Meta and the Battle for Smart Glasses | I'm a Creep | 2

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0:21It's June 2025. In a Home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles' Cypress Park neighborhood, an immigration raid is underway. Agents in dark sunglasses and bulletproof vests hop out of their cars, shouting orders as they look for people to apprehend. This site has become common around L.A. The Department of Homeland Security has sent swarms of federal agents into the city, some from Customs and Border Patrol, or CBP, others from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. In less than a month, around 2 ,000 local immigrants have been rounded up. It's a time of fear and uncertainty, made worse by the agents' anonymity.

1:04Many of the names and badge numbers aren't always visible, and their faces are often hidden behind baseball caps, hoods, and masks. It's nearly impossible to know who the agents are. In this Home Depot parking lot, a crowd of observers has started to gather, recording everything they can to document what is happening. As the Border Patrol agents try to push them back, they keep recording. And that's when they notice something surprising about the sunglasses worn by one of the agents. They're meta-ray bands. In the middle of an immigration raid, someone from Border Patrol is wearing a personal recording device.

1:45Observers wonder, is he recording right now? Will the glasses be used to identify protesters at the scene? Or is he just wearing them for intimidation? Whatever the agent's intentions, this moment adds to the growing unease over Meta's AI glasses. When the company formerly known as Facebook jumped into the smart glasses race in 2021, few saw it as particularly newsworthy. There were much bigger stories breaking about Facebook at the time, like whistleblower Francis Haugen sharing thousands of internal documents with a Wall Street Journal, revealing Facebook's knowing contributions to real-world harms.

2:26or Facebook's subsequent rebrand to Meta, meant to signal a pivot away from data collection and toward its metaverse. Against all of that, Meta's collaboration with Ray-Bans seemed like a harmless side quest. But as interest in the metaverse faded and interest in AI boomed, Meta pivoted. And once it added an AI assistant to its glasses, It brought a host of new questions to light about privacy, data security, and the modern surveillance state. To explain how we got here, we're going back to the exact moment meta-ray bands stepped into the spotlight and found their way into daily life in a way no other smart glasses ever had before.

3:12With that surge in popularity came hidden consequences. because now the question isn't whether smart glasses are here to stay. It's what people should do to protect themselves from their ever-widening reach.

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4:44From Audible Originals, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars.

5:12The origin story of smart glasses started before Meta and before Google Glass with a pair of Stanford students who really wanted to impress Mark Zuckerberg. Their invention? A pair of black-framed sunglasses with a small camera embedded in the frame. They envisioned a future where those simple camera glasses could one day do more, like recognize faces and provide augmented reality displays. And while those students' specific version of smart glasses didn't quite make it, the future they predicted did. It's here. Meta sold 8 million pairs of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025 alone. And similar products are rolling out from every major tech giant.

5:58The future of smart glasses has arrived. And so has the reckoning. This is Episode 2. I'm a creep.

6:14It's September 27th, 2023 in Menlo Park, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. Meta employees are gathering for the annual Meta Connect conference, where the company unveils new products, initiatives, and goals for the coming year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg walks on to the outdoor stage, the lush California greenery framing the screen behind him. He waves at the crowd, trying to look casual. But if you look closer, his posture is ramrod straight. Zuckerberg has a lot of careful messaging he needs to get right. Every major tech company has a conference like this. Think Google's I.O. They've been a staple of the industry long before Steve Jobs revealed Apple's first iPhone.

6:58But ever since then, every tech CEO has been chasing that iPhone moment. That moment when the crowd sees your new product and audibly gasps, knowing its debut will usher in a sea of change. And Zuckerberg is no different. He knows he's no Steve Jobs, at least where product reveals are concerned. His last two MetaConnect keynotes made that painfully clear. Both of those presentations had been hyper-focused on one thing, the metaverse. Remember those strange-looking digital avatars with no legs? Zuckerberg presented them at Connect 2021 as the future of remote work. He predicted people would meet up in Meta's virtual realm called Horizon Worlds, a sprawling app that costs billions to develop.

