“We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people.”
Meta has started banning Instagram users that use the company’s glasses to secretly record people to make content, according to a report by Business Insider. Meta owns Instagram, so this feels like an admission of something everybody already knows: a whole lot of creeps have begun using Meta Glasses to record people without their consent.
“If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kinds of videos that we’ve heard of and seen, then we’re going to take the content down,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently said in a social media post. “We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform.”
Regular Instagram users will likely have run into some of this stuff. Much of it involves arrogant content creators doing pranks on service workers, all while secretly filming everything with Meta Glasses or a similar product. Many of these “pranks” verge on harassment.
Other videos involve men filming their interactions with women in public. The women typically don’t know they are being filmed, which has given Meta’s specs unfortunate nicknames like “pervert glasses” and “predator glasses.” That is not great for branding and the continued success of the products.
We don’t know just how many videos have been removed under the new policy. Business Insider has noted that a pair of high-profile accounts that regularly film women in public without consent have been deactivated. The company also confirmed to the publication that those accounts were banned specifically for posting harassment content filmed with its glasses.
This isn’t the only move Meta has made to try to stem the tide of creepy behavior enabled by smart glasses. The company recently added software that disables the camera entirely if the LED light that indicates recording has been tampered with. People have been hiding this light with tape, film or by drilling holes.
This led to the creation of a cottage industry of people willing to “jailbreak” smart glasses so users can film without that pesky light going off. Meta’s recent software fix hasn’t been live long enough for us to get a sense if it made any kind of a dent in unsavory behavior.
However, it’s worth noting that the LED light isn’t exactly a spotlight. It’s easy to miss, even when turned on. This is especially true while recording outside in natural light. Still, it’s good Meta is doing something about a problem that the company had a major hand in creating.
