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Any notion of privacy in the modern digital world is a farce. Every time you walk down a neighborhood street, ring cameras on door frames are capturing every single thing that you do. Every time you look around and see a Tesla with your own eyes, it can see you right back with a battery of external cameras all over the place. And even the Wi-Fi signal in your home can detect heart rate, breath patterns, and body position. The concept of privacy is functionally dead. But that doesn't mean that people want it to be.
Before I get started, I want to go back in time 13 years ago. For some of you, that's a very long period. For others, not so much. But in the world of technology, it's an eternity. Back in 2012, Google unveiled a product, Google Glass, in this case, which was intended to revolutionize the world of augmented reality. The concept was simple. Glasses that performed functions. They could be a GPS or a calendar. They could search up information on the web or make plans. But they also had the function of recording video and taking pictures. By no means the primary function, these glasses were intended to replace the smartphone.
But even with the backing of a powerhouse like Google, practically unlimited funding, marketing, and technological support, something very interesting started happening as soon as the products began hitting the street. First and foremost, they attracted a lot of attention. The design wasn't exactly subtle. It was new age technology smack dab in the middle of your face. You quite literally look like something out of Star Trek. But after the curiosity died down on a cultural level, everything changed. Bars and restaurants began ejecting or outright banning people who tried to wear the glasses. And in some cases, users were getting physically attacked because of the device. Whether or not the devices themselves were being used inappropriately didn't exactly matter because the social environment around them rejected the concept. People who used the product became known as glass holes and just two short years later, Google discontinued production in its current form, effectively ending its push into the consumer market. The product itself would limp on in the enterprise world for a little over a decade. But in 2023, that also ended, closing a chapter in Google history that started with a bang and ended with a whimper.
Why does it matter? Well, it matters a great deal because society hasn't really changed since then. In some ways, yes, it's actually worse. aka like Tik Tok and youth behavior. But for those of us who are old enough to understand the difference between our ass and a hole in the ground, certain things have also stayed kind of the same. People may not blink at the fact that when you plug your phone into your car, it can harvest all of your phone calls and text messages. Most people probably don't even know that actually, but out in the world at a bar or a restaurant, people still don't like the concept of glasses capturing everything that happens. The term glass holes was born for a reason. And yet, even in the face of Google's failure, not so much because of tech, but more so because of stigma, even in the face of that failure, Meta aka Mark Zuckerberg, formerly Facebook, Meta has decided to go allin on Rayban AI glasses.
As of right now, just a couple years after launch, Meta's new Rayban AI glasses are outpacing Google Glass in every conceivable metric. The tech is better, obviously that happens with time, and the sales are better, partially because of price point and brand partnerships. But the biggest reason why these glasses are so much more accepted nowadays, is because they aren't. Meta Ray-B band sunglasses are almost indistinguishable from ordinary sunglasses or even optical supports to a degree where most observers simply wouldn't even be able to notice a difference. The product is selling better. It's facing a tiny fraction of the relative backlash, but that's not because they've changed anything. It's not because society suddenly welcomes the concept. It's because instead of innovating, they disguised the product. Meta has taken something that failed on a widespread consumer level, mostly because of stigma, and simply made it harder to recognize, thereby mitigating the immediate business problem, certainly, yet also simultaneously creating about five or six dozen severe privacy issues that may not currently have blown up in their face, but absolutely eventually will. In fact, they're starting to right now.
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Okay, back to it. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. Meta's terms of service agreement explicitly tries to address the issue of privacy. They have this whole responsibility section on their website and one of the mechanisms they imposed as an effort to enforce this is an LED video light. If the glasses are on, thereby saving whatever they see, there's a flashing indicator and technically disabling that indicator is a violation of their terms. Not only is it against the agreement, but it's also intended to be rather difficult to do. Ideally, disabling the light would be straight up impossible. And they're programmed in such a manner that if the glasses sense an obstruction to the light, they don't work properly. They say remove that obstruction. But the lifespan of this preventative measure was extremely short-lived.
