reality. Download today at inpress.app. That's I, N is in NewsNerd. Press. Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech, alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future? I'm Alex Honald, professional rock climber and founder of the Honil Foundation. Bring you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic, photographer Tom Peshak, and Anna Rathman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. I think meta is kind of like perpetually getting in its own way, you know? It just can't seem to figure out how to have people soften up to the company. And that's why you see this rollout just being like a complete disaster, really.

1:10Hey there, quick question. Is it a bad thing if people start referring to your AI-powered face computer as Hervert Glasses? I'm Charlie Worsell, and this is Galaxy Brain a show where today we're talking about meta-smart glasses and the slow and steady erosion of our public expectation of privacy. And whether or not Americans are actually mounting a genuine backlash to the surveillance state. Big tech companies have been trying to crack spatial and face computing for a long time. Arguably, the most notable example was Google Glass, a start-track looking headset that was technologically speaking, pretty impressive, but cost about 1,500 bucks and mostly just repulsed people. The prototype program for Google Glass fizzled out, but not before I tried to pair 13 years ago visiting Google's headquarters one day. Google Glass may have failed, but it did produce the most cursed photograph that existed of me. Plenty of tried to make smart glasses a thing. Snapchat released its first version of its spectacles in 2016, but the product just didn't really catch on. And that's in part because

2:11the technology wasn't quite there, or it was wonky or cumbersome, or there wasn't enough memory or storage. And then, in 2021, meta released its smart glasses. Its first collaboration was with the Sunglasses company Rayban. And meta's proposition here was that the glasses looked a lot more like actual glasses. Initially, the camera could record about 30 to 60 seconds of video, and the glasses let people listen to music or take calls. And the videos that were captured could be shared across meta's platforms like Instagram and Facebook using a special story set. And from the launch two things have. First, the glasses caused a somewhat expected controversy around privacy, like all these devices tend to do. But second, the glasses were successful. People bought them. And for creators, especially the product was something between a gimmick and a genuinely new useful camera tool. And so meta decided to invest in them. In 2023, they infused the glasses with AI software that allowed the glasses to describe what a user was looking at in their field of vision, very fancy, and all the while meta has tried to dodge controversy around whether the

3:16glasses will eventually deploy facial recognition technology. And over what data the company retains or uses to train its large language modes. And for a while, the glasses were mostly just this. It was a curio used by creators and mostly despised by privacy advocates. But all that has really changed over the past year. In 2026, the glasses had become more popular and more prevalent. And there have been more examples of people abusing them. People filming women on the street for pickup artists videos. Strange black markets popping up to hack cameras so that the recording light doesn't show. And as more people wear the glasses, more people are concerned that they're being surreptitiously recorded at sporting events, at dinner parties, at the store. Maybe even being recorded while having sex. And this negative reaction, which started on social media, has spread thoroughly throughout popular culture. This summer, the late night host Jimmy Kimmel referred to meta's device as, quote, pervert glasses. And yet, the glasses keep selling.

4:19Celebrities are attaching their names and likenesses to them, and the abuses continue to pile up. And so it all seems like we are headed towards a genuine reckoning for both meta, but all of us really. What is really going on here? Are these glasses here to stay? Are they impacting the lives of regular people? People who are just trying to go about their days and do their jobs? What happens to all of us in a world where we're always being recorded? And crucially, what can you do if someone comes up to you on the street wearing a pair of these glasses? Mia Sado is a reporter and features writer at the Verge who has reported extensively on the ways that these glasses are upending people's lives. What I like about her work is that it's always situated on the ways that emerging technologies affect regular people. And so she joins me now to talk about all of this. Mia, welcome to GalaxyBrit. Thank you for having me. So before we get into the current state of the meta glasses, the cameras everywhere,

5:23the Pan out to Con world that we live in, I wanted to walk just a little bit through the history of these glasses with you, kind of get your reactions as up of it. And this all starts on my birthday, September 9th, 2021, Facebook launches the glasses. Did you expect them to take off? I mean, this is, I'll just put myself out there. I, at every moment with a facial wearable technology, like a camera on your face kind of situation, I always expected to fail. I mean, everyone was very excited about Apple's Vision Pro a couple of years ago. And I was just like, I don't think we're ready for it yet. But like, did you expect this to be an actual product category for a meta that was going to work? Or did you sort of feel like it was destined for the same, you know, dustbin? I think at the time, and what I still believe is that this will not be adopted in the way that meta says it will or hopes it will. And to me, the most straightforward reason is that not everyone wants to wear glasses. Like, sometimes people don't want something on their face. And this is kind

