Meta knows its AI-powered camera equipped spectacles are widely seen as “pervert glasses.” And though it professes to be cracking down on creeps using them to record people without their consent, whatever measures it’s taking clearly aren’t working.
After Meta announced this month that it would ban users using the glasses to film themselves harassing strangers, a recent investigation by Oligarch Watch still found hundreds of these videos on its platforms. Many of them are from sleazy “pickup artists” who approach women in public, making sexual or degrading comments and recording their buttocks or breasts.
In one viral video on Instagram, a pick-up artist who goes by “_mypointofvue” films himself approaching an underaged girl in a shopping mall.
“I’m 17,” the girl says, seemingly unaware that she’s being recorded, when he asks her age.
“That’s crazy. I can’t do nothing with you, baby,” he replies, grumbling that he “can’t believe that ho was 17.” He then pulls out his phone on camera to do an ad for a crypto-based online casino.
In another Instagram video, a man who goes by Justin uses his Meta glasses to zoom in on a woman’s buttocks as she orders coffee, before repeatedly asking for her contact information and being shut down each time. “Shawty had the gyat,” he wrote in the caption. The user, according to Oligarch Watch, has posted dozens of similar videos since Meta announced the crackdown.
Another popular pickup artist who goes by “moreno.rizz” recently shared a video of himself approaching a woman by saying, “Excuse me, have we f*cked before? I’m just kidding. I just thought you were really pretty.”
The harassment can sometimes be even more blatant. Another pick-up artist called “dkdanny” boasts over half a million followers, and in some of his most popular videos that rack up millions of views, he wears Meta glasses while insulting the weight of random women on the street.
“You don’t get to talk, OK,” he tells one woman. “You already look big enough. Don’t talk big, too.”
The clear privacy risks posed by Meta’s glasses have been a heated topic since the devices debuted. The company has used big-name celebrity endorsements and run heavy marketing campaigns to improve how they’re perceived, but it’s not winning everyone over. Earlier this month, Instagram head Adam Mosseri addressed the harassment being carried out using the smart glasses, vowing to crackdown on it “every way we can.”
Some of the accounts that Oligarch Watch referenced in its reporting seemed to have been taken down after it was published, but that’s only a drop in the ocean — and one of the world’s largest tech companies relying on random journalists to police abhorrent content on its platforms clearly isn’t a serious strategy.
Meta told the publication in a statement that its glasses that it “built privacy into the camera for the glasses from the ground up,” including an LED that lights up when the glasses are recording. It did not, however, address the fact that there are many workarounds to this small deterrent.
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