Reported back in October of 2025 by 404 Media, excellent outlet by the way, make sure to check them out. A particular engineer named Bong Kim had figured out a way to modify the glasses imperceptibly so that the LED light no longer showed. His justification was that if people know there's a camera, they act differently, which is fundamentally true. There's all sorts of media examples to that end. But the unspoken side effect is fairly obvious. Here's an example of a Tik Tok influencer, aka Subhuman, using the glasses to harass women at University of San Francisco when talking about the idea of disabling the warning light. You're explicitly catering to people like that. In a more official capacity, these glasses are now prohibited by the United States Air Force, which only happened in January of 2026 because official policy always lags behind the technology. And if you want an even more extreme anecdote, here's a recent thread about a potential pharmacy technician wearing Meta Rayban glasses at their job. That's a pretty obvious HIPPA violation. And just because various workplaces haven't yet created prohibitive policies or strictly enforced them, it doesn't therefore mean that the product itself is somehow immune to that future.
Like I said before, 13 years in the world of technology is an eternity. But even 6 or 8 months now can feel like years. Back when 404 media reported initially on the work of Bong Kim, the process of rendering Metaglasses LED warning lights inoperative was relatively unknown. Generally speaking, it cost $60. It required you to have someone physically handle the device for you and make the modification. But flash forward to now and YouTube, among many other social media platforms, is filled with videos and explanations about how to deactivate the safety feature with everything from drilling to soldering to covers and more. There are millions of views now for these videos, which are DIY guides. They're not entertainment. So, it's not like people are just watching this for the fun of it. they're typically watching and replicating the steps and doing the thing that's in the video, right? So, that's a lot of people that are that are trying to make this modification. So, there's millions of views now on how to expressly create something that they call stealth mode, which means video without the LED warning light.
And by itself, in a vacuum, it's not necessarily the most pressing issue that we all face. But when you combine that with the revelation that Meta Glasses are outsourcing moderation and most importantly product enhancement to a third-party contractor in Nairobi, Kenya, that's when things start to get pretty insane. People who wear these glasses are assuming that they are the ones in control. Except they're not. According to an investigative report by Sensa Dagladet out of Stockholm, Sweden, probably butchering the pronunciation there sadly. According to that report, contractors in Kenya working for a company called SAMA are witnessing everything from bank details to medical information, private moments, bathroom visits, crimes being discussed, and everything in between. That content is being shared with at least one third-party contracting company. We don't currently know if there's more or not. where it gets reviewed and seen and translated and subtitled and evaluated overall by real people. Just in case the gravity of what that truly means hasn't sunk in yet, if you look at a sensitive mortgage document with the glasses on or a bank file or you have the password visible on your login credentials or you look at your own fingers on the keyboard as you log into your credit union, all of that information is now spreading across the planet. And that's even before we connect the dots. Remember, prevalence and ease when it comes to disabling what little safety measures there were to begin with are exponentially rising. You don't need to mail anything or pay anything. Now you can shut off the LED warning light with a simple drill and then everything you look at with this new stealth mode capability ends up displayed or available to human people at a major tech company.
Facebook isn't a social media firm. I guess I should probably call it Meta now. I just I grew up with it being called Facebook. So, it's a hard habit to shake. Meta isn't a social media company. It's a data company. The glasses are the physical product, sure, but the actual value isn't the money from the sale. It's the data that they aggressively gather afterwards. This is a total guess right now, by the way, but I would practically bet anything at this point that Facebook is willing to take major losses on hardware costs just to get as many of these glasses out into the population as possible, as quickly as possible, because the data that they recoup from it afterward is almost priceless.
