CommentaryWearable AI cameras like Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are outpacing the privacy and consent laws meant to protect people from covert recording. And the resulting footage is increasingly feeding the non-consensual intimate imagery market. The gap is widening fastest for women and girls, whose images are captured in public, uploaded without consent, and recycled into image-based sexual abuse.
In the late 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham coined the term panopticon, which in essence is a circular prison design intending to reform prisoners by way of constant surveillance. The principle behind it is simple, since prisoners had no way of knowing when they were being watched, they would have to correct their own behaviours and improve themselves. While the theory behind this has drawn mixed responses in academia, in the context of the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) gadgets in the 21st century, this concept becomes incredibly relevant. Although AI has numerous benefits such as speeding up the decision-making process and increasing overall efficiency, human rights concerns associated with its unregulated usage still remain. Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which embed smart technology into everyday glasses, allows users to record up to 3K ultra-HD videos and capture photos from their point-of-view without having to go through the hassle of bringing around a camera.
Marketed as a stylish, AI-powered smart eyewear that blends style and tech, the gadget has come under heavy, and warranted criticism, as this article puts forth, due to its users abusing it to take unsolicited photographs and recordings of individuals in public. As Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography (1977), “to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” Indeed, taking a picture of an individual or an object turns them into a static object and strips their bodily autonomy, a violation that has since been weaponized by the rise of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, which can be abused by unscrupulous actors to capture these pictures without consent. When uploaded to platforms, these images risk becoming training data on non-consensual pornography sites and commodifying women’s bodies. To be clear, this article does not demonize the blanket usage of smart glasses, the primary concern is not the device itself, but the predictable abuse that it creates.
News articles reporting accounts about young women and girls not realizing that they had been filmed without their consent, only realizing after the videos were uploaded onto social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok underscores the severity of the issue. Although the design of the glasses is fixed with a blinking light when pictures or recordings are being taken, they can easily be concealed with tape, which renders this safety feature ineffective. This article puts forward the argument that covertly filming women and girls is a digitized version of sexual and gender-based violence, which fuels the market for non-consensual pornography.
Invisible Surveillance Devices Outpace Existing Domestic and International Laws
At present, a single universal international statute addressing the issue of filming women and girls without their consent does not exist. Currently, the crux of international privacy rights relies on a combination of domestic data protection regulations and human rights treaties such as Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The lack of a streamlined international statute to address the dangers of devices like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses is disappointing and is primarily due to the rapid advancement of such technology outpacing the drafters’ ability to create a coherent international document as a guideline. In addition, privacy and civil rights laws vary from one jurisdiction to another, and this is best illustrated by using the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU) as an example. Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR; the retained, post-Brexit version of the EU regulation), processing of images, voice, and video must have a lawful basis. In the EU, Ray-Ban Meta glasses have faced rollout delays over compliance with the EU AI Act.
The Meta glasses also fail to comply with the EU Battery Regulation, which essentially requires that consumer electronic devices should be fitted with user-removable and replaceable batteries, a condition that the glasses do not fulfil due to its design prioritizing maximum user comfort. Turning to the United States of America, such laws regarding the usage of these devices vary according to the internal legislation of each of its 50 states. Out of the 50 states, 38 of them operate under one-party consent laws, meaning that an individual can legally make audio recordings as long as they participate or consent to it. The remaining 12 states operate under two-party consent, meaning that both the individual recording and the people present in the recording must consent to it. Non-compliance with the legislation could potentially cause the wrongdoer to be held criminally liable.
For instance, the rapid advancement of such wearable technology and its intrusion into people’s personal lives was demonstrated when a young man in Massachusetts had been approached by a stranger wearing smart glasses who seemed to know his identity and the nature of his work. The posting of the video onto platform X, formerly known as Twitter, shocked him when he discovered he had unwittingly become part of a viral demonstration. Whether the recording violated Massachusetts’ two-party consent statute (Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 272, § 99) turns on the facts, but the victim’s shock and the ease with which the recording occurred exposes a deeper problem, as even where such laws exist, their application to newer devices is relatively untested. When a device more miniscule and more advanced than a typical recorder falls between the gaps of state statute, the question is not whether laws exist, but whether they can be updated in time, a problem that becomes more urgent when the victims are not just young men, but young women and girls, whose images are used for sinister reasons.
Unsolicited Images and Videos Feeds the Non-Consensual Pornography Market
The speed at which the non-consensual pornography market, also known as image-based sexual abuse market is growing in recent years is alarming. Between the years of 2019 and 2024, content regarding sexual deepfakes, which are digitally altered or entirely computer-generated images, increased by 1,780%. The birth of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses have only increased the degree of harm that can be inflicted onto the lives of women and girls, since abusers can use the glasses to record victims in private spaces, including bedrooms and bathrooms. Prior to wearable devices, the typical manners in which predators gained material for their abuses were entirely manual, such as concealing tiny cameras in bathrooms and public transportation, upskirting, and hacking into victims’ personal phones.
Such recordings and snapshots are then typically used to blackmail victims, unleashing havoc onto their lives, with many of them being extorted large sums of money in exchange, and facing severe psychological harm when the material is leaked. Compared to the traditional methods of filming young women and girls secretly, which were limited by physical access, today’s unsolicited images and videos feed the non-consensual pornography market and turn every interaction in public into a potential source of abuse. In the UK, a woman was approached under the guise of casual conversation and a man had filmed her using the glasses, with the footage later uploaded to social media. After finding out about the video’s existence, she immediately contacted him and requested that he take it down, but he instead asked her to pay for its removal. In addition, these women, who are approached in public by these men are subjected to online harassment, whether it be due to their appearance or their behaviour, and are often subject to cruel mockery and degrading treatment in comment sections.
Digital permanence — the ability of social media to never forget any video or image uploaded to it even if it has since been deleted due to the data being copied across multiple servers — almost guarantees that these women and young girls are stuck in a cycle of re-victimization. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses act as a catalyst for rising violence against women, who already feel unsafe both in public and at home, particularly due to ‘sleep content abuse’ which is where men drug, assault, and record their partners in their sleep. Beyond street harassment, recently published findings where Meta had two lawsuits filed against them after preliminary investigations showcased that third-party contractors had access to user-captured footage and could inadvertently see women being filmed in private environments, meaning that every stage of the glasses’ ecosystem acts as a supplier to the non-consensual pornography market.
With the many examples embedded throughout this article, it becomes clear that the invisible panopticon is no longer hypothetical. It already exists in the form of seemingly ordinary glasses with the power to peel back the layers of consent one by one and further fuel sexual and gender-based violence against women. The question before us now is whether the relevant authorities will take immediate action to address this issue to foster a safer environment for all.
Sarisha Harikrishna is a BVS candidate at City St. George’s, University of London, and holds an LLB (Hons.) from Queen’s University Belfast. She is a legal research analyst at the Human Rights Research Center (HRRC) and an associate editor at JURIST.
