Sarah Harte: Meta smart glasses are shady new tools for predatory behaviour

Mark Zuckerberg speaks about the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses during the a Connect conference in Menlo Park, California. Picture: AP Photo

The idea of secretly filming people is creepy, yet people do it. New father Shane Flynn, who owned and ran the NGS Gym & Rehabilitation Clinic in Mullingar, Co Westmeath, is this week beginning his sentence of two years and four months for, among other things, secretly filming dozens of women topless as he massaged them.

It has been reported that Meta, in conjunction with the luxury sunglasses maker Ray-Ban, known for its Wayfarer and Aviator glasses, will launch a new generation of smart sunglasses later this year. Meta recently signed a 10-year deal with Italian eyewear conglomerate Luxottica Group, which owns Ray-Ban.

The upgraded version of the glasses, launched in 2021, reportedly arrives later this year. They have breathlessly been described as game-changing, with an AI assistant. They certainly will be of interest to voyeurs and would-be new technology stalkers.

Some techies congratulated Meta on “hitting a home run” with the glasses or remarked that the spyglasses made them feel like ‘James Bond’. 

My response to that is, for God’s sake, grow up because reading about what they can do gave me a kind of vertigo at the potentially harmful impacts on all our lives, particularly women's

The current Meta Ray-ban glasses allow you to tap a discreet button, and they will instantly take a photo. You can also record three-minute videos and live stream them to Meta’s social media platforms. A small LED light indicator lets others know the camera is recording, but it’s a gentle light that can easily be missed in broad daylight.

When questioned about the potential for abuse with these glasses, Meta responded that they encourage users to respect people’s privacy preferences and to use “voice or a clear gesture” to let others know they are being captured. The idea that we can rely on the average stalker or cyber-peeping Tom to uphold privacy norms is ludicrous.

Imagine how attractive the current Meta Ray-Ban glasses are to somebody who wants to, say, indecently film a topless female bather on a public beach and then upload it to social media

 What is more concerning is that the new glasses are said to open the door to photographing or videoing somebody, but also to potentially ‘doxxing’ them, meaning identifying their names, home addresses and telephone numbers through AI baked into the glasses. If this is true, the implications are terrifying, particularly for women and girls.

This is not alarmist. Last year, two Harvard students, in a publicly-minded experiment to highlight the privacy dangers, proved that a technologically-minded person could use the current glasses to dox women. Walking around their campus, they live-streamed videos and photos, got a program to monitor the stream, and used large language models and facial recognition software to identify the names, home addresses, telephone numbers, and even relatives' names of those recorded.

Criminal offences

We know that sexual harassment in public places is prevalent, which is why we have introduced a range of new offences to protect women from harmful behaviours, including stalking and the sharing of intimate images without consent. And yet, these freely sold smart glasses are shiny new tools for abusers.

Last week, my primary thought when considering the offences of upskirting and downblousing for my other job was: What is the ultimate point of introducing new legislation to combat harmful behaviour if we simultaneously allow tech companies to roll out this technology?

Upskirting and downblousing are covered under Coco’s law, which criminalises recording an intimate image without consent, which would cover these glasses.

Upskirting is a form of sexual voyeurism and abuse. It’s when somebody covertly uses a camera or mobile phone to take photos or videos under a person’s clothes to snap or record their genitals and buttocks without their permission. Often, it’s hard to detect when it occurs in a crowded public place and predominantly is carried out by men and boys against women and girls.

Supermarkets, parks, public transport, and streets are apparently among the most common locations for upskirting. Unsurprisingly, schools and colleges, nightclubs, and festivals also feature in incidents. Devastated victims often fear that their images will be shared. With these glasses, victims are right to be scared because the social sharing of videos and photos is becoming seamless, passive and effortless.

Upskirting made headlines during the recent notorious Pelicot case. Serial rapist Dominque Pelicot was arrested in a supermarket when a security guard caught him upskirting women at a French supermarket; this led police to detect his other crimes. 

Gisèle Pelicot, 72, a retired logistics manager, believes she may have been raped more than 200 times by her ex-husband and other men between 2011 and 2020. 

Pelicot, as you will know, is the ex-husband of the heroic Gisèle. One of the up-skirted women commented that afterwards, it took her two years to wear a dress while shopping.

‘Downblousing’ is when downward-facing photos of a woman’s top and chest are shared without her consent and is also considered criminal behaviour. These Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses are perfect for downblousing.

It’s great that we have criminalised both the recording of intimate images without consent and stalking, but we are playing catch-up by introducing well-intentioned legislation; meanwhile, technology is forging ahead and facilitating wholesale spying and a range of predatory behaviours on and offline. Does that make sense to you?

I’m no techie and held out with a dumb phone until 2019, when I was forced to buy a smartphone to contact a family member who had moved abroad via WhatsApp. Truthfully, I always feel sorry for those willing to queue for hours for the latest iteration of a new smartphone to hand over hard-earned cash for a new phone almost identical to their existing phone, just with added new features, but that’s just luddite old me.

But even if you love new techie gadgets, it can’t be denied that Meta and analogous tech companies are root and branch reshaping socially desirable norms around privacy, creating tolerance for spying on fellow citizens, whether or not that spying has a sexual component. 

The lucrative wet dreams of tech bros are being given precedence over our privacy and the safety and human rights of women and girls

Tech bros: Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk, arrive before the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the US Capitol in Washington.

Saying privacy is dead is a form of ‘privacy nihilism’. The fight for privacy is a marathon and a race worth running. We must fight against Zuckerberg and others' desire for a less moderated, more freewheeling, anything-goes internet. This is the clarion call from tech bros cynically cosying up to the new Trump administration.As I discovered this week, to foil this new technology, we should remove ourselves from a list of databases and search engines on which our personal information is stored, including the search engines PimEyes and FastPeopleSearch.

I found the process challenging, so I’m getting a younger and more tech-savvy relative to help me. Not everyone has that relative. We need clear, easy-to-follow public information from organisations like the Citizens Advice Bureau and other state bodies instructing us on how to remove our private information from databases and protect ourselves, as well as greater awareness of this issue.

Otherwise, the crude solution is to wear a mask in every public scenario. One thing is sure: stylish as they may be, if I see Ray-Bans within an inch of me, I will look out for that little light and question if I might be in the presence of a creep.