Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth
The camera won’t start recording if the LED is blocked, but some people try to bypass this by starting a recording and then covering it up.
According to a recent Business Insider report that the company’s moderation efforts have not stopped all accounts built around covert filming. The update addresses a specific workaround that some wearers had discovered. Meta’s glasses already disabled their cameras if the LED was covered before recording began, but some users found they could bypass that restriction by covering the light only after a recording had already started. In a more detailed Threads post, Himel explained the fix further: “We have an update coming to increase the reliability of the capture LED on our AI glasses. A fix for this is starting to roll out – the camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording. Himel added that “only a tiny minority of people try to get around these protections, and the fact they have to go to these lengths shows our efforts are working. Despite the account suspensions Bosworth described, Meta has not been able to catch every instance of misuse. The privacy concerns have been compounded by other developments, including a report that Meta was working on adding facial recognition capability to the glasses. Together, those issues have contributed to what has become something of a broader public campaign against the devices.
The update follows a separate change made a little over a month earlier, when Meta adjusted its glasses to turn off the camera if a wearer physically tampered with the capture light itself.
Facing mounting criticism, Meta has moved to publicise new privacy settings for its glasses and has launched what amounts to a public relations push to explain how the hardware works.
In a rare public acknowledgement of the problem, Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth has recently said that the company has been removing content and suspending accounts tied to misuse of the devices. We took this issue all the way across Meta, and we’ve been taking down content and even whole accounts connected to people misusing the glasses,” Bosworth said in the video. The camera has no off switch and instead stops working entirely if a wearer tries to cover or deactivate the LED, according to Bosworth. Beyond software fixes, Meta is now running an advertising campaign to educate the public about the capture LED, focusing on communities “where glasses sales have been popular,” according to Meta spokesperson Albert Aydin.
Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses have run into a growing privacy controversy, as clips of wearers covertly filming women and strangers have spread across social media. Bosworth posted an Instagram video last week describing the built-in safeguard meant to alert bystanders when the camera is active. “We designed this camera to be noticed by the people around you, so in every pair of glasses we make, there’s a capture LED on the front, and it lights up when someone’s taking photos or videos for the gallery. One billboard currently displayed in Los Angeles shows the glasses alongside the message: “The camera lets you capture the moment. The light lets everyone around you know when you do.”