One summer day earlier this year, Rhys left a Collingwood cafe in Melbourne where he had been working remotely, when his phone pinged with a message on the dating app Grindr.

The message was a photo of him sitting at a table outside the cafe on his laptop, with his dog seated on the ground next to him. In the foreground, in a man’s hand was an iPhone unlocked.

The photo had been taken moments before with Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, unbeknown to Rhys.

“He essentially wrote something about my dog being cute and apologised for not saying hi,” says Rhys, who asked that his surname not be used.

Rhys never noticed a flash, despite Meta Ray-Bans requiring an LED light to alert others to the device filming or taking pictures.

It felt creepy, Rhys says, particularly because the person didn’t say hi in the first place before surreptitiously taking a photo to send to him.

Smartglasses, such as Meta’s Ray-Bans, which have built-in cameras, microphones, and AI assistants, are growing in popularity as the clunky, ugly designs of earlier models are replaced with styles that are increasingly indistinguishable from regular glasses.

Meta says it has sold more than 7m of the glasses worldwide. It recruited the celebrity Kylie Jenner to star in online advertisements and partnered with social media influencers across the globe to attempt to bring the technology into the mainstream – and particularly into the hands of women.

Other companies like Snapchat are following with their own versions as tech companies look to find the next evolution beyond the smartphone.

But there is a growing backlash to, as they have been dubbed by some, “pervert glasses”. There are reports of women being filmed without their consent and having their interactions with a glasses-wearing influencer posted on social media. An ad by activist group Everyone Hates Elon features the late sex trafficker and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein wearing the glasses with the slogan “glasses for people who don’t do consent”.

While the price point remains high for the top-of-the-line models, cheaper versions are also becoming popular. Online retailers Amazon and Temu both sell knockoffs, while Australian low-cost retailer Kmart’s Anko-branded $89 camera glasses have already sold out, as Guardian Australia reported this week.

That news led to a petition by Australian activist group GetUp calling for a ban on the Anko glasses. As of Friday it had 21,000 signatures.

“It could be interpreted as a democratisation of access to these technologies,” Dr Fareed Kaviani, a research fellow in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, says of the Anko-branded glasses.

“But it’s not really a democratisation of consent – there’s a total lack of the ability for people to not only know if they’re being filmed … but there’s an inability to consent to being filmed.

“It really changes the dynamics of public space, raises a lot of privacy concerns, and a lot of concerns around the more vulnerable members of the public – especially children.”

Researchers at the University of Sydney analysed 350 publicly-available Instagram videos shot on smartglasses from around the world during 2023 to 2026, showing what they said was “a shift to discreet, point-of-view recording that is difficult for bystanders to detect”.

In a subset of these videos, around 60% of interactions could be classified as potential harassment, with subjects visibly uneasy or attempting to disengage, they say. In 43% of videos women were also abused in the comments of the post with some even revealing their personal details.

“Smart glasses have given pickup artists a new tool to further exploit women,” one of the researchers, Dr Joanne Gray, says in a statement accompanying the early findings on Friday. “You don’t know if you’re being filmed; that footage is then uploaded, exposing you to a wider web of harassment.”

Life-changing vision aid

But smartglasses do have some positive use cases. Graeme Innes, who has been blind since birth, says Meta’s Ray-Bans have been life-changing.

“I just use them all the time, and the fact they’re hands-free, it just makes a huge difference to my everyday life,” he says.

The former disability commissioner, now chancellor of Central Queensland University, says the glasses allow him to go for a walk and get feedback on his surroundings with the help of a visual description service.

At home, he can use it to check his credit card numbers, read a packet on an item in the kitchen cupboard, and to get cooking instructions.

“I was in a restaurant with my wife the other day, and I picked up the menu on the table, and just read it and chose what I want … that’s just something I’ve not been able to easily do in the past,” Innes says.

Chris Edwards, Vision Australia’s chief mission officer, says his life fundamentally changed when he got the Meta Ray-Bans two years ago, with the main benefit being the devices are hands-free, meaning he can use the AI assistant, or visual description services, to navigate.

“Getting support by humans is costly and impractical,” he says. “I do a lot of travelling for my work. And if I wanted to get similar support by a human, I would probably have to hire them for two hours.

“When I’m travelling [now] I can go to a location, put on my Meta glasses and be able to get descriptions of what’s around me, whether it’s a sign or a street sign or a bit about my location, all of those sorts of things.”

Specialist glasses for blind or low-vision people were available prior to the release of the current wave of smartglasses, but Edwards says they cost thousands of dollars and were not covered by the national disability insurance scheme.

Both Innes and Edwards acknowledge privacy concerns, but Innes says “that horse bolted 15 years ago when we got smartphones”.

“You can discreetly take pictures with a smartphone and the same privacy issues are there, so to single out the glasses as problematic – I don’t follow that logic,” he says.

Kaviani says the glasses are a “gamechanger” as an assistive technology, but “they’re not being marketed that way”.

Gray says governments should be acting early before the risks of the technology become “normalised and widespread”, and current privacy and harassment frameworks are not designed to address covert, continuous recording in public and semi-public spaces.

Meta last month rolled out an update that disables the camera if the LED light is interfered with, and also reportedly began removing videos from its platforms of wearers using the device to harass strangers in public.

However, legal recourse can be difficult. A new privacy tort in Australian federal law allows individuals to sue for invasion of privacy, but it is expensive for one person to take on.

If the images are posted to social media, they can be reported under eSafety’s adult cyber abuse scheme or children’s cyberbullying scheme. A spokesperson for eSafety says so far there have been a “small number of complaints where camera-enabled smart glasses may have been involved” and the regulator is closely monitoring how the technologies are being used.

“When it comes to filming people in public, just because technology makes something possible doesn’t necessarily mean it’s appropriate,” the spokesperson says.

The Australian privacy commissioner, Carly Kind, says smartglasses will “fundamentally alter our experience of interpersonal interactions”, and regulators should consider if new laws are required.

“As long as public trust in technology companies remains extremely low, the bar for establishing a social licence for rolling out new tech will be high,” Kind says.