It began with what seemed like an awkward attempt at flirting. Dilara, a 21-year-old shop assistant, was on her lunch break when a young man approached her and commented on her hair.
‘I swear red hair means you’ve just been heartbroken or something,’ her ‘suitor’ joked, before following her towards a lift and asking whether she was ‘single and ready to mingle’.
Uncomfortable as she already was, what Dilara did not realise, however, was that the entire interaction was being secretly recorded.
Because the man was wearing a pair of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses – spectacles fitted with a tiny, and almost invisible camera, embedded inside the frame.
Only when her phone subsequently started pinging with messages did Dilara discover what had happened: the footage of her innocent – and uninvited – conversation with a stranger had been uploaded to TikTok, where it rapidly amassed more than 1.3million views.
‘It was a heart-drop moment,’ she later recalled. ‘I just wanted to cry.’
It didn’t stop there. As her phone number had accidentally been left visible in the footage, Dilara claims she was subsequently inundated with texts and calls, even attempts at FaceTime video calls, sometimes in the middle of the night. It’s not clear how her number was made public – perhaps she was recognised in the footage, and other users leaked her number, or there may be another explanation.
Either way, the young man who approached her hadn’t simply been chatting her up, but had used her as content for his social-media channels.
21-year-old Dilara was on her lunch break when a man approached her and commented on her hair. Disturbingly, she was being filmed unknowingly for a TikTok video using smart glasses
Disturbing certainly, and not just for Dilara, who is one of many young women who have become unwilling participants in an unedifying new online economy, fuelled by the rapid rise in sales of the latest generation of AI-powered smart glasses which allow users to discreetly capture photographs and livestream footage.
Designed by Meta – which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp and which developed their smart glasses in partnership with sunglasses retailer EssilorLuxottica – sales tripled last year from 2024 to more than seven million globally and are expected to reach up to 16 million this year.
Little wonder that company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg boasted that the glasses are among ‘the fastest-growing consumer electronics in history’ – and that, anxious to get their own slice of the pie, tech giants Apple Snap Inc (formerly Snapchat) and Google are busy preparing their own versions for market.
Yet as sales surge, so too are fears over how the devices are being used, with a rising number of women – particularly young women – reporting how a seemingly harmless interaction with a stranger has been uploaded online for entertainment, often accompanied by sexualised or misogynistic commentary.
Many say they are approached just going about their business – heading into a shop, walking along the street or simply standing outside.
Worldwide sales of the AI-powered glasses, designed by Meta, tripled in a year to more than seven million and are expected to reach up to 16 million this year
In the case of Kim, who is 56 and was interviewed by the BBC this year, it was the beach.
‘I just thought he was being friendly,’ she recalled of the man who came up to her and complimented her on how she ‘stood out’ courtesy of her bikini and blue sunglasses.
‘I had no idea that was being filmed and that I was being used.’ Like Dilara, Kim only realised when she found herself bombarded with messages online – many of them explicit – and realised footage of the meeting had been uploaded to social media.
‘I was asked if I had an OnlyFans page, or do I have any content, and to name my price. I had thousands upon thousands of messages,’ she says. ‘I was basically used for his benefit.’
For a young woman called Oonagh, in Brighton, a brief interaction with a man in the street who told her she was ‘pretty’ also led to her being inundated with sexually explicit messages, many accusing her of enjoying the attention.
‘I had no idea I was being filmed,’ she told the BBC. ‘It made me feel very vulnerable.’
Kim (pictured in an interview with the BBC) was asked by a man if she had an OnlyFans page. At the time, like so many other women, she had no idea she was being filmed
Another woman, known as Alice, believed she was simply being approached by a man asking for her Instagram while she walked down the street.
‘In the moment, I thought, “OK, this guy’s just trying to talk to me”. I was hoping eventually he would leave me alone,’ she said.
Instead, the footage of this brief meeting was later posted online under the guise of ‘dating advice’ content.
When Alice contacted the man who uploaded the video and asked for it to be removed, she says he suggested he would do so only if she paid him.
‘I just feel powerless,’ she said. ‘He’s got the file, which still makes me feel uneasy.’ The incidents point to what experts increasingly fear is a rapidly growing problem in which women’s images, conversations and discomfort are quietly harvested for clicks, followers and advertising revenue.
‘The core issue is how those images or recordings are then manipulated and abused,’ Professor Olga Jurasz, director of the Centre for Protecting Women Online at the Open University told the Daily Mail.
‘It’s not accidental, it’s not a joke, it’s not for fun, it is deliberate and there is a real reason – and a monetary one – behind it.’
Yet despite the distress caused, those at the receiving end have little legal recourse as photography and filming in public is broadly considered legal. Moreover, once uploaded online, footage can become almost impossible to fully remove from the internet.
And while young women seem to be primary targets, Professor Jurasz warned the implications extend far beyond one demographic, pointing to growing concerns about smart glasses being used in schools and other everyday settings.
‘There are increasing concerns about such glasses being worn by parents and even staff in school settings, which raises questions about safeguarding as well as privacy’.
Certainly, it is not just putative romantic encounters being monetised by the ever-growing army of smart-glasses wearers, or ‘glassholes’ as they have been nicknamed. Restaurateurs, cafe owners and retail staff have also reported being unwittingly filmed for ‘clicks’.
