Extortion using footage from smart glasses is officially a real thing, as demonstrated by an eerie incident in London. A woman says a man wearing camera‑equipped smart glasses approached her near a shopping center and secretly recorded her as they conversed. She did not notice any phone or an obvious camera, and only later found out that a video of the encounter had appeared on social media and had received tens of thousands of views, the BBC reports.
When the woman contacted the account owner to request the video’s removal, he replied that taking it down was a “paid service.” She refused to pay and reported the matter to the police. The social media platforms removed the clip and banned at least one account, but whatever goes on the internet stays on the internet; copies and reposts of the footage kept appearing on other profiles.
Smart glasses with built-in cameras make abuse like this easier because they look like ordinary eyewear and record discreetly. Some models have a recording indicator, but such a tiny light can be easy to miss. Some users even try to hide the light by covering it up.
Meta claims that its smart glasses, Ray-Ban Meta, do not use facial recognition. But there are plenty of third-party tools that can take pictures and use online databases to identify people and gather more information about them.
This incident could be the beginning of a wave of abuse involving wearables and ambient AI data capture.
