Meta’s creepy smart glasses are part of a much bigger plan

Meta’s smart glasses just keep weirding people out. Renamed “pervert glasses” by some critics, the Ray-Ban smart glasses, made in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, have given rise to “creepy” behavior as users photograph and record people without their permission, then share those images and videos on social media and across the broader internet. The backlash points to a rapidly growing set of privacy, security, and ethical concerns. At the same time, Meta is using the content generated across its ecosystem to support Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a pervasive, AI-driven future. Zuckerberg’s 2026 manifesto describes a world where personal AI agents will do your bidding. But building those systems requires more than conventional AI models. It also requires enormous amounts of data about human behavior, much of it generated and shared through Instagram, Facebook, and other Meta apps, or captured through hardware such as smart glasses and EMG Neural Band devices. Privacy laws place limits on what Meta can collect, and in some contexts users can opt out. But vast quantities of data remain available, raising concerns that even seemingly incidental information can be swept into this syste…