Oonagh, a young woman from Brighton, said she felt vulnerable after a brief interaction with a man in the street led to her being inundated with sexually explicit messages online
In March, a Cork-based musician called Willow Esteve spoke out after being filmed without her knowledge by an online content creator known as Rendy Vlad – in reality a 21-year-old Ukrainian born individual called Vladyslav Morhulets who has 1.1 million followers on TikTok, where he posts self-styled ‘point-of-view pranks’, often using smart glasses.
Wearing what appeared to Willow to be a regular pair of glasses, Morhulets approached her at the checkout repeatedly trying to convince her to accept a dirty banknote covered in fast-food remnants.
‘At this point, I began to get suspicious,’ she recalls. ‘He was on his own, so I thought to myself, “Why would he be acting like this? Am I being filmed somehow?”’
Doing her best to end the conversation as quickly as possible, the following morning Willow’s worst fears were confirmed, when a scroll of social-media platforms revealed a highly edited video of their interaction overlaid with sound effects and close-ups – and while Willow emphasises that she was not embarrassed by anything it portrayed, it is the principle that has upset her.
‘There was a video of me online posted by someone with a major social-media profile that I had no control over,’ she says. ‘It just felt gross.’
Willow then contacted Morhulets several times asking for it to be deleted, but he did not respond, leaving her furious at the way control of her own image has been taken out of her hands.
‘This type of filming should not be allowed,’ she says.
Her experience – and that of countless others – exposes how existing laws are struggling to adapt to a world in which hidden recording devices are becoming increasingly normalised and, because of ever-more sophisticated design, increasingly difficult to detect.
As David Evan Harris – a former Meta AI researcher who is now based at the University of California Berkeley and who advises governments on AI policy – points out, technology has evolved substantially since the first attempt by Google to roll out their own smart glasses over a decade ago.
The bulky, futuristic looking ‘Google Glass’ headsets triggered a widespread public backlash and less than a year later, sales collapsed. ‘It was seen as not cool to wear those things, partly because they didn’t work very well – I tried them and they looked kind of nerdy,’ he said.
‘Numerous businesses actually made a point of banning them here in San Francisco.’
The latest Meta model is sleeker, designed to blend in almost seamlessly with ordinary eyewear, has a tiny camera within the frame and is much harder to detect.
Moreover, while the cameras come with a small LED recording light that flashes while filming is in progress, intended to alert others when footage is being captured, many seem to have found an easy way to bypass it.
On TikTok, and also on the Meta-owned Facebook, businesses are openly selling small black stickers and plastic covers designed specifically to cover the light. (One promotional video advertises them as ‘the perfect solution’ for users who want to ‘get rid of’ the warning signal.) For Harris, such antics point to an uncomfortable reality. ‘Some of the smartest engineers in the world are working at these companies – they could make these glasses really conspicuous and obvious and make it much harder to block the recording light.
The latest Meta model is sleeker, has a tiny camera within the frame and is much harder to detect (Pictured: Melania Trump trying on the glasses at the White House)
But they probably think there’s some percentage of their customers – and maybe it’s a significant one – that actually want the ability to surreptitiously video-record people without their consent.’
It doesn’t help, he adds, that this eminently wearable tech goes arm in arm with an increasingly muddy understanding – fuelled by the rise in social media and smartphone use – of the boundaries between what should be public and private.
‘Maybe there’s broad agreement that being on the street is public,’ he explained. ‘But when you are on a train, is that public? Is the inside of a pub – literally short for a public house – always public? It calls into question our expectations over what is reasonably expected to be private. And that is probably territory for future lawmakers.’
The offence of voyeurism in the UK, for example, can only be used in a place where privacy can reasonably be expected, and to date appears to have been only deployed once in a case involving smart glasses.
Earlier this year a man pleaded guilty to voyeurism at Warrington Magistrates Court after secretly filming himself having sex with a woman using smart glasses during a consensual hotel encounter in Cheshire while his partner remained oblivious.
David Williams, 47, and the unnamed woman had met on a dating app and met for consensual sex, but after messaging Williams the following day to say she had had a ‘good time’, she was stunned to receive explicit videos of their encounter.
She contacted the police, telling them she had no idea the glasses had been recording and that she had never consented to being filmed.
As a hotel room is a place where there is a legitimate expectation of privacy, it meant the offence of voyeurism, which can lead to up to six months imprisonment, could be used. Williams was fined £800, with District Judge John McGarva telling him that while he accepted he meant ‘no malice’ as the couple had discussed recording their encounter ‘in general terms’, specific consent should have been sought.
As David Evan Harris points out, governments should work in tandem with tech companies to protect the public. He highlighted how some countries have already tried to legislate to make it harder for smartphone users to take clandestine photos.
‘In Korea, all domestically sold smartphones are legally required to produce a mandatory, unavoidable shutter sound to alert people to what may be otherwise unwanted photography,’ he said.
The reality, as Professor Jurasz says, is that all too often the law is playing catch-up. ‘The pace of technological change means that even at the best of times the law is responding to social phenomena after they happen – it’s reactive, very rarely proactive,’ she said. ‘But reactive is better than no action at all.’
A Meta spokesperson told the Daily Mail: ‘People should behave responsibly. We have teams dedicated to limiting and combating misuse, but as with any technology, the onus is ultimately on individual people to not actively exploit it.’
Perhaps deepening public unease may play its part too. In New York recently, a woman went viral after allegedly snatching and breaking a man’s Meta smart glasses on a subway train after realising he was filming.
Rather than sympathising with the owner, social-media users overwhelmingly sided with the woman.
As one commentator put it succinctly: ‘Good. People are tired of being filmed by strangers.’
