Apple is set to enter the world of smart glasses — a move that is full of perils for a company that has made privacy one of its defining principles.
According to Apple insider Mark Gurman, the company will unveil its smart glasses at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June next year — targeting a release by the end of 2027.
Meta’s smart glasses collaboration with Ray-Ban has been über successful, but it has come at a cost for Mark Zuckerberg’s firm. A series of privacy-related scandals has given the glasses a bad reputation: from the revelations that contractors in Kenya were reviewing users’ intimate footage for the purposes of AI computer vision training, to nefarious users recording women clandestinely so they can trade clips on social media with other creepy weirdos.
The spectacles are now commonly referred to as “pervert glasses.” This poses a problem for Apple, which has aggressively marketed itself as a company that protects people’s privacy.
One option that Apple is reportedly mulling over is to sell smart glasses without a camera — users could still access features such as hands-free phone calls and listening to audio. Another option is to release the glasses with a camera that doesn’t record photos or video; the camera would still see the world, but only for the purposes of feeding that data to AI tools, helping the user navigate their environment. This is similar to camera-equipped AirPods rumored to launch soon.
But the fact is, Meta’s glasses have become popular in large part because of the camera. The ability to film hands-free is not just the preserve of so-called “glassholes,” but it’s also used by regular people who want to capture images of their children or effortlessly record footage at a concert.
Gurman writes in Bloomberg’s newsletter Power On that Apple will eschew controversial features like facial recognition and likely favor on-device processing.
“Apple also is likely to avoid something akin to Meta’s proposed ‘super-sensing’ mode, which can continuously analyze a wearer’s surroundings, and will steer clear of using customer recordings to train AI models,” Gurman writes.
Meta has started to try and clean up its glasses’ bad reputation: announcing an update that disables the camera if the user attempts to conceal the blinking recording indicator light and banning videos from Instagram filmed on smart glasses that feature harassment of strangers in public places.
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