Meta is closing the most visible loophole in its smart glasses. The company is rolling out an update that stops the camera working if the alert light is covered during a recording. The move comes amid a backlash over nonconsensual recordings that have flooded the internet.

The glasses carry an LED that is supposed to tell bystanders the device is actively recording. Meta had previously deactivated recording if a user tried to start capturing after placing a sticker over the light. But people quickly learned to reverse the order: start recording first, cover the light afterwards.

Alex Himel, Meta's executive vice president of wearables, said in a post on Threads that the update ensures "the camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording." According to Himel, "only a tiny minority of people try to get around these protections, and the fact they have to go to these lengths shows our efforts are working."

What stays open

  • Bad actors may still modify the glasses or tamper with the light without affecting recording.
  • It is unclear whether common bypasses, such as semi-transparent stickers, trigger the new safeguard.
  • Even with the light on, bystanders have to know what it means.

Meta launched a marketing campaign for that last point. A billboard in Los Angeles shows a smiling girl wearing the glasses, her fingers drawing attention to the recording light. The caption: "The camera lets you capture the moment. The light lets everyone around you know when you do." It adds: "Designed for everyone. Not just the people wearing them."

The European front

Data regulators in the European Union are probing privacy concerns with the glasses and have suggested Meta may not have properly field-tested the LED — that is, never measured whether the public understands what it signals.

Germany is considering banning the glasses after a nonprofit filed a criminal complaint alleging they breach the country's strict privacy laws. Germany is not alone: many EU countries are weighing a crackdown on a technology they see as invasive and as carrying a risk of expanding mass surveillance. The European Data Protection Board will release a report later this summer deciding what actions should be taken so that nobody in the EU is recorded without consent.

What the lawsuit actually alleges

A proposed nationwide class action advancing in the US accuses Meta of continually lying about privacy risks in marketing the glasses. Meta has yet to file a response.

The core of the complaint looks somewhere other than nonconsensual recording. It challenges Meta's advertising claim that users control their data, calling it false, and alleges the company does not tell users that human data annotators in Kenya review all footage captured by the glasses. That reportedly includes deeply personal videos — depicting sexual activity or bathroom visits — as well as sensitive content such as credit card information and private messages.

One example cited: a user set his glasses down on a nightstand, and they captured video of his wife undressing. "The video was sent to people halfway around the world to view and annotate in order to train AI," the lawsuit says, "all without the woman's knowledge that the video of her had been captured in the first place."

Beyond damages, the plaintiffs want the court to stop Meta advertising the glasses as privacy-protecting.