Through the looking glass: Meta Glasses, surveillance and the non-reciprocal gaze

From the 19th century onward, artists, scientists and journalists have used the camera to capture reality and reproduce its likeness to an uncanny degree. However, while photography has long served as a medium of visual documentation, the technology of the camera has consistently been employed as a tool of surveillance. One such example is the typological photograph, with which colonial anthropologists furthered their own methods of racial categorization; by posing Indigenous subjects against empty backgrounds and circulating their images to European audiences, these photographers captured and removed Indigenous bodies from their cultural contexts in order to justify imperial expansion overseas. In a similar vein, eugenicist Francis Galton invented the composite photograph as a way of recording human “types” associated with criminality. Repeatedly exposing the same image on different individuals convicted of crime, Galton would average the faces of up to ten different men in a rudimentary iteration of what would eventually become the mugshot. 

While photography continues to be used by state institutions as a form of surveillance, it is also increasingly being used to a similar end by individuals in private sectors. With the rise of discreet (and user-friendly) camera technology and free-use social media platforms, nonconsensual documentation in both private and public settings has proven to be a significant human rights concern of the 21st century. Products such as the iPhone, the Friend necklace and, most notably, Meta glasses, have made recording people in public more common and nearly undetectable. Thus, this raises the question: in an age where tools of surveillance are becoming increasingly invisible, how can the subject challenge the gaze of an unseen camera?

Meta Glasses: The Body as the Tripod

Meta, the social media company that owns platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, first released its Ray-Ban Display glasses in 2025, priced at $799 USD. While marketed as an AI assistant, music streamer and communication device, this product has primarily gained internet traction for its hidden camera feature that is directly built into the glasses frame. Using this technology, Meta glasses capture both audio and video when worn by users — and, unsurprisingly, its disguised recording abilities allow for unprecedented levels of covert documentation. 

Although questions of consent have always been an issue surrounding photography, the development of Meta glasses for private use signals a distinct departure from photographic consent as it has been constructed in the past. With this technology, the user wears, rather than holds the camera — thus, unless explicitly stated otherwise, the user avoids clearly alerting the subject to the fact that their image is being documented. 

Ironically, in a generally positive review of the Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, one reviewer noted: “The problem with using glasses as your camera is that your body is effectively the tripod.” While technically voicing a minor inconvenience that comes with the impractical recording feature, this comment also speaks to a larger, more disturbing aspect of the Meta glasses’ design: it transforms the body into an apparatus of the camera, rather than positioning the camera as an apparatus of the body. While the latter phenomenon has generally been true in past uses of photography, the “wearable” feature of Meta’s recording device has now narrowed the gap between operator and machine like never before. Thus, Meta’s new camera technology establishes the body to not be only a subject of photography, but an instrument of surveillance in itself.

Prank Videos and the Non-Reciprocal Gaze

Yet, while the covert nature of Meta glasses’ recording technology creates a power imbalance of its own between user and subject, the viral content for which individuals most frequently employ this technology also reveals a more troubling pattern of enacting non-reciprocal gaze on already marginalized subjects. As revealed by an increasingly popular subgenre of Meta glasses content, in which users record themselves pranking unsuspecting individuals on the street, on college campuses or in their places of work, the targets of these pranks are most commonly found to be women, service workers and unhoused people. This trend speaks to the intersectional implications of smart glasses, which are increasingly being used in ways that perpetuate preexisting power structures through the disproportionate surveillance of specific populations, particularly female-presenting individuals. Common formats of these videos include users verbally abusing service workers to elicit a reaction, approaching women and documenting their own sexual advances (even when rejected) and filming in businesses such as massage parlors while asking female workers for sexual favors. 

