Everything Is Content - Everything In Conversation: Meta Glasses, Perverts & Privacy Vs. Content

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Hello EICustard Creams! For this week's bonus we're discussing the ethics of wearing or owning smart glasses. It's a tech that has existed in various forms for over a decade, first with Google Glass, then Apple’s Vision Pro, which caused concern on release for featuring twelve cameras, six microphones and two depth sensors. And now Meta, along with other big tech giants, are expanding their own smart glass collections, ponying up for huge celebrity endorsements and seeking to normalise the tech for everyday wear. With your help- we discuss.Thanks so much for your takes on this topic. We love love love being In Conversation with you all!B, R, O xLinksThe Washington Post - Smart glasses record people in public. The most online generation is pushing backCNIL - Smart Glasses: The CNIL calls for vigilance TikTok - Alex Haddon matches songsBBC - Woman covertly filmed for 'humiliating' social media content - then told to pay Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Beth. I'm Ruchera. And I'm Anoni. And this is Everything in Conversation. Your midweek pop culture top-up and the episode where you join us in the discussion. If you want to be involved in future episodes, just follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Everything is ContentPod. The Washington Post publish a piece called Smart Glasses Record People in Public. The most online generation is pushing back.

subheading reading, the people leading the rebellion against camera-enabled glasses in public are the same ones who grew up sharing everything online. And in the piece, which we will link, as always in the show notes, writer Tatum Hunter argues that despite being one of the most logged-on and tech-dependent generations, Gen Z's distaste for smart glasses like the meta-ray bands is really pronounced. And this kind of tech has existed in several iterations for over a decade, first with Google Glass, which, as Tatum notes, were quite ridiculed at the time of release. Then Apple's Vision Pro, which came out last year, and caused concern for featuring 12 cameras, six microphones and two depth sensors, and now meta, along with other tech companies,

are launching their own glasses using cameras, AI features and speakers. The piece quotes Alice Marwick, who is a director at Nonprofit Research Institute's Data and Society. She says that, quote, different generations have different attitudes towards digital privacy, depending on their experience with technology. And while millennials were known as the generation of oversharing, Gen Z tends toward a more measured approach. Today, social media activity is dominated by large creators, while many users avoid posting altogether.

The costs of sharing the wrong thing can be profound, with many high-profile cases of people losing jobs or becoming the target of harassment. The benefit of appearing online, meanwhile, is relatively low as people move away from sending photos at their breakfast to a few hundred close followers. It's a fascinating piece and raises so many questions about generational attitudes to tech, surveillance culture, abuse of privacy, and a new frontier of antisocial digital behavior. And in a world where everything increasingly is content, we had to talk about this. So before we get into what the listeners thought, what did you both make of the piece?

And I guess what is your knee-jerk reaction to this tech and the idea that more and more people will start wearing these smart glasses in public? It's just really terrifying the idea that there are going to be more ways to surveil and also to remove the consent of who is a part of your content and what you can capture about them. It just really is bending further forwards to the kind of paranoia, the fear, the general distrust that we have towards everyone around us and what they could be capturing from us, taking from us, using from us. I don't understand why these glasses are a thing.

I don't understand why anyone would need to use them. I think they're weird. I know I am extremely techphobic with the kind of modern progressions of AI and just generally the things that we talk about. So I am still sitting with my drum, banging the drum, saying let's all log off and unplug ourselves as well. I think it was really interesting that in the piece she said that Gen Z are more of us to oversharing the millennial because I thought it was kind of a millennial sensibility to be a bit more conscious of filming in public. We're definitely, millennials are definitely

kind of oversharers online and Gen Z do often have quite a cool mystique. They're always posting in new ways on Instagram and TikTok that I didn't know cool often with captions that I don't know what they mean. But in terms of sort of just to quote Lucy Watson getting up in people's grill and filming people on the tube, I thought that was quite a Gen Zie. affliction. I think the thing with the glasses that makes it even more worrying is the fact that at least with a phone, you're conscious, and I'm sure you've noticed before, but I'm, I hate it when you see out the corner of your eyes, someone's filming in public and you're thinking, oh no, am I going to be in the back of that person's video? But with these glasses, it's so subtle. I also just think it's such a