6:26of, you know, the thing that I couldn't get over with the Vision Pro and other headsets and stuff is like, that's a really big barrier to entry. Having something on your head, having something on your face that covers, you know, your hair, your makeup, like, there are all sorts of weird human things that that is just like a barrier, literally. I've picked out a couple of events here that I that I think are related in the in the history of these these glasses. And the first is in 2024 meta confirmed a tech crunch that images and videos shared with meta AI, for an example, the look and ask features may be used to improve meta's AI model. So these glasses, the, you know, the inputs outputs are going to be used to train artificial intelligence systems. The second is in April 2025 in an email to glasses owners, meta said that AI features, including meta with the camera would be on by default and that voice recordings would be stored by default with no opt out. This year, confusingly meta tells the guardian that, quote,

7:33unless users choose to share media, they've captured with meta or others. That media stays on the user's device. When people share content with meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people's experience. We take steps to filter this data to protect people's privacy. End quote. These feel like important revelations to me because so much of the concern about these glasses is that they'll be used to surveil others. But isn't it just as important of a story that how much these glasses are surveilling their owners? Totally. You are giving up an incredible amount of information about yourself and what you do every day, simply by maybe wearing these glasses. And I think, you know, there's obviously the fears around how other people who are sort of unwitting participants in your glasses journey, like how their information is being captured and stored and used later. But it's kind of incredible to me that

8:36with this sort of back and forth flip flopping, more people, more glasses users aren't asking, like, I just wore them all day. Like, what do you know about my life? A huge for me, reason why I personally wouldn't use these glasses? Because there are some things that I actually would prefer meta not know about me. They know a lot already. But there's some stuff that I would like to keep for myself. This brings us to earlier this year, February, 2026. In the New York Times, Paul the Shes of Report, that I think cast the company, as poor a light as I've ever seen, an internal memo cast a tech company, the story alleges that meta is talking internally about adding facial recognition back into its glasses. And the time to get the hold of a document from May of the previous year, which described these plans to release name tag, which is its codename for a facial recognition product. They plan to release it to attendees of a conference for the blind, which the company didn't actually do. But this was part of what they were going to do.

9:39And there's a line from the internal memo that made news, which is, quote, we will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns. I just want first to get your reaction to that. Like, what are people supposed to make of that? That this company that is making this stuff is hoping that people will be busy enough attending to the other horrors of the world. So it's not to focus on the actual product that they're rolling out. Like, tell me what to make of that. We have so many gadgets and tech that is beyond what people could have imagined we had. Right? We have computers in our phones. And that is amazing. And I think we kind of skip over the fact that the idea of glasses that can record people around you and maybe even recognize who they are is literally like the spy glasses of the kids movies that I watched growing up. Right? Like that's like spy kids would love to have glasses that can record your whole day. And you can ask them later what you saw

10:43as meta like some linked plans of suggested matters working on or recognize the people around you. So just the capability is so sci-fi, futuristic, spyware that I just want to make sure we take a moment to be like, this is really crazy technology that we're talking about. And the point about you know accessibility, the role of glasses in disability spaces like this is something that meta has harped on quite a bit. And it's true and my colleagues at the verge of written great done great work about how these tools can be used for accessibility purposes. But there's a pattern of meta kind of putting them into these spaces and almost trying to deflect from the larger privacy and surveillance concerns that people have, including people who are disabled, like disabled people also deserve privacy. So there's a real like push and pull between like what can these glasses be used for and what settings could we use could we put them in versus like what

11:49what is the worst version of how someone could use this technology which is always going to be the thing that like the public thinks about is like what danger does this pose to me to my kids to my life day to day. So and you know right now like a lot of the new stories that were that were reading and the story that I wrote was about some of the people who are doing the worst version of that. So it's sort of like you know a shadow cast over meta and this new line item that they hope will become a major part of how people interact with their company. And this to me this idea of we want to we want to launch during a period of time when people with like especially like you know civil liberties groups aren't going to be paying as much attention about this to say nothing of like taking advantage of of horrific world events or political events. It suggests that they know this is creeping people out to some degree. That to me feels like like they have lost in that sense the the cover of of saying no no no like we think this is just

