As anxieties over surveillance tech grow, unsuspecting singles are sharing stories of being covertly filmed on dates by Meta smart glasses.

They met at a bar in midtown Manhattan. He arrived wearing a baseball cap pulled low and sported a pair of black-framed glasses, she says. As conversation flowed, from discussions about navigating life in New York to past relationships, he mentioned that his glasses were Meta Ray-Bans.

“I wasn’t familiar with them,” McAnuff, a 28-year-old project manager who now lives in Toronto, tells WIRED. It was her first time seeing the smart glasses up close, which can record images and video from the wearer’s viewpoint. He let her try them on and even showed her a couple of videos that he’d taken previously, she says. “That was it. We stopped talking about it after that. I figured that was the end of the use.”

The next day, checking her Instagram, McAnuff noticed she’d been tagged in one of his story posts. To her surprise, it was footage of them at the bar and on the subway together, en route to a basketball game uptown. In the video, McAnuff is captured from an above angle, sitting across from her date who is holding a drinking glass; WIRED has seen screenshots of the footage. “I felt super violated,” McAnuff says. “Like, what if I don’t want everyone knowing what I’m up to? He felt so free to film me and post it. There was no conversation about it.”

Meta sold more than 7 million pairs of the Ray-Bans in 2025, as its smart glasses have infiltrated public spaces thanks to pranksters with dreams of viral fame, some of whom even film people while they’re at work. The phenomenon, which has also spread to pickup artists hitting on women, has earned the hardware the nickname “creep glasses.”

Among singles, and particularly women, Meta’s AI-powered eyewear has become a recurring nuisance, as people share a spreading unease about being covertly filmed on dates.

  • Malica@lemmy.zip
    8·
    17 hours ago

    I think remember reading one about a South Korean lady wearing them on dates and feeding the footage into Claude to analyze and improve her dating skills.

    • velma@sh.itjust.worksOP
      41·
      17 hours ago

      That’s interesting! The article goes into some men using the glasses for the same thing:

      Gary Lewandowski, a psychology professor at Monmouth University whose research focuses on the science of romantic connection, says adding covert cameras to the mix will only make building trust harder. He says beyond posting for the ’gram, a number of factors could be driving men to do this. The most logical, non-creepy reason may be tied to post-date analysis, in that the glasses can help men identify blind spots around their own behavior.

      “A lot of men out there are eternal optimizers. They want better, more efficient ways of doing things, so reviewing game tape allows them to learn from mistakes,” Lewandowski says. “But I do wonder if some are doing it to build a case instead of a connection—why they’re right and the other person is wrong—or to help better identify red flags.” That type of surveillance “makes the date less about getting to know each other and more about fact gathering,” he adds.

      I can see the benefits of that approach as long as the person being recorded is aware of what they’re being used for.