Meta says it has disabled the camera on thousands of pairs of its smart glasses after detecting that owners had tampered with the recording light. The company confirmed the scale to Semafor this week — the first hard indication of how many people have been caught trying to film others in secret.
Meta’s camera glasses — the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta lines among them — carry a white LED that blinks whenever the camera is capturing. The light has no off switch, and it exists for one reason: so the people in front of the lens know they are being recorded. That has not stopped a subset of wearers from blocking or concealing it, a habit that earned the devices the unflattering nickname “pervert glasses” after footage of people — mainly young women — filmed without consent was shared and mocked online.
Meta drew a line in July, warning that it would disable photo and video capture on any glasses found to have a blocked recording light. In a newsroom post the company explained that the camera is automatically disabled when the capture LED is blocked or physically destroyed, and that it removes ads and listings for LED-tampering services and takes legal action against the businesses selling them.
Last week, Meta vice president Alex Himel said on Threads that the protection had been strengthened further. “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,” Himel wrote. “A fix for this is starting to roll out — the camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording.”
Himel told Semafor that less than 0.1% of users have been caught altering the camera record system. Meta did not share an exact count, but with 7 million glasses sold in 2025, that fraction lands in the thousands. For those affected, the punishment is pointed: without the camera, the glasses amount to an expensive pair of Bluetooth headphones.
Himel is not declaring victory. “It’s been a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game,” he said. “I don’t think we’ll ever be done… There’s always new ways to get around the safeguards that are in place. So we’re going to keep monitoring and evolving the measures that we have.” Reddit chatter suggests some workarounds may still circulate — one recent poster complained the update had left him “blown” and asked for alternatives, only to be pilloried in the comments.
The backlash has spread beyond software, too. Last week a trendy New York nightclub threatened to permanently ban anyone arriving in the glasses, and a budget-friendly pub chain in the U.K. has barred them outright.
Earlier on GismoLand: Meta Glasses. The AI feature you paid for now runs on a monthly meter.
