Meta has a nickname problem. Its Ray-Ban smart glasses have earned an ugly label: “pervert glasses”. Men wear them to film women in the street. Pranksters wear them to ambush shop workers.
Now Instagram is trying to scrub the evidence. The platform will start removing videos shot on the glasses to harass people, as Business Insider first reported.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri set out the policy in an Instagram Story last week. “If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos, then we’re going to take the content down,” he said. “We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform.”
The enforcement so far is thin. Instagram has deactivated at least two pickup-artist accounts, each with more than a million followers. Meta confirmed it banned them for harassing content filmed on the glasses.
Beyond that, Meta stayed quiet. It would not say how it enforces the policy, what counts as a violation, or how many accounts have gone.
The genres Meta wants gone #
Anyone on Instagram or Reels has probably seen the content. One genre is pranks on service workers that tip into harassment. One creator sprayed fart spray into a candle at Walmart, then asked staff to smell it.
The other is pick-up artists filming women at gyms or in the street. The women often do not realise a camera is running. The nickname “pervert glasses” has spread fast, and Meta clearly does not want it to stick.
The flaw is in the hardware #
Critics say the ban treats a symptom.
The glasses carry a small LED that lights up while recording. But it is easy to miss outdoors. Users quickly learned to defeat it with tape or a drilled hole. Meta has since added a fix that shuts the camera off if someone covers the light. It has not run long enough to judge.
A cottage industry of “jailbreaking” the specs sprang up in the meantime. Apple is designing its own glasses with a brighter ring around the lens, according to Digital Trends. The aim is to make recording harder to hide.
The wider backlash is loud. Smart glasses have got athletes thrown out of races and landed users with criminal charges. New York has barred them from its courtrooms, Gizmodo notes.
Meta, meanwhile, is reportedly toying with glasses that record everything, all the time. The reaction to the ban was less gratitude than exasperation. “Tech CEO pledges to catch bolted horse,” the journalist Dave Lee wrote.
Deleting a video after the fact does nothing for the stranger who never knew a camera was on them. It does nothing for the clips that never reach Instagram at all.
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