For decades, travellers returning from Europe to the Middle East carried stories that were more fantasy than fact—tales shaped not by reality but by the hunger of societies that knew the world only through hearsay. One of the most persistent myths of the 1940s claimed that Europeans wore special glasses that allowed them to see people naked. It was absurd, of course, yet it spread like a small cultural fever in communities where imagination about the human body was tightly policed and ignorance was a kind of social glue.

How could a pair of glasses undress women without their knowledge?

The question alone was enough to ignite collective astonishment in a time when curiosity was forbidden and the body itself was a taboo.

Those glasses never existed.

But the desire to believe in them certainly did.

And now—eight decades later—technology seems determined to avenge those old lies by making them real.

An investigation by Wired

An investigation by Wired

A digital empire above nations, with more than five billion subjects who obey without noticing.

These glasses do not strip the body the way the old myth promised.

They strip something far more dangerous: the human being himself—his privacy, his voice, his face, his movements, his very presence.

With a tap or a whispered command, anyone can film others without their knowledge. They can record conversations, capture faces, convert them into biometric data. They can steal private moments and turn them into content, blackmail, or commodity.

An investigation by Wired revealed that Meta has integrated facial recognition into the glasses’ app.........

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