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Meta says a light on the glasses always turns on when recording to let people nearby know. But the light can be easily covered or disconnected, and modified glasses are already being sold for secret recording. The safety feature Meta advertises does not actually prevent covert surveillance.
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The Meta AI app that controls the glasses demands access to your text messages, call history, contacts, and can track your location even when you're not using the app. Camera sunglasses do not need to read your SMS messages or monitor your heart rate. These permissions exist to feed Meta's advertising data machine, not to make the glasses work.
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Meta tells users to "respect people who ask you to stop recording." But Harvard researchers showed these glasses can identify strangers by name and pull up their home address just by looking at them. People on the street can't tell these are camera glasses — they look like ordinary Ray-Bans. You can't ask someone to stop recording if you don't know they're recording.
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The Limitless pendant had one privacy feature that mattered: Consent Mode, which was supposed to ask people before recording them. The company turned it off by default. So out of the box, the pendant records every voice in the room — your partner, your kids, the barista, your therapist — without asking anyone. Then Meta bought the company, forced users onto Meta's privacy policy, and deleted EU users' data entirely. The one feature that was supposed to make always-listening ethical was switched off before the first pendant shipped. Now Meta owns the technology, and Meta's business model is knowing everything about you.
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Meta said it blurs faces and protects your data. Workers in Kenya were watching people have sex, go to the toilet, and undress — footage captured by Meta's smart glasses and sent overseas for "review" with broken face-blurring. One woman was filmed changing clothes by her partner's glasses left on a bedside table. She never knew. That footage ended up with a stranger in Nairobi. When the workers spoke out, Meta fired all 1,108 of them. Now Meta wants to build a pendant that records every conversation you have. If Meta can't protect the video from your glasses, it is not going to protect the audio from your pendant.
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Meta says its pendant will help you remember things. Internal documents tell a different story. Leaked memos show Meta developing "supersensing glasses" with always-on cameras that track your surroundings all day. The same company planned to launch facial recognition while civil rights groups were distracted by other crises — the ACLU called this "vile behaviour." At a security conference, a researcher used Meta's own glasses with off-the-shelf software to instantly identify every stranger around him — name, social media, personal details. The pendant is not a memory aid. It's one device in an ecosystem designed to record everything you see and hear, identify everyone around you, and feed it all to the world's largest advertising company.