7:46But Horizon Worlds and its legless avatars flopped, and Zuckerberg was roasted as an out-of-touch leader with no conception of what humans actually want. And by 2023, the entire Metaverse gambit is looking shaky. Meta Reality Labs, the division behind all things Metaverse, as well as its smart glasses, lost$13.7 billion in 2022, and Meta's shares dipped 60%. Investors are losing confidence. One shareholder wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg saying, quote, Meta needs to get its mojo back. So now, standing before a smiling crowd at Connect 2023, Zuckerberg has a delicate needle to thread. He needs to signal to investors that Meta has fresh ideas, without abandoning everything he's built so far.

8:42He clears his throat and uses every ounce of charisma he can muster. In his presentation, Zuckerberg focuses on three main pillars. First, the MetaQuest 3 headset. These sophisticated virtual reality goggles have been a passion of Zuckerberg's ever since Facebook bought Oculus, a virtual reality gaming company back in 2014. They're a key component to accessing the Metaverse, so naturally, Meta has been working on improving them every year. Zuckerberg still believes gamers will embrace them, even if he was wrong in his prediction that people would use them for work zooms. But if you're trying to pull off a Steve Jobs-level reveal, you save your biggest surprise for the finale.

9:27So in his second pillar, Zuckerberg talks about Meta's foray into the latest Silicon Valley obsession, generative AI. Zuckerberg reveals that his team has spent thousands of hours developing AI personas you can interact with, styled after different celebrities. Want to get in shape? Ask Victor, a fitness coach that looks and sounds like Dwayne Wade. Want to play a Dungeons and Dragons-style role-playing game? Get help from a dungeon master who looks and sounds like a certain 90s rapper. I mean, who hasn't wanted to play a text adventure game with Snoop Dogg?

10:12The crowd's response is friendly enough, but no real gasps yet. So now it's time for the third pillar, his coup de grace, a new improved version of Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. Zuckerberg quickly lists the upgrades, which include improved audio, better cameras, a lighter frame, and more styles. But then he goes on to what he hopes will be the true iPhone reveal moment of this conference. But the most interesting thing about this isn't any of those specs. It's that these are the first smart glasses that are built in shipping with meta AI in them.

11:03So starting in the US, you're going to get this state-of-the-art AI that you can interact with hands-free wherever you go. Zuckerberg hopes that out of the three pillars he's laid out today, at least one of them will catch fire. Who knows? Maybe people will love Meta's Quest 3 headset so much they'll give the metaverse another chance. But given the way this keynote was organized, saving the AI glasses for last, the underlying message is clear. The Meta Corporation is starting to chart a new course, away from Horizon Worlds and into the land of generative AI. There's a reason why Silicon Valley is so bullish on AI.

11:49In March 2023, just a few months before Zuckerberg walked on stage at Connect, OpenAI debuted its latest large language model chatbot, ChatGPT 4.0. ChatGPT 4.0 took the world and the news cycle by storm, thanks to its uncanny ability to write code and approximate human conversation. Suddenly, no startup in the Valley could get funded without a pitch deck that included the words, Generative AI. Founders everywhere scrambled to cram AI functionality into every conceivable product. So adding generative AI to Meta's smart glasses wasn't just a good idea. It was practically a necessity to stay competitive.

12:33Technically, some artificial intelligence was already present in the glasses' original 2021 version, which was called Ray-Ban Stories. Its voice-activated assistant could obey simple commands like call mom or play the Beatles' White Album. Google Glass users had that functionality as well. All you had to do was say, okay, Glass. But the fluidity and speed of large language models have come a long way since the early days of Siri. Now the responses are more natural-sounding and can continue for longer than simply providing one answer to a query. It's not a true live conversation, but it resembles one.

13:13Here's Zuckerberg demonstrating the feature on an Instagram reel as he asks his Meta Ray-Bans to help him braid his daughter's hair. Hey Meta, how do you make a braid? To make a braid, brush the hair to remove tangles. Separate the hair into three equal sections and begin a basic braid by crossing the right section over the middle. These new Meta Ray-Bans hit shelves in October 2023 shortly after their debut at the Connect conference. And even though the generative AI feature is still in beta and only available in the U.S., the new glasses make major headlines because the verdict among tech reviewers is they're actually good.

