People Are Modding Meta Ray-Bans to Spy On You

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support to subscribe. Go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole. Hello. Emmanuel Mayberg. Hey. And Jason Kebler. Hello, hello. I feel like I've got it down now. where when I read that intro, it used to be with the music playing my ears because I need it to get the cadence and the rhythm of the intro.

0:51I'm doing it without now for editing reasons, but I feel like I've got it. Okay. That was beautiful. Thank you. Okay. No housekeeping this week, so we'll just get straight into the stories. The first one is written by me and Jason, and the headline is, a$60 mod to Meta's Ray-Bans disables its privacy-protecting recording light. For those who don't know, I'm sure many people do, there's this little light that appears when you use the Meta Ray-Ban glasses. And the idea is to, of course, warn people they might be being recorded. Jason, I bought a pair of these and sent them to you. Do you have them in front of you?

1:34Of course, yes, I do have them. This is not planned. And they're right here, if you're watching on YouTube. I mean, they're like a popular product at this point. So, I mean, I see them in the wild every now and then. I don't know if you guys ever see them, but I sometimes see influencers wearing them, I feel. I don't hang out with many influencers. I saw them once. I saw them... I had an HVAC guy over, and he was wearing them. And I was like, oh, this is a use case that really makes sense to me because they're crawling in all these tight spaces. And I was like, Oh, are you using them for work to show yourself later what you saw or what product number you see?

2:15And he was like, Nah, I got these for my birthday and we took them to Disney World. And he was like, They're kind of cool, but they're useless. I don't really use them. By influencers, I mean just people walking around in LA. I feel like I'm seeing people filming TikToks constantly. sure yeah and when they are filming probably there's this white little light that appears on the side but again the point of this article is that there is no light on these ones you have are you able to hit record now to show yeah so there's a button up here on on the right arm that takes a picture so i just took a picture i get a little like clicky clacky that tells me and there's no light.

3:04And then if I hold it like I am now, there's a little noise that tells me that it's recording. But right now I'm recording my screen. When I send you this video, you can see how disgusting my desk is and all my slacks and stuff like that. But we'll do a POV. Here's Jason recording the podcast. But I am recording right now and you can't tell, obviously. here's all of our confidential business information here's here's all of the inners of 404 media here you go we're live streaming it on meta without the the light or whatever um okay obviously people on youtube could have seen that if you're an audio listener which i believe most of you are i mean you're not missing much it's just there's no light on the glasses basically um we'll get into the modification that sort of thing but i want to hear more about your experience first in that i mean i'm looking at them through the camera now They look like completely ordinary glasses, obviously.

4:02When you received them in the mail, what was that like? Did everything look legit, basically? Yeah, I mean, so I have purchased modded hardware before in my life, most notably PlayStation 1 that had a mod chip added to it, and it was like, which let you play pirated games. This was so long ago, so it's outside the statute of limitations. I was going to say. Yeah. But basically, it's like, I don't know, my neighbor did that, and you soldered a chip onto the inside of it, and there was not the sheen of this as a factory product. Whereas this, it came in the original box. It was clear that it had been opened because there's a little pull tab, and the pull tab had been taken off.

