People are going to extreme lengths to stop themselves from being filmed through Meta’s ‘pervert glasses’

There’s an ongoing arms race to protect identities and privacy in the age of facial recognition, biometric scanning and data collection. Now, some of those concerns are coming from the influx of wearables, namely, smart glasses, and how to go about protecting oneself from being filmed in public. Some joke about singing Disney songs, others use software, and some have even resorted to physical tricks. 

And the concern is warranted: Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, for example, have been coined “pervert glasses” for recording people undressing, and the company is even being sued after a study revealed Meta’s subcontractors are viewing your most intimate moments. This is all culminating into a real privacy concern as not only is your right to privacy (or lack thereof) in the public realm coming into question, but so is how to stop what you do in public from getting stored on a company’s servers. 

“We are living in weird times,” Jim Waldo, a professor of computer science who teaches several technological privacy courses at Harvard, told Fortune. “The technology is changing. It’s the combination of the Meta Glasses with facial recognition, AI, and a number of other sorts of technologies that are all coming together and putting us in an environment that we just aren’t prepared to deal with yet.”

The privacy concerns are real—from the suit to data collection, and even the social media content made with the tech has left people chalking up Meta Glasses as a form of surveillance. Even Meta’s Instagram has had to act: the platform disabled several accounts thanks to violations of content usage after those accounts amassed millions of followers by streaming live feeds from Meta glasses.

“We don’t want harassing content on our platforms and take it down when we find it,” a........

© Fortune