Are Thousands of People Tampering With Meta Glasses to Secretly Record?

Thousands of Meta smart-glasses owners appear to have tampered with the devices’ recording lights, potentially allowing them to film people without the usual visual warning.

In an interview with Wall Street Journal technology journalist Joanna Stern, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said fewer than “one-tenth of a percent” of people with the company’s glasses had interfered with the system, describing it as a “very small fraction.”

Small fraction?

The glasses include an LED which is designed to blinks white when the user is recording or taking whenever the camera is recording. But if a sticker or tape to cover the light, the camera temporarily stops working. 

Stern said she recently took a pair to a workshop and had the indicator drilled out, physically disabling the light while leaving the camera functional.

“I was able to record without people knowing,” Stern said, before asking Zuckerberg how many people were actually doing the same.

“What we’ve seen is less than one-tenth of a percent of people who have the glasses,” Zuckerberg replied. “It’s a very small fraction.”

He added: “Whatever you’re building on any of these platforms, there are some adversarial games where people try to do bad stuff, and we are always going to be defending against that stuff.”

“It’s a very, very small percent,” he said.

Meta has sold millions of its smart glasses, meaning even a fraction of one percent could still amount to thousands of modified devices.

In July, Meta said that it “continuously improving” its ability to detect tampering, and has updated them the glasses to disable the camera if they detect the LED being tampered with.

Since when did we agree to turning ordinary people into walking CCTV units and changing the basic expectation that you can exist in public without being recorded from somebody’s face?