strange want and need to film everything and to constantly have an ability to document and post and share, and I know we've spoken about this a lot. And randomly, as a little side note, I was listening to Dame Mary beard on what did you do yesterday, podcast, which I recommended a million times. And they were asking her, like, what she thought about history, what she thought was the most fascinating. And she was like, I think the most interesting thing to imagine about like ancient Rome or ancient Greece is that no one ever saw their own face. The most they would see is a very blurred image of them and a piece of metal that they had to maybe put on some eye makeup or in the reflection in a piece of water. And she was like, I think that would have been one of the biggest, most

alien things if we were to go back in time to have genuinely no concept of what you looked like. And I think that the way that we've come now, this incessant need to be able to film to document to the point of actually needing to be hands free, I think that it's advancing at such an acceleration that we don't really know how to catch up with it. And I do think that there is, I'm feeling it more and more. I know that I'm sure that you guys feel it. I think we are going to be camps of two halves. Those that are like actually I'm feeling sick to my stomach with the level of surveillance that we have and other people that are just going in on it and getting more and more obsessed with finding different ways to constantly document everything. But I personally would quite like to experience

being a lady in ancient Greece, preferably one that was quite rich and well to do and was lying on a chaise long, eating grapes that were handed to up by men with very pert bottoms in sort of like lovely robes. Yeah, I'm actually right that with you. I, RDMs were just like full of people that were just as grossed out and like freaked out by this. We had like Steph who said, so scary, hate the idea being filmed without consent. And Amina kind of sort of summed up my entire thought process, which was like, what in the black mirror awful. Like it does feel awful and it feels like another thing that we as the general public have to just sit back and take and it's like fucking how there's a lot going on. But I was quite naive. I was like, oh, I guess maybe we don't really have those here because I've

never seen anyone wearing it. And then I saw a video of Michael Barrymore wearing some to film some content because he's very big on TikTok. What a plot twist. And I realized like, oh wait, I probably have seen people wearing these and just not realize what they were because they're literally just, I mean, I'm not the most perceptive. And because I just forgot, I had to force myself to forget that these exist. They're just like ugly black glasses. which loads of people have those. And it's just, it feels very icky and gross. This, like, people are almost waiting for the content to happen, almost waiting for the lights, camera action moment, because it just takes, like, one bad angle, one unfortunate argument in

public, like, you sneeze and a tit falls out. If someone's pointing their face at you, that exact moment, live streaming, your tit is famous. Like, I always think it's like, these, this seems to happen to people in their very worst days. And then it's, like, in the internet canon. And I just, I think enough people in society don't see anything wrong with making everything into content that I do not think we can be trusted. We can barely be trusted with phones. And a few people brought up in our DMs like what we need at this point. We need to follow Japan's example and have the shutter sound when you take photos in public because people cannot be trusted. It just feels like, wow, what an advancement in tech. Put it away. We don't deserve it. We're freaks. Yeah, I think that was

such a good shout. And it was also refreshing to have somebody suggest something because that doesn't feel like a step too far. That doesn't feel like curtailing people's, you know, freedom and liberties. That just feels like a very smart policy decision, which I think should already have been the standard, but isn't, but why can't we bring that in? So I loved that message. Also, when reading pieces like this, I guess it really shakes me because I see something like these smart glasses and I think, oh, hilarious. Like, obviously no one's going to buy those. They're just these random tech objects that, much like the beginnings of the metaverse and those kind of like insane head objects that meta was trying a show to us. It's going to be really select people who buy this shit and it's not going to really

