Meta’s smart glasses were the company’s PR headache. The public backlash has been swift, and furious; people are concerned about the erosion of privacy and increased surveillance. Some bad actors use mirrors to film themselves “groping” strangers. Women have become social media platforms without paying attention to the men who take pictures of themselves hitting on them unknowingly. If your product is called “inverted glasses,” you have a problem on your hands.
on Thursday, Business Insider reported that Meta is taking the unusual step of banning some content recorded with Meta mirrors on the company’s own platform. Instagram head Adam Moseri recently said that content that “takes advantage of people and abuses them, like a lot of these types of videos,” will be removed from Instagram.
Notice for a moment the bind Meta finds itself in: Its product has allowed customers to behave so inappropriately that the company has responded by banning content, as if to say “Stop making us look bad.”
“We don’t want people to secretly take videos of other people and abuse them and post them on our platform,” said Mosseri, according to the report. Business Insider. “So we’re trying to fight that in every way possible.”
But it’s worth considering how we got here in the first place. And a policy like this also creates a new set of questions that need to be addressed in order to understand what a ban on some smart glass content really means – and how it will be enforced.
We expect little to no privacy in public spaces – you can be the subject of someone else’s Instagram Reel for walking down the street, taking the train, or shopping in a store. The rise of short-form video has given new life to the human-on-the-street content format, which has proven time and time again to be cheap and endlessly replicable; there are “creators” whose whole schtick is going up to strangers to ask how much they make or how much they pay in rent, or if they can sing a song. Some people just take videos of strangers minding their own business; others run up to people to praise them loudly and enthusiastically just to get a confused – or gracious – reaction on camera. Being public has always meant sharing space with other people, but now we should also expect to be video fodder for people who will eventually make money online.
Not surprisingly, some of the early adopters of smart glasses were content creators; making content creation even more crippling one of the main functions of Meta mirrors. Not everyone uses Meta glasses to make a film about the abuse of workers and women – some use the glasses to film “day in the life” lifestyle content, or their food, or concerts. But between the anodyne personal content and the harassment that is now banned, there is a lot of gray area that can be directly addressed by the new policy of Instagram: What about the accounts that host homeless camps for the content of a shocking amount, or silent films of active public figures? Is it considered harassment if a man films women at the gym but does not approach them? And if you find yourself in a clip that was shot without your knowledge or consent, is that a reason to ask Instagram to take the video down?
And what if someone is “covertly taking videos of other people and harassing them,” but the old fashioned way, not do you use smart glasses?
Meta spokesperson Albert Aydin said The Verge in the email the company works on disabling cameras on glasses when tampering is detected and removing content from accounts associated with those devices. Aydin did not answer specific questions about whether a person who has been recorded can apply to Meta to have the content removed; Aydin said that Meta is trying to “fight hidden film and LED interference in every way we can.” Aydin also did not give The Verge and a copy of the original policy.
The furore over smart glasses is partly due to the infamous “flip” of the glasses that Meta has had to blame – but more innocent examples are putting people on edge, too. When it comes to smart glasses, it’s less about the specific content being recorded than it is about the ability to do so, without others noticing what’s going on. When the company says it will guarantee the most dangerous type of smart glasses content but leaves deep questions, Meta tries to have it both ways: It gets to emphasize its enforcement while creating the conditions for this content to exist in the first place.
