Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Have A Huge Privacy Problem, Thanks To Modders

Controversy around covert public recordings has been around nearly as long as video cameras, but now a new frontier is opening due to the rising popularity of smart glasses. Per reporting by journalist Joanna Stern on YouTube, the latest front in the privacy war is being waged in garages and workshops. Stern discovered that droves of people were flocking to aftermarket modders to disable the recording light on their Meta Ray-Bans to create a “stealth mode.” This light indicates that the smart glasses are recording — perhaps your most private moments, according to a new investigation — and the glasses won’t record if the light is covered, say by a piece of black tape.

Stern discovered ads for this stealth service posted in 30 U.S. states. When she contracted a modder to disable the light on her own glasses, he told her that in a single day “eight or nine” people had contacted him for the service. Whether for seemingly legitimate reasons — Stern spoke to a protestor who wanted to record ICE activity without being spotted, for instance — or nefarious intentions, disabling the warning light challenges Meta’s narrative that its glasses are a benign portal for greater connection with the world around you.

In the video, Stern contacts a modder who agrees to allow her and her producer to film the process of the indicator light on her glasses being disabled. He starts by shattering the glass that protects the light housing, then drills out the light itself with a Dremel tool. Then, to ensure that the glasses look as though they haven’t been tampered with, he pours resin into the housing and then cures it under a UV light. The result looks almost indistinguishable from factory-sealed Meta Ray-Bans, especially when viewed from a few feet away.

While mods such as this aren’t the only workaround for the recording light, they are one of the most difficult to detect (though there are other ways to tell if someone is recording you with smart glasses). Normally, as Stern demonstrates, the glasses will refuse to record if they detect that the recording light is covered. However, caps designed specifically to obscure the light are able to fool the glasses by allowing just enough light in to indicate to the glasses that the indicator is clear. The issue for anyone looking to record covertly is that the caps are fairly obvious, unlike the mod, which is virtually undetectable.

Smart glasses have been implicated in a number of controversies. Several women have reported being filmed without consent by people wearing Meta Ray-Bans, often only realizing it after spotting videos of themselves online. Known as “rizz-camming,” these people use smart glasses to secretly record themselves hitting on others in public and then post the videos online. One woman became an internet folk hero after destroying a man’s Meta Ray-Bans when he filmed her on the subway.

Meta responded to Stern claiming that it deleted “thousands of ads” for the modding service, but as of this writing, a quick search on Meta’s own Facebook Marketplace turns up several active listings for the service. As Stern points out, disabling the indicator light isn’t currently illegal, but that could be changing. On June 5th, a bill was introduced in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives that would make it illegal to manufacture, sell, or create recordings with smart glasses that didn’t have a functional indicator light.

The legality of secretly recording is trickier. While it’s currently legal in most contexts to record people in public places, real world tests are often complicated by the concept of “reasonable expectation of privacy.” In some states, that expectation means consent is required from all parties to record. However, 38 states (and the District of Columbia) are one-party consent states, where you’re allowed to record even private conversations without the consent of the other person.