enter our world. But we had a message from Sam who said, literally yesterday, an event I'd been to shared someone's story where they wore those glasses and filmed the crowd, which my friends and I were in. So I think it is really startling, realizing that actually, as you said, Beth, I could have just been asleep and not even noticed that this tech is just around me. And hearing that people have already found that and realized that is really startling. I guess it makes me feel that I just am quite ignorant to how fast and how ubiquitous a lot of these objects are because I just assume they're useless. It's so funny to say that because I remember the rollout of these metaglasses, the Rayban-style glasses, and I remember thinking at the time this is just like such a content creator-specific gadget

because there was loads of people filming themselves in a mirror and it was quite uncanny because you'd take a second and be like, wait a minute, how are we seeing, they're not holding anything in their hands, like how we're seeing this and it was these glasses and it started off with all these sort of like videos of people twirling around looking in different mirrors and it was all, it was quite fun but also a bit gimmicky. And I at that point in time didn't even click or go as far as to think, oh my God, people can just be wearing these in public. People could be wearing these for quite nefarious reasons. They could like stage an argument with their partner where they make them get really angry and film the argument or they could use them in lots of like deceptive

ways, frame someone for something just to catch someone out for blackmail. Because it is, it's the fact that it's just so secretive. And I just hadn't, maybe I've just got such a content career adult brain that I was like, oh, this is just another way people to kind of like film and make content. And I do think probably in quite a cynical way, the brands were thinking, like, it's such a big, the content creator class is a huge amount of people. I know that we think the influences are just like here and there. But actually today, it's hundreds of thousands of people that are having this as their like day to day career. It's extremely aspirational. So I do think that was maybe in essence where it kind of started. But it only takes a minute.

of thought, which I hadn't applied previously, to recognise how dangerous this could be and how it just doesn't make sense. It's like being a policeman with like a body camera on you. Like it's not normal. And whenever I see people filming in public, it makes you feel really unnerved because you just think, especially sometimes it'll be like a man on a tube. I've had it a few times and you're thinking, is he on FaceTime to his friend or is he actually trying to film me? And it's so uncomfortable and you feel like you can't really say anything. But at least you're semi-conscious enough to like do your jacket up or put your bag in your lap or be aware. But if someone's wearing glasses, you just have no idea. And I think that, again, it goes back to that episode that we did about, you know, nightlife culture kind of dying out because people are afraid.

There was that horrible story about that lovely elder gay man who went out and loved raving and then stopped doing it so people kept filming him on nights out. And it's just making public spaces uninhabitable at a time when we need public spaces more than ever because private spaces are exorbitantly expensive. So it's nonsensical and they should be banned. It does. It absolutely speaks to the like low trust society that we have. And we already know that there are enough bad actors who will do this egregiously, like all subtly on a mobile phone. And it just gives another tool for the pervert brigade, as I'm going to call them. And there's been discussion. There's discussion in this piece about meta claim. I think from their website or selling them, they are like, we have made it with tamperproof technology. So you can't just cover the light up. So a light comes on when you're filming just, I think, to give people the heads up. Same way that you can sort of see on some phones like in the screen. But it's already like Reddit threads. popping up of people finding workarounds to this. And I think in any sane society, there would be like massive, massive sanctions for any company that didn't really properly guard against a risk like that, make a technology so foolproof that people couldn't use it for malicious reasons.

But obviously, that's not the case. And you can't expect like a big money-making enterprise to do that. All they have to do is remotely carve their back and be like, sorry, guys, did our bit. Boo-hoo, what a shame for you. Which is why it's so frustrating that no lawmakers really doesn't feel like anyone is really across this in a proper way. It's people potentially using it to prey on women and children or, as you say, to sort of misrepresent a situation. It seems so nefarious. And even as I was researching this, it was so many cases of men trying to wear these into strip clubs to try and make revenge porn, try and, you know, sort of digitally, ocularly upskirt people. It's so bad. And we had a message from Mieisha who said, women and girls already feel unsafe in public. This is an alarming threat to that. And I think it really is. We're living in the age of technology that, a collapse ahead of law and good sense, like AID fakes, this technology. Who does it hurt? It's predominantly women, girls, children, vulnerable people and the social code is just so broken. I genuinely don't