Offering a possible explanation for this specific form of online targeting, content creator Brad Podray (who has also engaged in many of these trends) notes that “creators gravitate toward women and service workers because they are more likely to produce usable reactions and less likely to push back in ways that threaten the content.” Thus, the problematic nature of smart glasses technology not only lies in whether the act of surveillance is visible or not — it also lies in the subject’s inability to prevent the extraction of their image, and then intervene in its publicization regardless of their consent. While Meta has responded to these concerns by pointing to a built-in LED light that is supposed to alert the subject to the fact that they are being recorded, the BBC has also confirmed that there is a wealth of online instructions that can be used to successfully disable this feature.

The Private vs Public Photograph

These issues of not only nonconsensual documentation, but also nonconsensual circulation of documented materials speak to a more general debate within photography: the fraught relationship between subject and photographer, but also subject and audience. Critic John Berger evaluates this dynamic in his concept of the private versus public photograph. In an essay titled “Uses of Photography,” Berger describes the “private” photograph as an image that is circulated primarily amongst its own subjects (such as a family portrait). Crucially, Berger notes that this audience has a personal relationship with the subject, because in the private photograph, audience and subject are the same. 

In contrast, Berger defines the “public” photograph as an image which is circulated in a context removed from that of the subject. He describes the disconnect between the content and the consumer, explaining, “The contemporary public photograph usually presents an event, a seized set of appearances, which has nothing to do with us, its readers, or with the original meaning of the event. It offers information, but information severed from all lived experience. If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger. The violence is expressed in that strangeness. It records an instant sight about which this stranger has shouted: Look!” 

Berger characterizes the capturing of an image for public consumption to be an act of violence and inherent “unknowing.” Here, the object of the photograph is not the subject, but the consumer. This extractive practice in public photography reflects the largely non-reciprocal aspects of Meta glasses content creation, which primarily serves an online audience entirely removed from the subject. 

In ASU’s The State Press article titled “What’s behind the glasses: The complex legality and ethics of recording on campus,” student journalist Katsuri Tale notes the extent of this non-reciprocal content extraction, writing that “ASU students are no strangers to street interviews – what makes this instance unique is that most of its subjects are unaware they are being recorded until a video is posted to a public account on TikTok.” In this sense, Meta glasses represent what is perhaps the most extreme form of public photography: this technology violates consent not only in the act of documenting, but in the act of circulating images of people who did not realize they were being documented in the first place.

Public Circulation by Design

Yet, while individual users who generate offensive, nonconsensual and extractive content are certainly at fault (as well as the consumers online who raise the demand for this content), it is important to note that these trends are also a symptom of larger cultural and technological structures that enable this content in the first place. When initially launched, Meta glasses only filmed vertically, in portrait mode — not landscape. One user-help article explains, “By default, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses record in portrait mode. However, this is expected because the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are designed for social media sharing, including Instagram and Facebook, which favor portrait mode.” 

As noted by this user, the unconventional aspect ratio reflects the broader interests of the manufacturing company itself. It is unsurprising that Meta, which owns both the glasses themselves and the social media platforms which this content is then posted on, would adjust this feature to maximize content production for their online platforms. Because of the restrictive nature of the format itself, these default settings indicate that the primary function of the Meta glasses camera is to record images for public circulation, even in spite of the discreet nature of the actual recording technology.

While the public largely regards the short-form content produced on the internet as “unserious” and user-initiated, these trends can be better evaluated on a systemic level through Theodor Adorno’s theory of culture industry. In “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” Adorno criticizes the role that ideology plays in the manufacturing of art or entertainment that is supposedly for “the people,” arguing that the masses are in fact another object that is constructed by curators of culture. He speaks to the trickle-down nature of ideology in entertainment, writing that “this is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as well as by economic and administrative concentration. The culture industry intentionally integrates its consumers from above.” 

Thus, the individual agency of creators and consumers remains heavily influenced and restricted by institutional interests, as well as design of the technology itself. Meta’s current smart glasses certainly demonstrate this: while the hidden camera feature enables users to film people without their consent, the portrait orientation of the recording itself encourages users to upload these same videos to the internet. While individual content creators must still be held accountable for exploiting unsuspecting subjects for online viewership, the fundamental design of Meta glasses points to the larger culpability of tech companies with regards to privacy violations.