12:49going to be a great thing for for the world like these these everyone should want these and they're going to empower people to do great things. It's also you know a reality that red meta is feeling the heat for these glasses like they are synonymous and some people sort of have called them pervert glasses or glasses for creeps right like the rollout is so messy it's such it's it's it's really just not a good look. And I think meta you know just even zooming out from the hardware stuff meta has lost a lot of public trust over the last decade um and over the last like five years and it's facing all of these battles not just that people think the glasses are creepy but that it's facing all these court cases and it's being sued by parents and states for you know it's products and how it harms young people. And losing and losing um and so this idea that oh now let's give this company glasses that can recognize faces or can record your entire day

13:52and spit it back out to you when you ask the AI questions like that is just a nonstarter for a lot of people and I think meta is kind of like perpetually getting in its own way you know it just can't seem to figure out how to um have people soften up to the company and that's why you see this rollout just being like a complete disaster really. So uh you just want to say in in response to that times report meta issue just statement and said quote we're building products that help millions of people connect and enrich their lives quote while we frequently hear about the interest in this type of feature meaning facial recognition stuff and some of these products already exist in the market we're still thinking through options and we'll take a thoughtful approach if and before we roll anything out that was in response to the February uh stuff. How damaging do you think that instance was to to the reputation of this gadget like do you think that that really like stuck

14:53through to people like those types of things are the reason why you have folks like Jimmy Kimmel calling these these perfect glasses. Yeah I think it's a big part because of again like it's one thing to have glasses it's one thing to have a phone that can record video it's one thing to have glasses that can record video and it's an entire other thing to have glasses that can scan your face and tell the where who you are right like it is such an escalation of the technology and I will say that a lot of the some discussions about this technology you know it's it can be rife with misinformation and like misunderstanding um but I think this idea that well it's only you know a stone throw away to put facial recognition in these glasses like this seem to sort of confirm those fears that people hold um what is the worst possible thing that these thoughts could do well maybe recognize you know if you are a creep wearing these glasses you can find women on the street and try to identify them right like that is sort of like the worst case scenario the thing that

15:55people fear the most and when things like this leak it sort of confirms underlying fears um or like underlying assumptions that people had that had not been confirmed previously so I think it was a major part of it. If you're trying to get news today you'll find a lot of biased algorithms ragebait and AI noise thanks social media that's where in press comes in it's a social platform on top of factual journalism not the other way around track your reading and earn points it's like Strava for your brain plus you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity ditch the echo chamber for reality with in press download it today for iOS or Android at in press.app that's i and as in news nerd press do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world people working in conservation exploration science and tech alongside storytellers imagining

16:58and creating a better future I'm Alex Honnold professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation bring you season six of plan of visionaries this season I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Peschek and Anna Rathman executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute USA in partnership with the Rolex perpetual plan initiative watch plan of visionaries on YouTube or ever get your podcasts. So meta has has not released facial recognition software in June of this year though wired reported that meta discreetly moved to infuse facial recognition tech into its smart glasses as evidenced by a piece of code discovered in the meta a.i app by wired journalists it's an unreleased feature so as we stand they don't have facial recognition yet but do you think that the based off everything you just said the reports the backlash the the feeling that it is like a you know like having facial recognition is crossing the Rubicon right but it's also

18:02like the killer application for this right as like the the people who are evangelists for this product see it as you know this sort of the sci-fi endgame right of being able to look all this stuff up to have the the computer on your face that can really process and index all this information but do you do you think that it's coming for these glasses or do you think that it it's like a bridge too far right now because it's like the number one thing that also creeps people out. Yeah I mean it's hard to say because I know meta comms and PR people were like really getting into it over the the wired story they were really upset about it but there's a reason they're working on it you know it's and it's hard it's hard to put that aside it is clearly I think a bridge too far for a lot of people for a lot of the public even the glasses themselves seem to be a bridge too far and we can talk a little bit about like how after my story the the reaction was so unified in a way that I have not seen from any pieces that I've written

19:05people hate it and so if you're meta looking at you know the reaction to the glasses themselves and then sort of the uproar with the facial recognition you have to slow the role a little bit so it you know doesn't surprise me that they kind of tried to sort of weasel out of it a little bit like oh this is not shipped like we you know we work on things all the time but at the same time it is something in development and there have been other leaks about what type of capabilities they might envision the glasses being infused with so like one I believe the financial times reported about always on smart glasses where they're not actively you know capturing video with the privacy light that they have right now but that every couple seconds they're taking a photo and they're capturing audio and you can query meta AI and say like you know what was that restaurant that I walked by earlier so these are all these are all things that you know the company is thinking about that they might consider releasing in the future so yeah I don't know I think the question