think I know anyone that could be trusted with this technology. I just don't. I struggle to fathom how it should exist at a point where you're still able to tamper with it to film women on the tube, to film children at the beach. I struggle. I just don't think people could be trusted. Just before you made the point about non-consensual image sharing, I already was just thinking, all of the progressions in tech, it's just a famous trend that occurs that often the first thing, or one of the first things that they are used to do, is to exploit women. So with AI, obviously AI porn became one of the first things that I remember even learning about AI from. It's just, it is just so gross.

And yeah, I don't know, I'm just becoming more and more convinced. I don't understand why we need these glasses. What is the fucking point of them? They seem so useless and so exploitative. Why would you ever need to have a 360 camera on your fucking head? It's just, do you want to, I don't know, should we just like basically install video chips in people's minds? I don't see, I don't see what the point of this is. I think it's really stupid.

Daniela also had a good point. And this is something I hadn't even considered, but seems really obvious now she's pointed out. I work in theatre and this is worrying, particularly for shows where actors can be in vulnerable positions already, e.g. naked. Obviously, F-O-H staff already do their best and some productions make audiences lock their phones up. But how do you do the same for glasses that look seemingly normal? I'd actually be more worried about tabloid journalists using them rather than normal audience members, actually. And it is just, why are we creating more problems when we already have enough fires to put out literally wildfires, but also metaphorically across the world?

It just is so bizarre. It's so strange. And in terms of tech progression, it feels like at one point we were seeing all of these interesting new developments, the idea of having a camera on your phone, the idea of being able to video, the idea of being able to talk to anyone across the world and not necessarily have to dial up Skype. Now it just feels like all of these pointless advancements for the point of just capturing more content or being able to constantly upload to your online profiles. It doesn't feel like interesting movements to me.

It just feels like, I don't know, making us more tech addled, more obsessed with social media. It doesn't feel like our worlds are moving in any other direction than just being tied even more to the world of the internet. Technology can be amazing and it feels like there's been a really long period of time where nothing interesting or adaptive or progressive has happened in tech. beyond this kind of self-serving technology. And it's so interesting when these things do get developed that it's like kind of individual companies making these and there doesn't seem to ever be any forethought as to whether or not it could pose a risk

because all of these things are just going to end up being very costly in the long run for governments, for societies, when they do end up with lawsuits and legal cases and then we kind of have to backtrack and retrofit the right legislation in order to protect citizens from whatever. it might be and it's fascinating that that's not said beforehand kind of like actually this could end up in some problematic way it seems like a no-brainer that any individual in society should not have access to an extremely discreet extremely advanced camera where they could film absolutely

anything it just doesn't really make sense and pema said i'm not sure how this invention is beneficial to us in general life situations the only reason i feel this could aid someone in day-to-day life is for those who maybe struggle with accessibility issues apart from that i see no reason why everyday citizens should have them. We're already concerned enough as it is that we should end up as an awkward passerby in strangers TikTok or filmed unknowingly to become the next memeable moment when we've been warned against and cautioned about everything we do online and how that can affect us or future job prospects, etc. We now have more things to worry about beyond our control. However careful we might have been in the past, this increase in surveillance everywhere is

noticeable and feels very ominous. And I don't want to become a conspiracy theorist, but you can't help but wonder, is there some bigger idea beyond this? Like, do matter genuinely want us all sort of spying on each other? Do they want to create this idea of paranoia? Is it a means of policing people? Because you can't help but take that extra step. It does just seem, no one asked for this and absolutely no one needed this. I'm very grateful for the amazing capabilities of an iPhone camera. It is incredible. At the same time, I feel completely drowned by my camera roll, which has an inordinate amount of pictures on. And I really desperately long for the time when everyone had photo out. albums full of genuinely candid pictures of like gorgeous moments. And I think that it's one thing