13:58Unlike Zuckerberg's obsession with the uncanny avatars of Horizon Worlds, these smart glasses seem like something a regular human would actually use. and a lot of humans do starting with content creators. I bought the viral Ray-Ban Meta glasses and we're going to find out if they're actually worth buying in 2024. So if you've been seeing this trend where people are recording without their phones these are the smart glasses they've been using. You can live stream directly from these glasses so if you're going live on Instagram you can actually just click a button and switch to the glasses to get live POV.

14:31There's also the headliner design in addition to Wayfair and there are more colors there are transparent ones like the one I'm wearing. Those content creators are talking about the glasses themselves, but creators also start using the glasses to film their everyday content. One TikToker starts an entire trend by using her meta-glasses to record herself in her bathroom mirror, lip-syncing to a K-pop song. Within weeks, the video racks up over 86.3 million plays and launches hundreds of copycats. People start filming hands-free POV videos everywhere. At the grocery store, on the driving range, even at a local lunch counter as they learn how to eat crawfish.

15:15One blind TikToker named Sadie the Blind Lady racks up half a million views by posting how the voice assistance features help blind and low vision people get around. You can use the glasses to ask Meta AI about almost anything that it sees. And you can get pretty specific with the questions too. Hey Meta, look, what section of the store is this? This is the dog treats section. Now, to peek behind the curtain for a moment, not all of these videos reflect organic interest in the product. Some do, of course, but others are created through Meta's robust affiliate program, which pays creators a commission on sales they generate from their content.

15:57Still, affiliate links only pay off if the content is popular. And in this case, it definitely is. The number of meta Ray-Ban videos on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook explodes over the next few months. And then, something really interesting happens. Rather than peeking quickly, as happened with Google Glass or Snaps Spectacles, interest in meta glasses doesn't fall off a cliff. People don't suddenly get bored of them. From the release in fall 2023 through the end of 2024, Meta moves two million pairs of Meta Ray-Bans. They're officially more than a passing fad. They're a certified hit.

16:42So, what did Meta Ray-Bans get right that its predecessors got wrong? Well, it wasn't just one thing. It was more like a combo platter. They found the Goldilocks path, the sweet spot between a device that feels like a gimmick and one that's too ambitious and too expensive to ever reach real people. First, they nailed the functionality. MetaRay Bands strike a balance between trying to do too much, like Google Glass, and doing too little, like Snaps Spectacles. Glass tried to be a replacement for your phone. Spectacles, a fun novelty tool. Next, there's the price. Starting at$300, it's low enough to be accessible to a wide range of tech consumers.

17:29Costs about the same price as an Apple smartwatch. Compare that to the$1 ,500 price tag of glass. Or worse, the$3 ,500 Apple Vision Pro, a souped-up AR wearable that debuted to massive hype in February 2024, only to see disappointing sales and an embarrassing lack of demand. But$300 is also high enough to signal quality. After all, Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses without the Meta camera go for just under$200. Snap Spectacles sold out of vending machines were just$130. When the price is too low, it can signal low quality, regardless of whether or not that's true. So,$300? That's another Goldilocks win for Meta.

18:19And finally, the look. Partnering with a brand like Ray-Ban gives Meta a massive leg up in the fashion department. These glasses don't have the strange robotic look of a glass hole or the whimsical toy-like design of spectacles. They just look like regular glasses, which makes them a lot easier to work into your everyday life. In fact, without the tiny LED light that signals the glasses are recording, it's easy to miss that these Ray-Bans have a camera in them. And that is about to set off a whole host of issues. Because the more common meta Ray-Bans become, the more ways people are going to find to abuse them.

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21:24It's September 2024. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, two Harvard students named Anfu Nguyen and Kane Ardifio are on a quest. Wearing a pair of meta-AI glasses, they cruise the greater Boston area looking for strangers to talk to. They head down into the subway and approach a woman with curly brown hair and a red striped jacket who's waiting for her train. Oh, hi, ma 'am. Wait, are you a Betsy b****? Yes. Oh, okay. I think I met you through, like, the Cambridge... Right? Yeah, yeah. It's great to meet you. I'm Cain. The train arrives and the interaction ends. Betsy goes on with her day. But the young man she just met doesn't actually know her.