20:10is more like when when we'll meta read the room that like this is all too much for for a lot of people yeah the idea of the taking the photo every every few seconds I that just feels like the largest possible data liability that yeah a company could possibly present itself with just like especially with I think some people think of these two as like sunglasses right and that yeah obviously they make some meta sunglasses through Ray band or Oakley other people but they also just some of these are just clear frame glasses that like people have on all the time right like yeah so these glasses have been out in the world for a while like Raiders a lot of normal people are using them in honestly like pretty expected ways right and then there's there's the creepy stuff and a lot of that has really come out over the last year so how in your reporting and and stuff you come across how how are people abusing that it's really weird they will wear the glass like

21:15some bad actors let's say we'll wear the glasses into a store and harass the workers who are working there they might sort of be recording them without the person realizing and they're pulling some sort of prank I use a word prank like really loosely it's not funny which is a big problem but you know they might like ask the price of an item over and over and over and the person will answer the worker will answer and they'll be like well no I'm I'm saying what is the price what is the price of the item and this goes on for for minutes they might pretend to be like a rude employee where they're like getting in the way of other customers just to get that reaction and so it makes the worker the butt of the joke so there's that genre right harassing people while they're at their job and they can't they can't say no and this is the reporting that you just did for the verge you went and spoke with a number of people who have had these like exact

22:16instances right yeah that happened to to one of the people you spoke with what when did I have happening there like what was what was the fallout from that so the worker that I spoke with what this happened to um went home after their shift they were obviously very shaken up and they're one of their bosses found these videos on social media posted to social media on tiktok and instagram and combined these videos had more than half a million views um they were you know viral by a lot of people standards and the they were trying to sort of get them removed finally when I reached out to meta and asked about them they removed the entire instagram profile that had you know done done these videos um but it sort of creates you know a heightened fear a new fear for for workers where they could go into their job and try to help a customer and end up being in a video where they are taken advantage of for content um and meta I should say that meta says that content is that type

23:20of content is not allowed on its platforms it doesn't want like secret recordings of people it doesn't want videos that are like harassing of people um and so when I asked the company about it they did say it violated their bullying and harassment policy but there is this type of content is very easy to find online the prank genre is yeah is this is a staple here can I want to I want to keep on this because uh this the story that you wrote uh for the verge about this uh obviously as you said it really resonated with lots of people but what what were some of the other examples because I think I think it's really helpful to have them out there these individual use cases there are some more like I guess relatively innocuous worker examples that I spoke with with workers so one person um works at like a very touristy place in Seattle and she is a young woman and said like the adoption of these glasses just it skyrocketed um very quickly it it was like she was seeing these

24:24glasses every day multiple times a day and now she says she sees like 10 people an hour come into her workplace wearing metaglasses and it's a touristy place so there's always been recording but now she kind of described it to me as like you can tell that they're wearing glasses and sometimes you can tell that they're recording but you can't really tell what they're recording because it's like eye level um so they'll be looking around but the what they're capturing is much broader than just like exactly where they're looking and she hasn't been harassed but she was like I'm a shorter woman and when men come in wearing them and record me they're looking down at me and it really feels like they're looking down my shirt but they're recording down my shirt so there's this general sense of like I don't know what this video was being used for are they gonna make a vlog about it are they gonna put it in their food review or you know tour um like vacation blog like who knows but I all I know is that I'm in a bunch of people's videos and I find that really weird I think when we talk about these glasses the the idea of surveillance is this amorphous concept right uh

25:26you're filming people with other consent but there's a piece in your story where you write that in the case of these businesses store employees are also handling sensitive data at their jobs right and this includes like customers names email addresses credit card information and it strikes me that I mean this is obvious but like surveillance is about so much more than people right it is also about everything else that is being consumed and whether that is for their you know either public consumption or or a stranger's consumption what else aren't we thinking about when it comes to the the the fallout of of these cameras just being everywhere I think that like this is sort of an would be a drier fallout but like the liability that so many people are opening themselves and their employers and everyone else up to when you have a camera attached to your face um so like one of the examples I include in the story is a woman who was working at a grocery store and her boss came in one day wearing metaglasses and she was very worried obviously about the