for the advancement of an iPhone camera to be better. But I think we're already feeling drained by that. What are people going to do with just this footage? I can't see anyone. Influencers are going to be using it for their content. And then everything else beyond that just feels very problematic. And there is an interesting question to be heard about, but like what is the end goal? And I don't even need to be in conspiracy theorist territory to be like there could be something. It's just wise to think there's something afoot here, especially with a company like meta and their rap sheet. In terms of this, I think they're doing it because they can. There is no downside for them. Make money, make us more reliant on this kind of tech, normalize, being so switched

on that we have to buy this gadget and this gadget and be a part of the metaverse from the minute we're born to the minute we die. And I was reading, I know that there's lots of concerns about the GDPR compliance in the UK and Europe and kind of the balance between tech advancements and privacy protections. And I was reading that the French Data Protection Authority, which is the National Commission of Informatics and Liberty has made the separation quite clear in that there is a difference between using this tech for personal use, which is permissible and using it with an intent to distribute, which would require GDPR compliance. So you'd have to obtain consent from the subjects of the video, and then any use outside of that could be argued as illegal. But I mean, it gets

messier from there because there's special dispensations for journalists or public events. And crucially, if you have any violations to that, it's you as the user that are accountable. Meta has no, or at least in this case, Meta has like no liability, which is so fucked up. And I guess doesn't give them any incentive to make this tech safer or to encourage proper use, because if the buck doesn't stop with them, then they are just, well, they're just making the bucks. And I think, we had a great message from Ahmed, who kind of furthers that point, he says. I think it's frustrating that law and regulation tend to trail behind technology. And I think companies know this so they can knowingly treat the delay as a business opportunity. That's what's

called regulatory arbitrage. And it's the exploitation of legal or jurisdictional gaps because regulation hasn't caught up. So in this case, pushing up products that collect our data or track our movements before lawmakers can react, Metaglass is recording and always scanning where the public has no clear right to be or filmed, or even think when crypto firms were setting up shop in places with weak oversight, then selling everywhere else. The pattern is looking the same whereby these companies move fast, build scale, and almost dare regulators to catch up. By the time the legislation arrives, the technology is already embedded in daily life. And I think most people on RTFs agree to this. I think it speaks to what you were saying and only about, like, where does this end?

what is the bigger picture? What is the really sinister side of this? And I know that our DMs are a smaller sample size. But I do think that speaks to a larger, like the people I speak to in my day to day life about this. There is a real distrust and frustration with this technology, but also a real sense of like, well, the trains on the tracks, there's absolutely nothing that is being done or will be done. We had a really interesting message from James, who said, I dislike the filming everything for social media content a lot. I'm uncomfortable with the glasses filming light being obscured, especially of being used in a way that's threatening. to women. I'd wager most wouldn't notice. I don't think I've ever seen them out and about, perhaps I have. I have the same feelings about street photography. It's gone from genuine reportage to, for content's sake. Photography filled with people just going about their lives or being mocked. It's the same with social media, full of main character syndromes and trying to catch people out to publicly shame for likes. Bring any of this up, however, as with street photography, you'll get pushback, largely men, stating that it is in fact legal, depending on country,

and pointing out that we are all being filmed constantly anyway, not that I think that's remotely the same thing. And while it might technically be legal, I think most of it is ethically wrong. I thought that was a really interesting point about street photography because I don't know if we've had this conversation, we probably have, but even just, you know, those accounts that just like take pictures of people just looking really cool across the street that just don't notice, candidates, things like that.