4:52but that was literally the only indication that these glasses had been opened in any way. Like there's like a sticker that comes with it that goes like... Like a sealed thing or something? It's a seal. It's a sticker that is like in the bridge of the nose and the glasses don't work until you remove that. That was still on there, which I thought was kind of notable. You know, the glasses were very clean. uh like there was no indication that they had been altered or touched in any way shape or form and they they work perfectly fine like um you know they come in a ray-bans case which like this is the glasses case if you're on youtube and uh it's also the charger and they were in that like there there was no real indication that these had been modded in any way shape or form um and like the the app didn't notice there's like a meta ai app that you have to download and like you have to pair it with your phone and you have to pair it with the app and there's like no indication of any sort that that anything had happened to these glasses yeah do you want to swap places for a second maybe you want to ask me some questions because i i came across this originally and then um again you handled more the practical part i did more the sort of reporting part yeah so um i mean how did you originally find them yeah so i got an email i believe from a 404 media reader which as we've said many times um is where a ton of our tips come from and i think they said something like their brother was watching youtube and they got this weird advert for these modified meta ray-bans for some reasons they went back and they they found the link and they sent it to me and it was basically just a youtube video where this person was first of all advertising this modification but he was also like basically doxing his customers where he would say oh this is susan's uh pair of glasses this is dave's pair of glasses or whatever and he was saying i'm gonna ship this out blah blah blah you ordered this variation that sort of thing and i don't know that was interesting for a number of reasons first that it's on youtube so it's almost like a content moderation thing there ever so slightly um secondly the fact that this modification is happening at all and that apparently works of course we bought it to verify but that was very interesting to me that somebody could disable the light in this for a very popular product and then film people without them knowing and then thirdly doxing your customers is pretty strange as well But that's how we came across it.

7:35And we bought a pair and then sent them to you. Yeah. And they came pretty quickly. Another notable thing is that the way that the glasses work are you record or take photos. And then within the Meta AI app, there's a glasses tab. and then you import the videos and photos into that app and they go onto your camera roll. And there were maybe like eight or 10 photos and videos that were already on the device. And those photos and videos were of the guy modifying them, which was super interesting. And you were able to glean a little bit of information from it. But that gave us a little bit of insight into how he was doing it.

8:26He clearly opened up the glasses, I can hear power tools going, and it's in a workshop of some sort. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, it's like, well, it's not a busy workshop, but maybe it's just the guy in there or something. Obviously, this is a very limited view. And I remember Sam was editing the article, and I open it with a description of this person's in their workshop and they're modifying these glasses but it was such so strange because it was it wasn't from his point of view it was from the point of view of the glasses which have a camera in which he was working on on his workbench so it's almost like second person uh perspective and sam had to help me find a way to communicate that to readers basically it was pretty all over the place but yeah he's in there he's tinkering with some compressed air something that seems to have the glasses uh like clamped in place as well but i then also emailed him as well and just asked him like what are you actually doing here i wasn't really expecting him to you know provide details but he's basically puncturing the led light i think um or the sensor uh i'm a little i'm a little bit unclear on that i think it's the light but he's basically using a drill to puncture that so that obviously when you try to turn the light on, it doesn't turn on.

9:54I saw maybe he was also disconnecting a wire, like the wire that powers the LED or something. I think that's what you saw on Reddit. Yeah, that was like a theory that I saw. But it's unclear. It's unclear. Yeah, and I mean, to that point, I find this and I start writing that. You go away and you find like, oh, people have been talking about this for years And I feel like we knew that, but obviously this was the piece and the time to include it in. But people on Reddit have been complaining, basically, why do I have this light on my metal Ray-Bans? I want to film people without them knowing. I have legitimate cases.

10:33Like I want to film, I'm a lawyer and I want to film people signing documents or something. Okay, whatever. And then some people were just there like, I want to film Hot Girls without them knowing. It's one of the top, like when you type into Google and it autocompletes your question. It's one of the first things that autocompletes do is how do I hide or disable the LED light? And there's that. There's the Reddit discussions, which are very common. And then also, Meta has addressed this. but I think another indication of how much people want to record people without the LED light turning on is the number of products on Amazon that advertise the ability to do this.

11:20You can buy stickers or covers for the LED light. And I mean, to their credit, Meta has made it so if you cover the light, it will not record. But the existence of the product shows that people want to do this very badly. yeah and i don't know if those covers always work like maybe they do in some cases maybe they don't in others but this one definitely works because he punctured the led and then we got the glasses and we verified it right yeah and um that was like a response to this article was like oh you can just put black nail polish or like electrical tape or something like that and as far as we know that doesn't work it may have used to have worked but meta pushed a patch i believe for firmware update that disables the camera if it detects that the light is covered um but but yeah this works um and then i guess like i would just also say that this problem is one that is like of time immemorial.

