‘Protest like nobody is watching!’

By Katharina Nocun, originally published on FeministTechPolicy.org.

‘It's hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren't AI glasses,’ Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg recently proclaimed. Seven million pairs of its AI ‘Glasses’ Meta claims to have sold in the past year alone. On the product page, bespectacled, conventionally beautiful people smile out at you. The use cases sound trivial: listening to music, making phone calls, private snapshots. Added to these are features such as real-time translation and AI search. So far, so convenient?

That Meta is hoping for synergies with its own social media platforms is obvious. As part of a large-scale campaign, an assortment of celebrities is currently promoting the product. One influencer, unboxing hers, gushes that filming her son will now be even easier. I suspect the inconspicuous glasses may well postpone the debate about whether the one-year-old even wants to be ‘content’. For unlike its predecessor from the house of Google, whose clunky camera invited comparisons with the ‘Terminator’, Meta has opted for two discreetly styled camera lenses at the edge of the frame. A collaboration with the established brand Ray-Ban does the rest to make the frames look unremarkable. A small light does come on during recording, but the internet is full of instructions for circumventing the measure. The ‘hack’ that defeats the latest security update from Meta, which is meant to put a stop to all this: a sticker costing two US dollars.
 
The consequences are grave. Since the manosphere discovered the product, countless videos have been uploaded in which women are secretly filmed and put on display. The tilt of the filmer's head shows unmistakably which parts of the body are being sized up. Then there are ‘pranks’, some of them aimed at older people who probably would never dream that they are at that moment being filmed by a pair of glasses. Beneath the videos, which sometimes generate hundreds of thousands of views, countless spiteful comments pile up. Meta did announce only recently that it would banish such content from its own platforms. Yet search queries continue to turn up such content. And the perpetrators have countless other digital channels at their disposal for carrying on their ‘game’ undisturbed.

‘It just allows you to be kind of living in the moment with your head up and your hands free,’ enthuses Alex Himel, Vice President at Meta Wearables. I doubt that women feel much the same when, at the club or in the gym, the gazes of his customers linger conspicuously long on their bodies. One person's freedom thus becomes everyone else's loss of control. The mere possibility of being thrown to an online mob, or used as ***** material, gives rise to a profound unease. Worry about covert surveillance and its consequences leads to adaptations in behavior, so-called ‘chilling effects’. The glasses' nicknames circulating online – ‘Pervert Glasses’, ‘Predator Glasses’, ‘Stalker Glasses’ – testify to considerable unease. And there are good reasons why feminists in particular are pushing back hard against the normalization of such products. I, too, now sometimes screw up my short-sighted eyes when a bloke in black Ray-Bans comes towards me at the open-air pool. It feels like the continuation of patriarchal entitlement and appropriation of space by new technical means.

The lack of representation of a heterogeneous society in Silicon Valley, combined with governments' lack of will to regulate, has for some time been imposing massive negative externalities on those affected. Women influencers now advise singing Disney songs during unwanted filming – in the hope of provoking a copyright takedown once the video is uploaded. This is unlikely to help in most cases, but it makes plain how little anyone trusts Meta to solve the problem. It is, after all, difficult to believe in the noble intentions of a company boss who once built a platform on which users could vote on the attractiveness of female fellow students on the basis of photos used without their consent. The guiding principle associated with Meta, ‘Move fast and break things’, all too often degrades those who are ‘other’ – from the developers' and investors' point of view – to tiresome collateral damage. Sacrifices one must be prepared to make – in the service of profit maximization. That goes for AI nude deepfakes. That goes for AIs that, on the basis of biased training data, advise women applicants to ask for lower salaries. And for photo services that take Black people for ‘gorillas’. Many small but also large decisions that shape the lives of billions of people. Profits are privatized, while the harms offloaded onto users and society are waved away as teething problems. Whoever criticizes is obstructing progress.

Kylie Jenner recently presented a model of her own as part of the Meta Glasses campaign. The billionaire owns several estates with large gardens, high fences and security staff. People like her need not worry about being filmed by strangers with Meta Glasses while working out at the gym. After all, the amenities of the average billionaire's villa include private pools, tennis courts and assorted further fitness facilities. Nor does Mark Zuckerberg need to fear that his three daughters will be secretly filmed as they romp about. The man who since the 2010s has never tired of explaining to the world that the old norm of privacy is obsolete has for years been systematically buying up the plots of land adjacent to his estate.

It has long been technically possible for friends to strap a GoPro camera to their heads and film us and the world, unasked, day in and day out, in the service of content generation. Social norms have prevented this. Social norms that exist for good reason, and whose point perhaps even Zuckerberg secretly believes in. It was precisely these norms that sealed the end of ‘Google Glass’ around ten years ago. Because they matter all the more not despite but because of digitalization. Who, after all, wants a ‘Glasshole’ – as the wearers were derided at the time – at a children's birthday party?

Honestly, I do not want to imagine a future in which the majority of glasses worn in public space are ‘smart’. Not only because I do not want men in glasses giving me the unpleasant kind of goosebumps at the public swimming pool, and because I cannot afford a private pool. What is at stake here, rather, are central societal questions of power and control, which today surface in supposedly isolated examples like these in consumer protection. At its core, what is being negotiated here is the normalization of a kind of surveillance that is likely to bring problems of an altogether different order in the future. Investigative reporting recently revealed that the code of the Meta Glasses at one point contained facial recognition software. The company removed the ‘feature’, which had not been armed, only after public criticism. In India, comparable technologies are already being deployed by security forces. ‘Direct Palantir interface – when?’, a follower recently asked me. Honestly, I hope never.

Katharina Nocun is an author, commentator and podcaster who studied political science and economics in Münster and Hamburg. Her work examines the tensions between digitalization and democracy. She has published four books and has been awarded the Marburger Leuchtfeuer (2017) and the Madsack Award (2023).

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