It is like, I guess we've really found this issue. right now to do with smart glasses. But it's been pernicious the issue of surveillance. And when it suits us in the past, I've definitely followed those accounts because I think they look really cool. My perceived notion is that people are being flattered by being included in them. But it is interesting how we find ourselves here. It doesn't come out of nowhere. We have all of these different ways that we have been excusing, I guess, surveillance on social media. And it feels like almost at the time we should have been having those conversations right at the beginning. of many accounts on Instagram getting off on, including other people as content, it feels like

it's only now we've realised and we've really woken up. I can't speak for everyone, but I definitely think that I have. And it's a really good point. This isn't a new concept. We have been seeing it in different forms, different shapes for years, really. It's so interesting because on the street photography, I've thought about this before because when I was younger, I used to love those books. They would have black and white images of like what the women in Paris are wearing or whatever. And I think the issue is the problem now because then I realized in the last like five years something changed right I was following like photographers they weren't social media accounts it was genuine sort of beautiful like black and white pictures of someone like you said like sat at a coffee shop the difference now I

think is that we can find those people and that's where the issue comes from if it was a beautiful picture of a woman smoking of oak on a Parisian street in 2000 it's just a beautiful picture of a woman unless you knew her you would never know anything else about her the problem is now people can zoom in on their face they can do Google image reverse search they can then go and actually find, like that person is then completely anonymized. Unanonymized? No. They're not, you can't be anonymous anymore.

So basically I think years ago when there was like street from fashion photography, it genuinely would you would still be anonymous. You could be captured in a picture and your auntie might see it and they might send it to you, even if you were like in the background of a picture. The problem is now no one is anonymous. And so any little tip bit about you that gets online, even if it's, Even if it feels like there's no details about you, there's no information, there is a way that people can figure out it's you. And that is why it's changed.

There are some accounts that I follow. There's one guy who's based in London who does these really funny videos where he imagines what song people are singing when they're like walking through Victoria Station. But he films them, then goes up to them afterwards and says, I'm going to do this video, would you mind? Gets their permission and then post it. And I think in a context like that, especially because it's very joyful and very funny, I don't have an issue with that. But yes, I really take umbrage an issue when people think that. They can just build a following off posting people online because the danger of the internet is you do not know whether that person has a stalker, whether they've got a dangerous sex partner, whether they want to be found, whether they want to be seen. And I think that's the thing.

It's annoying because we've lost a really beautiful thing. I love candidates street photography. But I don't think it can exist in the same way whilst we're all on the internet. I think that it becomes a whole different thing. This just already reminds me as well of a good episode on Taylor Lorenz's podcast. where she looked into the rise of these charitable stunt videos. And to kind of thread it back to this, it is the idea that people are grateful to be part of content

because they have a chance at being part of five minutes of fame. And that assumption is so damaging. So there is a genre of viral content making where people include homeless people, people who are in situations where they're clearly exposed to being vulnerable or impoverished. And the people behind it, feel morally superior. The reason we know that is because they continue making these videos.

And when asked about it by journalists like Taylor Lorenz or any kind of internet journalists, they maintain that they're giving other people a chance to get famous. And at the end of it, through some kind of rigmarole of maybe challenging or kind of setting up the other person to prove that they're a decent person, then they give them a load of money. But in that podcast, she uncovers that many of those people have found that their lives have become much worse as a result of being part of this content, consent was never explained properly, the kind of ramifications, the kind of fact that they were even part of a video wasn't even explained because it is all kind of done in covert, secretive ways. And the assumption is they're

lucky because they are in a situation which is far more vulnerable than the person behind the camera. It's almost seen as if to be akin to a charitable act. And I think all things like this tech do is allow people to exploit other people or to get. away with doing some terrible things. I don't think those harms are worth the advancement, which is, in my mind, negligible from this. It just feels like all of the kind of worst elements that we're seeing through viral culture online are just going to become much worse with the means to just get away with doing it in more covert ways. Thank you so much for listening this week and for all of your thoughts on this week's topic.

Quick reminder that we're on Instagram and TikTok at Everything is Content Pod with extra behind the scenes content and ways for you to take part and suggest topics for upcoming episodes. If you enjoy everything as content, please do give us a rating and a lovely five-star review on your podcast player app. See you as always on Friday. Bye. Bye!