22:08He got her information on the fly by scanning her face with his metaglasses. Now pay special attention here. because this is the point where a product crosses the line from useful to unsettling. Think Apple's AirTag, right? Designed to help you keep up with your stuff, not for someone to, say, track an ex-partner, right? But that's the thing. Once a tool exists, someone's going to test its edges in the real world, often on unsuspecting people. That's how new tech finds its limits. And if you're an innovator, what do you do when real-world behavior starts rewriting the narrative around your product.

22:51To be clear, this Mission Impossible-style face scan isn't one of Meta Ray-Ban's native features. As part of a side project, Nguyen and Artifeo set out to prove a point that the off-the-shelf consumer glasses combined with freely available facial recognition tools could be used to identify strangers in real time. To do it, they built a piece of software they call iXray, which basically converts a pair of Meta smart glasses into a doxing tool. They pull this off in just a few days, too, on a budget of$400. Using the Meta glasses as video inputs, iXray uses publicly accessible third-party facial recognition tools to dredge up personal data about strangers.

23:38How personal the information gets depends on the subject's digital footprint and how careful they've been about their identities. For some, it might turn up their Instagram account and the details of a recent vacation. For others, it might surface their alma mater, their employer, their personal phone number, or even their home address. Nguyen and Artifeo insist that the purpose of their project isn't to harm people, it's to warn them. They declined to publish iX-Ray's code, even though plenty of people are asking. Their point, they say, isn't to disparage the glasses, but rather to show how dangerous it is to leave too much personal information online.

24:21But this experiment in privacy invasion seems to be as much a promotional opportunity as it is a public service. In an interview with NBC News, Nguyen and Artifio reveal they've actually built their own AI assistant, which they happen to be wearing around their necks. And then we're creating a wearable necklace with a camera on it. Oh my God, that's cool. The necklace camera and AI scans people's faces and connects the wearer with profiles other users create and willingly share. And we built it ourselves. You built that yourself? I do think like the world is very lonely today. People don't really go up to people or like talk to people or learn about others in real life anymore.

25:07The iX-ray doxing experiment is starting to seem less like a cautionary tale and more like a jumping off point. Because the more popular metaglasses get, the easier it will be for people to follow in their footsteps and use metaglasses for nefarious purposes. And that could be a problem for Meta, since trust in their company is already at historic lows. We mentioned that the company formerly known as Facebook integrated robust facial recognition tools into its products all the way back in 2010. Remember how Facebook pages used to suggest friends to tag in your photos? Those innocent-seeming nudges worked because of facial recognition software.

25:50The same tech was also used on Facebook and Instagram as a way to help restore account access if a user got locked out. But over the next decade, as Facebook's reach grew, so did its mountain of tagged images. In 2012, Facebook hit a billion users. By 2017, that number was 2 billion. And along the way, those 2 billion users uploaded many more billions of photos year after year, until Facebook found itself sitting on one of the largest digital photo collections in the world. At the same time, the world beyond Facebook was waking up to the dangers of facial recognition. In the late 20-teens, reports emerged that the Chinese government was using facial scanning to profile the Uyghurs, a persecuted religious minority.

26:43And in the U.S., we learned that law enforcement agencies had been using facial recognition aggressively here as well. There have been wrongful arrests, prosecutions, and even deportations based on faulty algorithms. Suddenly, a company of meta-size having the power to identify billions of faces started to seem like a very bad idea. To Facebook's credit, the company reportedly declined to sell its facial recognition software to third parties. But that was cold comfort once stories emerged about what Facebook was doing with user data on its own. Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018?

27:24Facebook got caught selling the personal data of 87 million customers to organizations that weaponized it for political purposes. The result was a record$5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, which sounds like a lot, until you realize Facebook reported revenue of$15 billion for just the first quarter of that same year. In that context,$5 billion barely constituted a slap on the wrist. In fact, once the settlement was announced, Facebook's stock actually went up to its highest price that year. Then came the so-called Facebook files in 2021, leaked to the Wall Street Journal by former Facebook product manager Francis Haugen.