Workplaces will eventually catch up to this. Social environments likely will, too. And I wouldn't be surprised to see restrictions placed on glasses like this popping up all over certain industries. Stigma is a powerful thing. And when you think of Google Glass, that stigma was very obvious. Unavoidably plastered right there on your face. As a result, the backlash was quicker and more severe. But for Meta Rayban sunglasses, the stigma and the backlash just hasn't caught up yet. The IOC, as in the information commissioner's office in the UK, seems to be the first regulatory body to begin officially examining this, but there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that we're simply witnessing a sophisticated and calculated gambit for data acquisition. the product itself is not the priority. And even if governments crack down on what can be gathered and shared and evaluated or held especially on Meta servers or Facebook servers in the future, even if they eventually find them billions of dollars for violations and improper data handling, which is almost certainly going to happen at some point down the road, but even if it does happen, none of that matters in the long run because here and now they can gather obscene amounts of visual data regardless of security, ethical, privacy, or moral arguments and then use all of that data to enhance AI models, train algorithms, and beef up advertising profiles. It's remarkably similar actually to how Open AI scraped the entire internet effectively and then monetized the product afterwards. They don't really care about the lawsuits at this point, even if they lose, because they already did it. Closing the stable doors after the horses have bolted, doesn't do very much. And given the fact that the most immediate or significant difference between Meta and Google attempting a nearly identical concept over a decade apart is that one of them was identifiable and unique while the other is intentionally disguised. It rapidly becomes clear at that point that the gambit isn't product sales. It's dragnet data acquisition where all sorts of that should not be videoed is getting videoed and stored or sent or seen by people who should not see it.
Just to be thorough, a lot of what I've said today sounds really abstract. So, I'll give another example, a concrete example. MSC Cruises has now updated their policies to explicitly forbid smart glasses from being worn in public areas. They'll actually confiscate them, perfectly underlining my point that while technology basically moves at the speed of light, social expectations kind of don't. Imagine a world where the Meta Ray-B band sunglasses that you bought can't be worn at a restaurant or a cruise or any government facility like a courthouse or the DMV or even the grocery store or basically any indoor public space or commercial space and certain outdoor spaces on top of that. Imagine if the only place that you could realistically wear your stupid little sunglasses was in your own home. Else you risk ridicule or rejection or confiscation of the device itself. that immediately destroys the entire appeal of the product because the product isn't what matters. The data is. There's almost nothing that a pair of glasses like that can do beyond the capabilities that a smartphone already has had for years. And smartphones will never carry those same restrictions or stigmas. Putting the smartphone on your face doesn't make it better. It changes the type of data yield. And so Meta has taken a concept that verifiably failed 13 years ago, obfiscating it with luxury branding, and blitzing it out to the population as fast as they can.
Right now, we're living in the golden age of user data. Everything you type in the search bar, click on, or even hover the mouse over. Everything you stop scrolling to watch, everything you buy, even places you drive to and how long you stay there are all used to construct a profile and train all the algorithms. We are rapidly approaching a stage of modern society where every single thing that you ever do, say, look at, or interact with is cataloged. And who knows, I could be wrong about the impending push back when it comes to meta sunglasses in particular. I really don't think I am, but it's possible. So, take what I've said all of this with a grain of salt. However, when I look at the world around me, the major companies that dictate or control larger and larger aspects of our daily lives, I find myself wanting to at least draw attention to the fact that 13 years ago, everybody mocked and stigmatized a pretentious group of tech bros, ostracizing them effectively to an extent where the product kind of failed. I mean, that's not the only reason, but it's a pretty big one. And then today, the exact same thing is being rolled out everywhere. They just put a fancy Ray-B band logo on it. Do your part, dear viewer, please, and make these people feel unwelcome, shall we say. It's our civic duty at this point.
Anyway, that's it. If you want to support the channel, check out the links down below. The video sponsor, of course, Surf Shark Locals and Patreon channel memberships, right? Monthly subscriptions, that's great, etc., etc. I have a bit of a different upload schedule recently for a variety of reasons. Some of them personal, some of them not. I am touching grass as they say, but I'll probably get back in the swing of things soon with a much more typical upload schedule. As always, thank you all for watching. Question everything and have a nice night.