12:24It's like there's been a long history of people posting creep shots to the internet, like surreptitious upskirt photos and photos of women taken without their knowledge in public. And that's one of the... I believe there are some countries that have laws. I think Japan has a law where all cameras have to make a noise when you take a picture. And obviously, iPhones do that, but you can disable it in the United States. But I think if you have the sound on it, it makes a clicking noise. Yeah. I have an English friend who, for some reason, she got an iPhone from Japan. So whenever she takes a photo, the camera shutter makes a noise.

13:11And it's like, can you silence that? That's really annoying. And she's like, no, I can't. It's mandated in there to stop upskirting photos from Japan. I'm like, oh, okay, cool. Well, don't take photos of me. I don't know. But yeah, you're right that it's very similar in that, well, maybe I'll save these thoughts for when a manual talks about the difference between a phone and a pair of glasses. But yeah, it's very much the same issue where people have recording devices and they want to do it surreptitiously, basically. Yeah, I feel they're definitely different. And I'm just saying that like other pieces of technology have had this issue before.

13:53And the solve has usually been like, it has to make a noise. And I don't know how much that's like actually fixed anything. But it's like a similar sort of issue. So, I mean, I guess we can talk a little bit about the abuses. But Emmanuel just wrote about one of the abuses. So should we save that for the second half of the show? Yeah, how about we'll take a break here, and then when we come back, we'll ask Emmanuel about his own story about MetaBray bands and how they are actually being used in pretty weird, horrible situations. We'll be right back after this.

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18:03all right and we are back jason did you you were in a flow did you want to do this one as well or or should i take it he's putting on his glasses so let me put my glasses on so i can see the screen um i i was just trying to to flow it back to you you have such you had a nice run of show and our little documents, which I'm recording right now with these glasses. I'll start, though. Meta's Ray-Ban glasses users film and harass massage parlor workers. This is a story by Emanuel. This is something that you were working on in the background for quite some time. I feel like you found this on Instagram and then documented it for quite some time.

18:49Do you want to describe what's going on here? yeah i feel like i've said this maybe three weeks in a row now but i found this like most horrible things on the internet was just served to me via the instagram reels algorithm and the videos show first person perspective guy walking in to massage parlor talking to the front desk or to one of the people working in the back and dropping increasingly more obvious hints that he's not just there for a normal massage, he's looking for sex work. So one of the first things they say is, I want a massage, but I only have 15 minutes, which I've come to learn is code for like, I'm here for a happy ending, I want a handjob or something like that.

19:48A lot of the workers at these places, English is not their first language. I think most people probably come in and point at the menu and say, like, I want a 60-minute massage, 90-minute massage. So they don't always understand. And then they become increasingly more obvious and rude in a lot of cases. And they're like, hey, I'm here for a handjob. I want a tuggy. tuggy is a word that a lot of these accounts use um and in some cases i would say maybe most of the cases the workers either laugh it off totally are confused and just think that they're going in for for a normal massage but there is some cases where the person understands what uh person who is recording the video is asking for.

20:46And then they kind of get into more details about like, what is a specific sex act that they want? How much are they willing to pay for it? And so on. I should note that it's not entirely clear in the videos that they ever go through with it. A lot of the times, if the worker suggests that they go through with it, the person recording the video says, okay, I'm just going to go out and get some cash outside of the cash machine, and I'll be back. And then the video ends, and there's no follow-up. So that to me seems like they just want to make a provocative video and go viral on Instagram, which they definitely do.

21:32I found many accounts that do this. The biggest one I saw had over 600 ,000 followers, millions of views on every video um this is happening all over instagram all over tiktok it's like a bona fide trend and if you're wondering why would you do this then i found that several of these accounts what they do is from their profiles they link out to pay-per-view sites where they sell videos which they pitch as like the full uncensored version of what happens after he comes back with the cash. That's what they say it is. That's what they say it is, but I've looked at the videos and it's very clearly just random videos pulled probably from tube sites that have nothing to do with the video recorded at the massage parlor.

