She thought she was meeting one of her daughter’s friends.
This woman posted on TikTok: @conservagirl1said she was attending her daughter’s evening basketball game and when she walked out of the bathroom, she saw her daughter standing with a teenage boy. She figured it was a friend of a teammate, maybe someone from school. So she did what she always does – started talking, being friendly, and being a mom.
He complimented her. Ask her if she is married. Ask her if she’s in a relationship. She answered it all with a smile, because why wouldn’t she? He seems like a nice kid.
Then, her daughter grabbed her arm and pulled her away. “Mom,” she whispered, trying to explain—there was a camera in the boy’s glasses. He was recording all the time.
She didn’t know what it meant. She had never heard of Meta glasses. To her, they looked like regular glasses.
The video has now been viewed 2.5 million times
She didn’t think much about the interaction until she saw the video online. The video, which was filmed from the teen’s perspective via the glasses’ built-in camera, caused an uproar. 2.5 million views. Approximately 20,000 shares. About 500 comments. She was the star of a video she never agreed to star in, which was posted to an audience she had no idea existed.
The video fits into a growing genre of content on TikTok: “exciting moms.” The premise is simple. A teenager wears Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which look like regular sunglasses but have a camera embedded in the frame. The teen approached a friend’s mom, flirted with her on camera and posted the video. The mother had no idea she was being recorded.
This is a form of prank. This is also a surveillance format. It just depends on which side of the glasses you’re standing on.
Meta creates a privacy light. It doesn’t do much.
Photo credit: @raybanmeta/Instagram
Here, Mehta might point out that the glasses have a protective measure. There is a small white LED on the frame that lights up when the camera is recording. It should signal to those nearby that they are being filmed. Meta even has tamper detection built into the system—cover the light with tape and the camera will turn off.
Sounds reasonable. Except for a few things.
First, most people don’t know these glasses have cameras. The mother in the video did not. There was no way she would have discovered a recording light on a device she didn’t know existed. LEDs are only useful if the person being recorded knows what Ray-Ban Meta glasses are, knows they have a camera, and knows how to look for tiny white lights on the frames of ordinary-looking sunglasses. There are so many things to know.
Secondly, people spend money to remove lights. A report from 404 Media found that one hobbyist spent around $60 to completely disable the LEDs—bypassing Meta’s tamper detection so that the camera would continue to work, but the lights wouldn’t. The glasses looked brand new afterwards. You’d never know they’ve been modified.
Meta says this violates their terms of service. This is the execution mechanism. Violation of terms of service.
things get worse
In early March, a joint investigation by Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten revealed something that most Meta Glass owners probably didn’t expect: Contractors at a company in Nairobi, Kenya, had been reviewing raw footage taken with the glasses.
Not metadata. Unanonymized thumbnails. Original footage.
Contractors told reporters they saw people using the bathroom, taking off their clothes and recording themselves during sex. One contractor described a clip of a wearer placing the glasses on a bedside table. His wife came into the room and took off her clothes. She had no idea the cameras were still running or that someone in Kenya would end up watching the footage as part of their job.
Meta acknowledged that it uses contractors to review content shared through its artificial intelligence capabilities. The company says it applies privacy filters, including facial blurring. The Swedish survey found that obfuscation doesn’t always work. Sometimes faces can be seen. The same goes for credit card numbers, text messages, and personal documents.
The UK Information Commissioner’s Office launched an investigation. On March 5, the United States filed a class action lawsuit alleging false advertising and invasion of privacy. The plaintiffs say no reasonable consumer would interpret “designed for privacy” to mean that overseas workers would view footage from their homes.
Meta’s marketing slogan for the glasses is “Designed for privacy, in your control.”
Mom asked the right questions
In her TikTok response, the mom stopped short of calling for a boycott or lawsuit. She asked some simpler questions: Should people be allowed to photograph strangers wearing Meta glasses without telling them?
It sounds like this question should have an obvious answer. But approximately 2.5 million people watched the secretly recorded video of her at her daughter’s basketball game, and it’s still being played.