26:29safety of like customers if they were being recorded by these glasses or you know kids coming in but a big part was you are handling customers credit cards you know you you know in their loyalty program you can see their name and their email address and their phone numbers and stuff like that and so I think a big sort of under appreciated part of this is that when you have glasses attached people's faces you are collecting a lot of data that you probably are not supposed to be collecting right and and uh privacy and law expert was kind of saying to me like the more you collect the greater the risk is of leaks and misuse right you are just opening yourself up to so much potential liability um that the store you know without a specific policy against these glasses is just just kind of throwing your hands up and saying like yeah my workers can wear these and I just like are you thinking about how to explain to customers down the line if there is a data breach if there is a leak on meta side that their credit card information isn't that too amidst all

27:31this meta announced this summer as you as you alluded to there then it's going to ban some of that content that's filmed to the company smart glasses on instagram and you wrote a piece arguing quote meta just created a moderation nightmare for its smart glasses walk me through why it's a moderation nightmare a lot of content on the internet depends on taking advantage of other people and it's unfortunate and it's not fair and it is that is the way it is and you know when meta first announced like we won't allow these worker like harassment pranks or like another genre of meta glasses content is men going up to women and trying to like do pickup lines on them to see how they react meta said like we don't want this right on instagram we don't want this on on Facebook but the reality is is that even without the glasses this type of content was being created and it was abusive and harassment then to but meta was you know like that content exists everywhere and I think about all of the different environments where someone is being recorded without their knowledge

28:37one example that I immediately thought of was like the people who walk through homeless encampments or you know areas where there's maybe like open drug use and they record it sort of almost like you know it's a it's a very extractive type of content where you're making it for people to gawk at and that type of content as far as I can tell is allowed on these platforms because I see it all the time and if we are taking a stand against content that takes advantage of other people or records them without their consent or their knowledge surely a lot more will fall under this category and I don't really see any evidence that meta is taking action on that in fact even the content that explicitly they said they would remove like the pranks it took a random tech reporter to ask the company about to ban this account that had hundreds of thousands of followers and hundreds of thousands of views so you know my my argument there with like the moderation question is where is the line for so much other content other than the couple that we've raised what is

29:42allowed and what isn't because in some ways like a big part of social media is recording people without their consent you know it's like a massive you know recording carons or like people of Walmart right like to use a throwback a lot of content is about strangers and you never go up and say hey can I do you want to be in my video you're just taking photos you're just taking recordings of them and so I I found that moderation decision really interesting to me it read more like don't make us look bad on our own platforms by using these glasses that are already incredibly unpopular don't put the bad stuff on Instagram what what was meta's response to this reporting that you've done recently around around these these glasses they have given the same canned answer to a lot of reporters who have written stories about meta glasses and their misuse meta basically told me you know we have built privacy into these glasses from the ground up

30:43they have the LED light that indicates when it's recording right like on the on the lenses and they also said that they had been banning certain hashtags from being recommended that are like associated with the contents who like Riz you know for these pickup line videos or cold approach I think was another hashtag that they said that they had kind of blocked and of course they did say you know we're taking down this content we've taken down thousands of pieces of this content and we've banned big accounts with millions of followers who had been posting this content so you know they're they're response to a lot of the the criticisms or the reporting is often like well there is this LED privacy light built into them and like we take it seriously and we've they've made certain software updates where if the camera detects that you've covered the light supposedly it will stop recording I think you know people it's a rolling update so maybe

31:45it's not applied to all glasses right now and people are obviously always trying to find ways around it but they've you know tried to make it so you can't tamper with the light so that people don't know when you're recording well it seems to like a bit of an arms race right because there there's been reporting in places like the Guardian and and other outlets that you know follow people who run businesses essentially that help you know jailbreak these devices right to get the to disable the the red light which obviously is against meta's terms of service that's not what they want people to use but I think it's it's you know it's worth noting here that there's just like this entire economy built around trying to trying to make these even more surreptitious than yeah then they already are um you know what what really strikes me about that you're reporting on the subject is that meta has created essentially a first and second

32:48order problem right in the first they've done arguably more than any other company to create this culture of social media cloud engagement chasing the ranks and other things for views this whole content creation ecosystem like they didn't set the terms of that at meta but like Facebook is the OG social network right they helped build that world that we're all living in in the content landscape and then they dropped this product into it a product that is tailor made for these types of creators and these types of people to be used in these environments and they're now using it to turn people's lives into content in a way that's even more focused than you know the camera phone and I'm curious like where's this all going like what is the end goal here for meta with these things? Well I think you know meta is an ads business and so presumably you know the more information they have about what you do all day and what you see all day the better their targeted ads will get

