Meta has launched its new AI-powered smart glasses. To promote the product, the company partnered with Kylie Jenner, who not only contributed to the glasses’ design but also licensed her voice for the Meta AI assistant. While the product has already raised serious questions about privacy and data security, its marketing strategy has also drawn attention for specifically targeting women.
Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses, developed in collaboration with Ray-Ban and Oakley, are now available for purchase. Equipped with a built-in camera, microphone and speakers, the glasses allow users to take photos and videos hands-free, livestream, make phone calls, listen to music and interact with the Meta AI assistant.
Although smartphones have long made it possible to record people in public, pointing a phone or camera at someone usually provides an obvious indication that recording is taking place. Smart glasses largely remove this visual cue. Since they are almost indistinguishable from ordinary sunglasses, they make it much easier to record people without their knowledge.
Meta states that an LED light on the glasses illuminates while recording is taking place. However, it has already been demonstrated that this indicator can be disabled through relatively simple modifications. Similar alterations have previously been seen with drones and covert surveillance devices, raising new legal and ethical concerns about smart glasses as well.
The Kylie Jenner Partnership
One striking aspect of Meta’s product launch is its emphasis on fashion rather than technology. The company partnered with Kylie Jenner to promote its new smart glasses.
Jenner, an American television personality, entrepreneur and social media influencer, rose to prominence through Keeping Up with the Kardashians and later The Kardashians. Since the 2010s, she has played a major role in shaping popular culture. In addition to fronting the Meta AI campaign, she reportedly contributed to the design of the glasses and licensed her voice for the Meta AI assistant.
According to many researchers, this is a deliberate marketing strategy. Since women influence a large proportion of consumer purchasing decisions, their adoption of new technologies is seen as crucial for bringing products into the mainstream. Marketing products through fashion, beauty and lifestyle is therefore viewed as a conscious strategy aimed at female consumers.
Technology researcher Dr Sarah Saska argued in a social media post that major technology companies understand that products not embraced by women rarely become mainstream. According to Saska, technologies that initially appear unfamiliar or potentially unsettling are repackaged through the aesthetics of fashion, wellness and beauty to appear safer and more desirable.
Meta’s campaign reinforces this strategy by featuring not only Kylie Jenner but also DJ Peggy Gou and various fashion influencers. Some commentators argue that these celebrity-driven advertising campaigns and social media trends effectively feminise AI technology, using female celebrities to make what is fundamentally a surveillance product appear more approachable and trustworthy.
The promotional images resemble fashion editorials far more than technology advertising. In doing so, they shift attention away from concerns about surveillance, privacy and data security towards questions of style and lifestyle. Ironically, a technology that may increase security risks for women—who already experience the highest levels of non-consensual photography and sexual harassment in public spaces—is itself normalised through female imagery.
Privacy and Security Concerns
The greatest controversy surrounding smart glasses concerns privacy.
Research conducted by Harvard University students Anh Phu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio demonstrated that, when combined with facial recognition technology, AI-enabled glasses could identify individuals within seconds by accessing publicly available databases and retrieving information such as their name, phone number, address and details about relatives.
Similar concerns have also emerged regarding Meta’s own software. According to an investigation by WIRED, Meta AI has long contained code relating to a facial recognition infrastructure known as “NameTag.”
Although the feature has not yet been activated, it has been designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into biometric data and compare them with information stored on users’ devices. While Meta maintains that the system is inactive, the fact that facial recognition capabilities have already been integrated into an application downloaded by millions of users has heightened concerns that the technology could be activated in the future.
Critics warn that such capabilities could be misused by a wide range of actors, from stalkers to law enforcement agencies. In the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have already been photographed using these glasses in at least six states. At a time when women are already disproportionately targeted by digital abuse, the technology raises significant concerns about women’s safety.
Secret Recordings and Digital Violence Against Women
Examples of the technology’s misuse have already begun to emerge.
According to BBC reporting, some men have approached women on beaches, in the street or outside shops while secretly recording their interactions using Meta glasses. The videos are later uploaded to TikTok and other platforms as “dating advice” or “pick-up” content.
Many of these videos attract hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of views and generate engagement through degrading and misogynistic comments directed at the women featured.
Experts argue that the issue extends beyond covert recording itself. Women are increasingly being transformed into content for the online attention economy.
Speaking to CNN, feminist scholar Stephanie Wescott of Monash University identified a growing trend among male content creators—sometimes referred to as “manfluencers”—who secretly record women in order to produce misogynistic content. According to Wescott, women in these videos are presented not as individuals but as “targets to be conquered,” “prizes,” or markers of male success.
One woman from Brighton, Oonagh, only discovered weeks later that a man she had rejected had secretly recorded her using Meta glasses after the video appeared on TikTok. The footage also revealed the city where she lived and attracted numerous abusive comments. Although she reported the incident to the police, no legal action could be taken because it had occurred in a public place.
In another case, a woman reported that the content creator demanded money in exchange for removing secretly recorded footage of her.
Rebecca Hitchen of the End Violence Against Women Coalition described these developments as “disturbing but unsurprising.” According to Hitchen, the likelihood that such glasses would be exploited by perpetrators was entirely foreseeable.
Wescott argues that smart glasses do more than simply provide a new recording device. They also reinforce existing gendered power relations in public space by normalising the idea that women can be watched, recorded and lose control over their own images without their knowledge. This, she argues, strengthens the perception that public space is open to male surveillance and control.
She regards this as a new manifestation of gender-based technological abuse. The greatest danger, in her view, is that women lose control over their own bodies while often remaining unaware that this loss of control is occurring.
Workers in Kenya Review and Classify Recordings
Meta’s AI systems rely not only on algorithms but also on human labour.
According to investigations by Swedish media, content moderators based in Nairobi, Kenya, reviewed footage captured by Meta glasses and labelled it for AI training purposes.
Workers reported encountering recordings of people using the toilet, changing clothes, private moments captured after users forgot they were still wearing the glasses, and sexually explicit material.
Some Meta users subsequently filed lawsuits, stating that they had been unaware both that these recordings were being retained and that they could be viewed by human moderators. Following these revelations, Meta reportedly terminated the relevant contract in Nairobi.
The case illustrates that AI systems are not purely automated. Instead, highly personal recordings from millions of users may be reviewed by people on the other side of the world.
As Smart Glasses Become More Widespread
Meta says it has sold approximately seven million smart glasses to date. Mark Zuckerberg has described them as “one of the fastest-growing categories in the history of consumer electronics.”
Meta is not alone in this market. Apple is reportedly developing its own smart glasses, Google is preparing to re-enter the sector, and Snap is expected to launch the next generation of its Specs glasses.
As AI-powered smart glasses and similar technologies become more widespread, they pose particular risks for women and children, who are already among the groups most vulnerable to both digital and physical abuse. At the same time, the increasing integration of facial recognition technologies and large-scale databases by technology companies—and their potential use by authoritarian governments—raises broader concerns about surveillance, privacy and civil liberties.