He’s based in Los Angeles, and while we speak, he eats what appears to be tuna directly out of the can. He’s one of hundreds of vendors, easily discoverable online, who specialise in disabling the flashing LED light embedded in Meta’s smartglasses that blinks when wearers capture photos, videos and audio. After Ghost Metas disables the LED, it’s impossible for someone to know they’re being filmed.
He flips his camera over to show me his work bench, revealing painter’s tape, a drill, a hole puncher, a dental pick and a tube of resin. He says he’s worked on about 100 pairs of glasses, and that one pair only takes him about 15 to 20 minutes. Meta said that it sold roughly 7 million pairs in 2025 alone, practically tripling combined sales numbers from 2023 and 2024.
Influencers, athletes and global celebrities such as Chris Hemsworth and Teyana Taylor have embraced the tech in sponsored posts and buzzy ads. The glasses mark a turnaround for a company that made big missteps by overinvesting in virtual reality “metaverses” and trailing behind in the AI race. The most notable endorser has been Kylie Jenner who, in June, collaborated with Meta on her own line of AI glasses.
Meta promises that users can ask Kylie’s glasses any question, and the AI will issue “every response in Kylie’s voice”. The reality of how people are using the glasses has been less benign. They have been widely used for exploitation and privacy violations, much of which has been bragged about on social media by bad actors themselves.
Online creators – primarily men – have used the glasses to troll boardwalks, college campuses, and streets outside bars in search of women to hit on, and then post the interactions. Some men have recorded overtly racist videos in which they enter massage parlors staffed by Asian women and ask for “happy ending” massages. Others have used the glasses to record bathing suit-clad women at the beach.
I’ve spoken with people who say Meta Glasses have been used to secretly record their private interactions, with one source describing an incident inside her house that she felt endangered her children. Many of these videos are captured and posted online without the consent of their subjects, often by influencers who want to humiliate the subjects they’ve filmed. To protect against this, on every pair of glasses there’s an LED light that’s supposed to let people know the glasses are recording.
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