Summary:
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Meta’s smart glasses have a camera indicator light that users are paying to have removed for privacy reasons.
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Meta fights back by rolling out a software update that disables the camera if the indicator light is tampered with.
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The targeted individuals are disproportionately homeless, service workers, and women, with incidents of unauthorized recording at protests and restrooms.
The small white light on Meta’s smart glasses exists for one reason: to warn people around you that a camera on someone’s face is recording. For as little as $50, people were paying to have it destroyed.
Now Meta is fighting back. The company is rolling out a mandatory software update to its Ray-Ban Meta glasses that disables the camera entirely if the device detects that its recording LED has been physically tampered with or drilled out, according to journalist Joanna Stern, whose reporting prompted the change.
The light blinks whenever the glasses capture a photo or video, and Meta says it has no off switch by design. Earlier models already shut the camera off if the LED was covered with tape. The new update targets a darker workaround: people weren’t taping the light. They were drilling it out.
The change follows a monthlong wave of reporting by Stern, formerly of The Wall Street Journal, who exposed a thriving underground trade built around killing that light. She paid $100 to a man she found on Facebook Marketplace to have the indicator removed from her own glasses. The job was done in a New Jersey garage and finished so cleanly the glasses looked untouched. She found the service advertised in 30 states. One modder said eight or nine people had contacted him in a single day.
Those targeted are disproportionately homeless individuals, service workers and women, and the glasses have been used to record people at protests and in restrooms.
In one documented case, a woman in London was filmed without her consent by a man wearing smart glasses, who posted the footage online, where it drew 40,000 views, and refused to take it down unless she paid him.
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Meta says it is removing ads and Marketplace listings promoting tampering services, may ban accounts offering them, and is prepared to pursue legal action against sellers. It also claims no other camera maker has built a comparable safeguard.
Meta’s claim that it can now detect a physically removed LED is a company claim that has not been independently tested, and it’s unclear whether first-generation or Oakley models will get the same protection.
A one-way hardware change is hard to catch in software, and every fix so far has invited a new workaround.