22:32So to sum that up, I mean, it's basically the grift. like that last piece you said it's it's a harassment campaign crossed with a grift that's being carried out via meta ray-ban glasses and i mean just in case it wasn't obvious i think it was but these are first person perspective videos because they are being filmed by the glasses obviously they're then uploaded to instagram where you see it through a recommendation algorithm or mreels and that sort of thing people view them they go oh my god this is outrageous or they find it salacious or something like that and then the instagram user uh directs them to a site where they can uh buy potentially more of the videos that sort of thing um just to clarify how did you first see it like did did you search out something or did you literally just randomly get served on all these videos on instagram one day i just it was just served to me like because it is popular.

23:33I got served a video that already had like 1.5 million views. And it was just served to me as it was served to other people because it is viral. It's a self-reinforcing thing where people stumble on the video. It is provocative. It's like a shocking video. And yeah, I wasn't looking for it. I didn't know it existed until it was served to me. And again, the way that this works is I'm sending it to you guys. I'm clicking on the profile. I'm very clearly engaging with the videos. And then it serves me more accounts that are doing this. Yeah. When you sent it to us in Slack to show us, it was nuts.

24:17I was really taken aback. It sucks. We report many upsetting things. in the last few months we've reported several upsetting things that have happened with meta glasses obviously seeing that uh ice and border patrol agents are wearing them during these raids is just you know it's like this is one of the worst things that is happening in this country at the moment and that's disgusting uh whatever i i don't want to i don't want to like talk about Which is worse. It's not a competition. But these are such upsetting videos because they're so mean-spirited. It's like you have these guys who are trying to make a few bucks, exploiting these women who barely speak English, who don't really understand what's going on.

25:13It is very clear that they don't know that they're being recorded. and what is happening to them what is being done to them for laughs and for a few bucks is so awfully dangerous for them I talked to Swan Vancouver which is an organization that Sam introduced me to that advocates for people who work at massage parlors and sex workers which to be clear I'm not saying every person in these videos is a sex worker. Some are, right? But it's like, whether they are or not, it's extremely dangerous for them to be exposed in these videos. And many times it's either the person says where they're recording it, or you can see where they're recording it because they're filming themselves coming in, and you can see the sign of the establishment.

26:13And it's like, they might be undocumented. Or if they're sex workers, you know, there was this awful incident where this shooter targeted a bunch of massage parlors in 2021, which he later said was because of his sexual addiction, right? So it's just like a very marginalized group of people, one of the most marginalized groups of people in the country. And these guys are just harassing them and exposing them for laughs. And they're just extremely cruel. And also, it's interesting because if you scroll back, it's not as if they woke up one day and said, Oh, I have an idea. Let's just buy the Meta glasses and start recording massage parlors.

27:01it's they got the meta glasses first they made a bunch of videos where they just go into a best buy and either they start screaming or they try to go in the back or they harass workers at the store like the idea was i'm gonna buy these glasses it makes it easy to record people without them knowing and i'm gonna do wild awful shit and post it to instagram and go viral that way because it's like a very provocative video and then eventually they realized that these massage parlor videos were hitting the algorithm the right way and then they shifted to making those exclusively right um i'll come back to the metaglasses thing in a second but sam i was just wondering like based on what emmanuel just said there and you know it um targeting um you know vulnerable groups um specifically i'm just wondering what you make of it because yeah when emmanuel sent it to slack you know i think it i think it took everyone about it Yeah, I mean, I don't really have a ton to add to what Manuel said.

27:58That pretty much captures it. But yeah, it sucks. It's very much something that raids happen all the time of massage parlors. Like cops will go in posing as someone who wants to get a happy ending massage and then arrest the whole entire place and it ruins lives. Like it destroys whole entire families. You know, that's often like the breadwinner of the family is working a massage parlor. You know, whether or not they're again, whether or not they're actually doing any kind of illegal sex work in the place, it can be really dangerous and really scary because they're in there just looking for. and they're just trying to upturn the place.

