Meta has opened Pandora’s box with its AI-infused smart sunglasses.
The pricy accessory has sparked a heated debate over privacy, with unsavory individuals abusing the eyewear’s easily-missed cameras to harass unsuspecting strangers in public — garnering the specs the distinctly unflattering nickname of “pervert glasses.”
It’s gotten to the point that owners who shelled out hundreds of dollars for a pair have become too afraid to wear them in public. Meanwhile, Meta is seriously struggling to crack down on its badly-behaved users.
Now, Google alternative DuckDuckGo, a company that has long attempted to actively distance itself from Big Tech, has come up with a genius new product that’s guaranteed not to spark controversy: a pair of plastic, non-pervert glasses that lack any electronics whatsoever.
The company partnered with sunglasses maker Knockaround to create the “world’s most innovative anti-surveillance sunglasses,” or “Normal F***ing Sunglasses.”
“No camera, no microphone, no AI, no battery, no electronics of any kind,” Knockaround boasts on its website. “Just a beautifully crafted pair of matte black sunglasses with a glossy DuckDuckGo logo, designed to block the sun and never send data to the cloud.”
“Yes, these are actually real,” DuckDuckGo had to reassure netizens in an official announcement on X.
Best of all, at $35, they’re an absolute bargain compared to Meta’s pervert glasses, which start at a far steeper $299.
Satire publication The Onion, which promoted the sunglasses, rounded up some fictional reactions.
“0/10,” the publication quoted one fictional man. “Useless for perverts.”
“Guess I’ll have to violate people’s privacy the old-fashioned way: from the bushes,” another quote reads.
The marketing stunt appears to be working out. A DuckDuckGo representative told CNET that a “significant percentage of the inventory has sold, though it’s still too early to release sales data.”
It also perfectly illustrates how the public is becoming fed up of having AI shoved down its throats, in the kind of tech-obsessed overreach that’s facilitating some extremely boorish behavior.
Some netizens were inspired by the product, pointing out other categories that could benefit from being stripped back down to the basics.
“This is a good start,” one Bluesky user wrote. “Can we get Normal Fing TV and Normal F ing Refrigerator next?”
More on sunglasses: Meta’s Attempted Crackdown on AI Glasses Perverts Is Already Failing