33:53um they're I assume that they're thinking about how to monetize this um the other thing is like meta for as central as it's been to social media for 20 years in recent years they've also really been playing catch up right like they TikTok changed the game and meta changed its business around TikTok and so what meta has always been concerned about is scale it has more users in TikTok more content um and what it what it needs is people on its platform in different ways and I think there's sort of a catering to that type of creator creators who can amass views um even if people don't really like their content or you know people find it sort of like morally objectionable and so I think you know there's a reason why creators were some of the first people to adopt these glasses because who else is recording all day who else is recording their interactions the people

34:56that do use them it creates a frictionlessness for content creation and so I you know have to assume that like a big part of these glasses is that they want creators live streaming for example right like streaming is a huge part of of the online ecosystem um ads obviously I assume they're working on ways to incorporate that or to try to monetize it in the future and it's strange because I think it is really budding up against a real like social backlash around being watched and I think it's interesting that you know people this happening at the same time when there's like a nationwide outrage over flock cameras yes um I think these two are like intrinsically related you know they're very they're coming from a same frustration of the feeling that you cannot escape the grips or the eyes of of these huge behemoths tech companies um and so yeah I'm curious at what point meta you

35:59know sort of decides to go all in or to pair things back like it wouldn't be the first time that meta you know tried something and then it didn't work right um it's it's namesake was a complete flop the metaverse you know at what point do they sort of feel the public outcry is too much to bear I think they're obviously taking like a pretty defensive posture and trying to swage some of these fears but there's sort of like an in in compatibility that I see between like the public reaction and meta's plans well there's a lot I want to unpack there I think before we get into a little more of like the the broader backlash against surveillance you know we have this summer meta announced announces its new line of glasses and Kylie Jenner is the the face of that campaign and uh there's a line from uh Taylor Lorenz and tech reporter who writes a sub stack issue wrote this July quote influencers are declaring a hot surveillance summer west fat west village fashion grilies are

37:03posting AI glasses selfies and for thousands of people cameras on your face have officially gone from creepy to chic and I'm curious if that is like in your understanding bit of like a micro phenomenon thing something that's already burned out like are these glasses actually popular are are non influencer types wearing them I mean my understanding is that it's their hard they're hard to keep in stock um you know and meta has sold millions of of pairs of glasses like it's it's hard to deny and they're the market leader right like when you talk about smart glasses it's meta I think you know the example of like the west village grilies wearing the Kylie Jenner glasses um that was actually kind of smart on meta's point because they made the glasses cute like not everyone wants to wear the classic ray band shape and the the sort of design element like was a step up I guess I would question whether that is like just an isolated phenomenon in these small

38:08pockets of types of creators versus like I don't know that they're convincing their followers to go out and buy them which is sort of a whole point um a lot of like the influencer marketing with these glasses like they sent them to influencers and I had seen a few videos of even like content creators that I follow and the comments are not good you know what I mean like their followers are mad at them for taking a meta glasses brand deal so I I think it's sort of hard to gauge meta obviously wants it to be part of your work work life your social life you know just going around listening to music they talk a lot about like you oh you can listen to music too and take calls and stuff um but I do think this is kind of the direction that tech companies are thinking apple you know has uh there's been leaks of apple working on earbuds that have cameras on them which if glasses were a problem earbuds will really make people upset so it's it's definitely like a trend that other companies are going and waiting into I just wonder you know how long um people have the energy

39:15upset and to push back on it if you're trying to get news today you'll find a lot of biased algorithms ragebait and AI noise thanks social media that's where in press comes in it's a social platform on top of factual journalism not the other way around track your reading and earn points it's like Strava for your brain plus you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity ditch the echo chamber for reality with in press download it today for iOS or android at in press.app that's i and as in news nerd press do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world people working in conservation exploration science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future i'm Alex Honnold professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation bring you season six of plan of visionaries this season i speak to guests

40:16select national geographic photographer Tom Pechak and Anna Rathman executive director of the chain good ol institute USA in partnership with the Rolex perpetual planet initiative watch plan of visionaries on youtube or wherever you get your podcasts in keeping with this idea of the backlash you mentioned it i think everyone really feels it the flock cameras right these you know they're licensed plate scanners they're taking photos they've tracked a lot of attention some vandalism a lot of new stories in part because of reports that police officers are using them to follow or harass people in their lives but also just because people are getting like dog with tickets in their neighborhood or just feeling like things are showing up everywhere and and like you know where's this information going the vibes are so bad is around the the glasses that ice recently barred the care for glasses from the force that i mean if you've lost ice you know where where are we there so we're in this moment of the backlash but why do you think that is because we've had