28:43So having this kind of thing on social media feels like, I don't know, like an extension of that, just like more mocking of someone in a pretty precarious situation. Yeah, I mean, we don't want to assume too much about what they are actually doing in these parlors, but he's trying to entrap them into something that they're obviously not there to do initially. they're not advertising it when he walks in. He's trying to talk them into doing something that they don't want to do, which is so fucked up. It reminds me of... I think Emmanuel wrote about the live streaming of Kensington. And it's just...

29:25It's like this kind of like rubbernecking with via technology of people who are in bad situations. Or like the bum fight videos that were really popular for a long time. It's just sad. and like pathetic. It's more... It's like I feel like loser behavior could be an entire beat on 404 Media. It basically is. And it's just... It's fucking loser behavior. Not to mention that he's stealing people's content from... Probably stealing it from like leaked OnlyFans or ripping it off of tube sites and then reselling it. It's just like get a job. I don't know. Like get a life. I think also like... It's worth mentioning that like universally these are Asian-owned massage parlors and like the comments are like horrendously racist, like universally.

30:15So, and it's like, of course, these women's faces are in it. Like it's just the whole thing is like extremely gross for like many, many, many different reasons. Yeah. Before I get to the meta stuff, Jason. Well, I was just going to say, so like a few things. One, this will lead into what Emmanuel is going to talk about now. But if you go on Instagram or TikTok and search the meta Ray-Bans or meta glasses or meta AI glasses hashtags, it's like this is the main thing that people are using these for, at least that is surfacing on these platforms. Not the massage parlor tuggies, although these are very viral.

31:02But it's like, kind of universally, what you see there is people who don't know that they're being filmed. And pranksters, for lack of a better term, just jackasses doing stupid shit in public. I could imagine actually some useful uses of these glasses and almost all of them have to do with cooking videos and DIY videos at home. It is useful to have a POV perspective as a video. Kenji, who we all adore. Kenji, the food vlogger. Who sticks to crack. Does POV videos with a GoPro. Perfect for him. yeah yeah yeah like there there are reasons why it would be like nice to have a camera where my eye is but like everything that i can think of is like almost universally like i'm filming something i'm doing by myself in my own house um and then the the other thing is just like there was another viral video that i saw the other day that was like on a campus and it was just a guy harassing women like on campus, like hitting on them basically.

32:11Like pickup artist lines? Like pickup artist lines, yes. And then he would like post it. And then like, you know, people would find out who the woman was and then they would bother her on Instagram or on TikTok. And then, I mean, I saw the woman like responded in one of these cases or like made a video herself. And she's like, I was drunk when this video was filmed. First of all, second of all, like I had no idea that I was being filmed. And so, I mean, that raises the question of like, are they using modded versions of these glasses or alternatively, and then I'll throw it back to Emmanuel, it's like, Meta put a light on these glasses and then said to the world, like, that's what we're doing.

32:49You figure out what this means. Like, it is kind of like fucked up that you put a technology into the world and they're like, here's what we're doing for privacy. Like we're putting a light on it. And then it's like up to random people like on the street to know that and to understand that. And then also, there's obviously tons of power dynamics when it's a pickup artist approaching a drunk college student and hitting on her. She's already being filmed. And then it's just a tricky situation. And that plays out in some of these massage parlor videos where the women are like, get out. And then it becomes a whole thing.

33:29And it's fucked up. But anyways, if you click around on the Meta Ray-Ban hashtag on Instagram or TikTok, you'll see lots of really shitty things. Because it seems like if you upload a video from the glasses, it automatically gets tagged as filmed by Meta Ray-Ban, something like that. And that's how you knew these massage parlor videos were from Ray-Bans, right? Yeah, so it's not actually clear to me how they're getting tagged, but there is an official tag. Not like a hashtag, but like a watermark or something that appears under the title of the username that says film with meta glasses with their branding.