Kylie Jenner in old-school sunglasses. (Swan Gallet/WWD/Getty)
Kylie Jenner asks her brand-new Meta glasses what the weather is like in New York City. Another Kylie Jenner, from inside said glasses, responds: “It’s around 68 degrees … light showers and cloudy skies.” The automated Kylie’s Calabasas accent fries the word “skies”, which crackles with the brogue of a gum-chewing, hair-twirling clubgirl — not the vibe of your typical weather reporter. “Thanks!” smiles flesh-and-blood Kylie.
For just $399, you too can have robot Kylie Jenner tell you the UV index from inside a natty pair of cat-eye specs. The Kardashian princess and makeup mogul has seen fit to expand her business empire — already worth upwards of $700 million — by “collabing” with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to release the Starfire Kylie Edition AI glasses, available in three tasteful colourways, with Kylie’s own voice used for the embedded AI assistant. The product’s six microphones and in-built camera with 3K ultra-HD video quality allows you to discreetly capture, record and post anything and everything you do over the course of your day. Welcome to the future, diva!
My guess is that for Meta, recruiting Kylie is less about shifting stock than detoxifying its brand. The tech giant must know that women the world over are highly — and rightly — suspicious of covert recording devices. Its glasses were first released in 2021 in a collaboration with Ray-Ban; since then, public surveillance has well and truly Metastasised. To date, more than nine million pairs of Meta glasses have been sold; growing demand means the company is considering producing 20 million by the end of this year.
Remember: this is the company — alongside Google Glass — which gave the world the “glasshole”, the marauding wanker who craftily records interactions with women on the street for his own, often nefarious, purposes. In recent years there has been an explosion in junk internet content involving “Karen” interactions, or pervy shots of scantily clad women tumbling out of nightclubs — a 27-year-old man was arrested in 2024 for doing exactly this in Manchester — made to be clipped and posted to social-media sites as thinly veiled softcore porn. In the Manchester case, police did not clarify what sort of device the man used, but the victims reported being recorded “without their knowledge of consent”. While such behaviour can often be blamed on the ubiquity of camera phones, covert devices — including glasses — compound the ability to film by stealth.
Another contemptible breed of glasshole is the YouTube “auditor”: a content creator who films himself testing whether public officials — police officers, government employees etc — respect his “legal rights”. These insufferable jobsworths, most notoriously the blogger Charles Veitch, go around deliberately provoking people in uniforms, or haranguing low-level staffers who have nothing to do with policy, for the sake of a viral clip or two. The alibi, as with most public recording these days, always appeals to a flimsy notion of the “right to record” — broadly true in any public space unless another law, location rule or civil right cuts across it. In the case of harassment or stalking — impulses which propel many of these viral videos — the right to record simply does not hold. I knew it was bad when my own dad appeared in the background of one of Veitch’s auditing videos, minding his own business outside his local bank branch. If the sleepy high streets of the East Midlands aren’t safe, where is?
Should the “right to record” be exercised so relentlessly? Obviously, emphatically not. Consent in these cases is asymmetrical: the glasses-wearer opts in, and the rest of us are involuntarily recruited. It is highly disturbing for the act of recording no longer to look like a weirdo shoving a phone in your face, but for it to be very likely taking place all the time, undetectably and as a matter of course. Low-level paranoia seems the only possible result. There is strong evidence that this recording technology is being gleefully taken up by a new cohort of ill-intentioned men — including a BBC investigation released in January which unearthed “hundreds” of videos of women who had been covertly filmed on Meta glasses. Many of them were “bombarded” with creepy messages after footage of them was posted to social media. In a lip-service attempt to make video-recording obvious, Meta has installed a white light on its glasses to tell us when we’re being filmed or photographed. Yet the archetypal glasshole will simply put a piece of black duct tape over the light — an unforeseeable outcome.
Nowhere has the scourge of men secretly recording women been so sorely felt as in Japan. There, upskirting and cameras hidden in women’s loos have instilled low-level dread into everyday life; as a result, smartphone manufacturers are required to build a shutter sound into camera applications which cannot be turned off, so that people always know when they are being snapped. In the West, if Kylie’s Meta glasses are anything to go by, the trend seems to be moving away from making devices obvious: these fashion-forward frames look like something you’d pick up in Urban Outfitters, not the shadowy shelves of Perves R Us. Yet smart glasses stealthify content-creation by design: you don’t need to point a phone, nor even swipe to open your camera; filming is as simple as looking at the subject, then murmuring “Hey Meta, start recording” or silently pressing the “capture” button. The result is to make the social act of surveilling your peers as frictionless as possible, while minimising the warnings to others that anything they do could be broadcast to the world.
To those who protest that if women feel comfortable dressing or acting certain ways in public, they have nothing to fear in appearing online, it’s worth remembering that a video does not have to be pornographic to be fetishistic or grim. We know that peeping through a keyhole is violating — but would you feel any less violated if someone zoomed in on your body on the bus? To many of us, being filmed at all feels like a transgression. Regardless of the context, it is impossible to predict how footage could be edited and used. In 2024, two Harvard students connected Meta Ray-Bans to a facial-recognition system which instantly found the personal information of strangers on the street. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to conceive of bad-actors using these details to disarm targets or gain their trust.
Meta probably hopes that by bringing in a fave of female pop culture, it can whitewash these realities and make women more comfortable with living in a fishbowl. Making such devices not only acceptable but cool makes resistance seem uncool. Selling these devices under the innocuous banner of feminine content creation is a cynical stab at removing our defensive instincts. You’re not the obvious subjects of this technology, gals — you’re its users, and you’re empowered! For Kylie, who has been featured on reality television in her own home since she was a child, the intrusion of cameras and microphones into daily life may not seem such a problem. For the rest of us, who have not had a desire for privacy whittled out of us since childhood, it should.
The problem goes beyond the gratification of the common-or-garden pervert. The constant paranoia of being captured doing something outrageous, or embarrassing, or accidental, or ridiculous is already warping the texture of public life. For those of us who spend hours watching videos of people falling over on TikTok, that feeling has come to saturate any time we spend in the outside world. Any perceived infraction is fair game for filming: dressing poorly, having the wrong political views, perhaps even having an annoying sneeze. Nobody is safe. What does it mean not only to fear slipping on a banana peel in front of 20 pedestrians, but to fear footage of said slip being broadcast to the entire world in an instant?
Privacy in public — to the extent that your every move might not become a viral video — is a value worth defending. If we let it slip, then none of us, man, woman or child, will ever again feel comfortable going about our business at the gym, the supermarket or on the train. The unguarded moments of being sloppy at the pub, or groggy on the commute, or gormless in the yoghurt aisle, will no longer be our own; we’ll become as straight-backed and meek as a Victorian child always in range of the schoolmaster’s cane. Err, and you’ll find yourself the star of a “Karen compilation”. The more we accept the rollout of these devices as normal, the more we all passively consent to the public space becoming a de facto content studio. Unless we shame those who use these devices in public, we submit to becoming performing monkeys. I don’t remember opting into that. Do you?
