The young woman in hot-pink shorts was shocked to discover she was secretly filmed by a man wearing Meta's Ray-Ban Stories camera glasses in a Target store, after spotting herself in a 'rizz video' on Instagram. The woman, known as [PERSON_NAME], an esports broadcaster better known as [PERSON_NAME], expressed outrage on X, calling the glasses 'disturbing' and 'violating & WRONG.' The Instagram account that posted the video has since been removed, part of a growing trend Meta is rushing to ban due to videos showing women secretly filmed by men in smart glasses.

Despite the summer's backlash, executives at Meta, Google, Open AI and other tech companies see this as just the beginning. They hope smart glasses and similar portable products could one day replace the smartphone as our main gateway to AI. The big idea is that letting our virtual assistants see and hear exactly what we do will make our AIs richer and smarter, extending our own intelligence by boosting our memory and organising our lives.

"We think that AI is going to be really empowering for people," says [PERSON_NAME], vice-president of wearables at Meta. "And how are we going to use the AI? We think it'll be wearable form factors." Billions of people already wear glasses, he adds, and using these to talk to AI is easier than having to pick up a phone and open an app.

For all the privacy furore, smart glasses sales are growing rapidly. Analysts at Counterpoint Research estimate consumers will spend more than $1tn between 2026 and 2032 on wearable devices. Smart glasses alone will generate an estimated $44bn in sales by 2032. Meta's vision, which also includes "super sensing" AI glasses that constantly record the world around the user, has only fanned privacy campaigners' fears that smart glasses could soon become even more intrusive than viral rizz videos.