41:22license plate scanners before the glasses have actually been around for a while like what do you feel like has changed in recent months or in the last year around this broader trend of surveillance and and people really like having their you know spidey senses open to it i do think it's hard to disentangle it from the Trump administration and this idea of like you know a hostile presidency and the various ways that it's watching what people do and you know watching how people live their lives and who's here and who's not and we are coming and goings and you know tracking my grants and immigrants and and so i think already people are primed to be fearful of being watched um the other part if i could connect it to social media the social media side is like we're now you know several decades into kind of the content machine and it's really ramped up in the last

42:23you know sense covid when everyone was stuck at home and i think people are kind of sick of being fodder for someone um in the case of like the meta glasses wearers you know people are sick of being like the background characters to the influencers main character life right like we don't want to be in the background of your videos we don't want you to record us and then post us online um and so i think part of it is like a backlash to influencers and to content creators as well um that you can kind of see like percolating and bubbling up in in other spaces so there's a i think there's a sort of a confluence of different things a lot of it is like you know they're mad at content creators who are then monetizing the content as they harass people um or that they you know as they try to pick up women and and hit on them i think that's such an excellent point about just like the fatigue people being tired of being fodder for these people but what do you think all this is doing to us who

43:26are living in this world where we genuinely at this point lost the expectation of of privacy you know your stories of kids that are afraid to dance as school dances they're afraid of being filmed people are like i don't really want to go on a date i saw i i think it was a new york post thing where there was just like two people like kissing on a bench and turned into a story what is it doing to us that we're now living in this world with no expectation of privacy it really makes us all into punishers i hate the feeling of you know quantifying every moment of everyone's life in order to find something scandalous or objectionable or something you disagree with or even just like don't like um and i think you know it's interesting that the glasses and the content from the glasses is coming now at a time when people are really used to seeing strangers who are not public figures who are not celebrities who are not journalists or politicians talking on their screen and the sort of rise of short form video where all you have to do is do a selfie video and there's a potential for

44:30it to get millions of views that really creates an environment where a face on the screen is just that you don't you don't sort of see them as just another private individual because now they've chosen to make a video um and this idea that you know every moment of our lives should be up for consumption should be up for criticism um should be you know available for people to comment on we really sort of created that those conditions over the last five years since since tiktok i don't know it's dark it's not it's not like a healthy society where you see some like see two people kissing or whatever in the park and think who are they cheating on it's not good to like see a woman in public and say oh she would make a good video right like that's a really yeah humanizing way to think about your fellow humans yeah it's uh we've been barreling towards this for a while and i think you know the glass is just sort of super charge it and a lot of people also i should say like

45:32some people seem to find this content funny some people like it um and that is also kind of you know well they've they've learned that behavior over the last several years what it reminds me of is as social media text-based social media started to curdle right like i think about being on Twitter and just seeing people start to become like the worst versions of themselves and like picking people apart in very specific ways and what i feel like you're describing which is real and what you know video-based social media has done as as well as like all these surveillance tools is it's basically taken that and it's ported it like into the reality of of your actual like physical life like you in physical space right and there's no way to separate that this is you kissing on a park bench like that's just who you are you can't distance yourself from that and that to me feels like that is like a rot that like if we don't eradicate that somehow it gets

46:37it gets dark real fast yeah we should remember too that like TikTok describes itself as an entertainment platform not a social media platform i think about this with like social platforms trying to move more and more into um they're trying to get people to watch their content on a television not on their phone like youtube is big on this instagram is saying it wants you to watch like reels on tv but you can see how people start to think that this is more like closer to like a television show or like a reality tv show or a movie you know rather than like a post that a random person made one day um and that blurring of of those lines i think contributes to it also the fact that like TikTok stars have gone on to do to become celebrities in their own way and they just started as like a teen girl in her room doing dances so um the way that people consume this is not like oh there's a random twitter account who posted something embarrassing or posted something that people are dunking on and now it's become like i'm i see this person as entertainment because

47:42the platform that i found them on is an entertainment platform to bring it slightly back to the the glasses i i keep asking you a variation of a question of where does where does it all lead and what we're describing here in some ways is like a breaking of the social contract right yeah technologically enabled breaking of the social contract and tech regulation is in general iratsoness right it's very difficult it's always notoriously behind but when we think about where we go with this as a society that is like kind of fed up with this but also has to deal with it do you think the answer here ends up being regulatory or does it end up being cultural like you know again go back to google glass with the society is like nope not today sorry we're just not we're not doing that you look weird um or third option is this an an example these companies just steamrolling people like where they're dropping it into the world forcing us to deal with it even if a lot of people are like i don't like what this is doing i'm

48:46curious how you think about the the next steps here yeah i think like a really straight forward sort of way to fence this in and that doesn't require regulators is like private businesses saying we you can't wear these here um which is something that is like you know not that strange we're used to entering environments under rules that are not laws like there's no law that you can't wear sneakers at this nice restaurant it's just like a policy that they enforce right so if private businesses say well you can't record here anyway you can't do videography here anyway so we can't take the risk with you wearing these glasses here i mean that's something that any private business can just you know that's a rule that they can send down tomorrow um and in the case of like my story i think a lot of these incidences could have been avoided if there were clearer rules but because it's emerging tech you know there's there's a lot of like gray area and like things being sucked out still um i think you know i'm not advocating for anyone to do this but a really

49:49common response that i saw in the comments of my story was like people just straight forwardly saying if i see these glasses i'm going to take them off your face and like step on them which a lot of it might be like internet post-trained but also that is a big way of people enforcing norms in society is like shank i'm going to hurt you or i'm going to like socially shun you because i don't like this thing so i think that's definitely a big part of it and some people actually did i did see comments that said like i bought these glasses for a trip with my family but because of all the bad actors recently i've just felt really weird wearing them so like i don't wear them anymore so that is definitely an example of that sort of like raining it in through social pressure yeah i thought maybe a way to end this would be um as long as these are out in the world people do have to deal with them they do have to come up with the norms or or or or what have you and i was listening to a virgin podcast that you were on where you fielded a a very memorable question from a listener about how to use or not use these glasses consensually in the bedroom and also fears

50:53that if he purchased these glasses met it might end up with a lot of footage of him using the bathroom which he didn't want but he also really wanted the glasses and i thought your advice was reasonably sound so i wanted to ask you just as we as we wrap up here some some of your thoughts like guideline etiquette rules for using these glasses or encountering these glasses in the wild and so i guess first up even if you disagree with the fact that someone has purchased these in general what's your etiquette advice for people when it comes to using them around other people on the world well i think you know if you're with your friends it depends on the setting i guess but i would say like maybe let people know just so you know i'm wearing these glasses i'm not recording i'm not doing anything with them you know do you think i'm like a super cool thing to do at a park hey guys guys and where are the glasses informed consent when you hang out with your friends yeah but that's another part of this like these glasses really are a hindrance because who wants to

51:55say just so you know i'm wearing these glasses that a lot of you really hate but like i'm not doing the thing that you really hate so don't worry but you know i would probably say like you should let people know um because i think a lot of like the uh the bristling comes from the fact that like people are realizing after the fact like we'd admit it are those meta glasses and then it becomes a problem obviously like don't cover the light that's really creepy that's really weird and strange strange thing to do um and i get that people you know it's useful for other things like some people really like listening to music that way i get it um but you have to be sort of prepared for people to push back on it which i think is like you know that's something that you don't have to do if you have normal glasses and wonderfully brings us to the the last question which is if you see them out in the wild and you feel like somebody might be up in your space possibly filming you or just making you a little uncomfortable what is your advice having talked to a lot of these people and reporting

52:56on these situations what's your advice for somebody who finds himself in that situation? yeah i will say my understanding is that if you get close enough and say hey meta stop recording it could work um there the users can disable the voice um activation setting where it's like so that doesn't work but it responds to any voice not just the where's voice so if you think someone is recording like you see the light on the glasses on you could try getting right up to them and say hey meta stop recording see if that works um it might not always but maybe worth a shot if you're really are feeling like harassed hey meta delete my account uh just just unplug the server forget i exist she's me thank you so much for coming on galaxy brain to talk about this and thank you for your reporting which i think has has really um has really shown like the the human impact of all this technology in the world thank you for our work my pleasure

53:58if you'd like to be saw here new episodes of galaxy brain drop every friday you can subscribe on the elanix youtube channel or an apple or spotify or ever it is fidget your podcasts and if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow colleagues you can subscribe to the publication at theelanic.com slash listen that's theelanic.com slash the listener thanks so much and i'll see you on the internet you'll find a lot of biased algorithms ragebait and a i noise thanks social media that's where in press comes in it's a social platform on top of factual journalism not the other way around track your reading and earn points it's like stava for your brain plus you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity ditch the echo chamber for reality with download it today for ios or android at in press dot at that's i and is in news nerd press