Zuck's New Glasses Are a Fashionable Privacy Nightmare

Consumer tech offers both promise and peril—this one’s about the latter

Emily Rand & LOTI / Better Images of AI / AI City / CC-BY 4.0

He was just a normal guy—nothing special at first glance. Did not catch my eye as he passed me on my way to the metro, blending into the bustling street like any Madrileño on their morning rush. He wore a sustainable Ecoalf hoodie, instead of the Zara equivalent that half the city wears, a well-worn backpack, and those sleek horn-rimmed glasses that you’d expect from someone who spends weekend mornings at El Rastro bargaining for vintage vinyls and evenings watching OV movies in the Renoir cinema. A solid eco-hipster retropunk mix.

The metro was packed. Rush hour on Line 6, La Circular, is always the same. It gently loops around the city’s tourist spots—Retiro, Sol, Gran Vía, La Puerta de Alcalá, El Prado—bringing together all kinds of people. It’s an annoying reminder that we share this planet with eight billion others, but also a good one: those who look nothing like us exist too. Across me, on the other side of the train platform, a young woman was looking at me. Probably university age, with a Z-gen-coded pair of loose trousers, Ray-Ban glasses, and the long dark-brown wavy hair, typical in this corner of Europe.

I love to observe how people dress up when they go out. Their appearance reveals so much, without a word—what they want from life and the lengths they go to express their cultural identity. Lost in my thoughts, I eventually reached my office, just in time for another tedious meeting. The day moved along as usual—emails, phone calls, writing a first draft to let it catch dust on my virtual shelf. By lunchtime, I had long forgotten about both the retro guy and the university gal.

They hadn’t forgotten me.

I got home and was greeted by a total mess. It looked as if a tiny hurricane had swept by from hall to kitchen, to bedroom. The door hung ajar, the lock splintered. Inside, papers fluttered in the breeze, remnants of a hurried search. Broken glass littered the floor, and the scent of cigarette smoke lingered, sharp and out of place (I don’t smoke). Clothes lay tangled, furniture overturned, a scene of intrusion that left no space untouched.

As I investigated the chaos, my eye caught on something on the floor—a crumpled Metro ticket. I barely glanced at it until I noticed the timestamp: from this morning, a trip on Line 6. I moved further into the room, catching a glint near the toppled chair. It was a small zipper pull, detached, with the kind of minimalist branding you’d see on eco-friendly gear. I turned it over in my hand, feeling a sense of déjà vu.

That is, fortunately, a made-up story—but one that may be closer to reality than we think. At least once Meta’s Orion smart glasses hit the market like a refreshing wave of innovation, flooding our intimate worlds with possibility and connection. Yeah, like everything the company sells.

Orion was the highlight of Meta’s Connect 2024 keynote, hailed as “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen” by Mark Zuckerberg himself. A new means for us humans to interact with the digital and the analog at the same time—the future of consumer tech. That’s Zuck’s vision: He believes his new fashionable accessory will displace the smartphone by 2030 as the go-to computing platform.

But, if things don’t go as planned—which happens more often than Zuck would gladly admit—Orion could turn into a fashionable privacy nightmare.

That’s the impression I got from a story 404 Media covered just days after the Connect conference. It’s a peculiar case of “I broke it before it even had a chance to start moving” (for the uninitiated, that’s a wordplay with Facebook’s old mantra, “Move fast and break things”).

We’ll dive into the details, but first, I need to get something off my chest: Have you seen Zuck lately? If you think that Ecoalf dude with his vinyl collection or that Z-gen girl with her enviable lush Spanish mane were trendy, wait to see Zuck’s “Aut Zuck aut nihil” custom oversized black shirt, or his disheveled chic wavy haircut.

Meta Connect 2024 Keynote

He’s really changed everything—adding a newfound willingness to make sure we all know he’s one of the cool kids now—except for his ruthless, relentless pursuit of making the world a more plugged connected place. Whether we like it or not.

That’s why, after his recent image overhaul, he’s once again embraced the infamous motto. He moves fast. He breaks things. After a long stretch of congressional hearings, public apologies, and constant backlash, he’s finally had enough. He’s wiped the slate clean. People like him. He can do whatever he wants. The world bows to his style and swagger—because it doesn’t judge attractive people. Funny how long it takes nerds to figure that out.

I guess I was mistaken in the fictional intro story. Some people don’t dress up to display their identity but conceal it. Looking at the updated version of Zuck—younger, likable, modern, not a millionaire but a millennial—doesn’t remind me that people who look nothing like me exist too, but that the word “appearance” has two meanings.

Anyway, the 404 Media story.

Journalist Joseph Cox reports that two Harvard students—AnhPhu Nguyen & Caine Ardayfio—managed to jailbreak them into potentially the most terrifying privacy mistake a tech company can make. Perhaps jailbreak isn’t even the correct verb—they didn’t encounter barriers to doing what they did. They simply added a few software packages on top of Meta’s stack and transformed a helpful tool into a face scanner that can recognize passersby on the street just by looking at them. But it gets worse.

The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members.

Here’s a glimpse of what that looks like:

Say I happen to cross a burglar couple wearing those glasses on my commute to work. They’d know where I live, that I’m not home, etc—anything we put on the internet in allegedly safe places that aren’t so safe for the savvy cybercriminals. Breaking into my house would still require some other sophisticated thieving skills but the easiness with which this thing gathers your name and phone is already terrifying.

Despite my snarky remarks at Zuck, I want to make clear that Meta isn’t in any way responsible for this project (for obvious reasons, Meta didn’t integrate face recognition into the glasses). Holding them accountable for it would be like claiming Apple is responsible for every hack, scam, con, and fraud done with an iPhone. It’s also worth noting, on the other hand, that Zuck may not care much anyway. He’s not humanity’s best friend—he’s never been—and don’t think he added a friendliness feature to the package that improved his muscles and his wardrobe.

Nguyen and Ardayfio aren’t releasing the code or tool. Instead, they want to raise awareness and warn the world about what’s possible with off-the-shelf open-source software and a new pair of high-tech glasses. If a student on a budget can do it, imagine what an organized mafia could do.

Cox asked Meta what they thought of the project and unsurprisingly (also correctly) they stated that “it could be done on any camera.” Cox says, underscoring the point, ”I mean, yeah. But it was done on Ray Bans. And Ray Bans look like normal glasses.”

That’s the crux.

We’re used to cameras. If I see someone pointing one at me I immediately assume they're taking a picture. I’ll register that as an unusual thing and potentially, depending on the degree of neuroticism in my blood at the moment, as compromising my intimacy and privacy. But glasses? That’s new. I don’t expect people to be able to steal my info or identity just by looking at me. We shouldn’t need to live wary of it when crossing the street.

There are two ways to look at this.

On one hand, we might not adapt to it the same way we adapted to phones doubling as cameras (not that many people mind anyway). If someone points their phone at me, I know they’re taking a picture—just like when someone points a camera. Bad. It’s obvious. But phones started as simple metal slabs! We saw them with fresh eyes, without any ties to older devices. Glasses, however, are already so ingrained in our perception as an ordinary accessory that they don’t trigger any suspicion.

That is, in a way, Orion’s most powerful and dangerous feature: they’re so normal that people will want to wear them; they’re so normal that people won’t notice them.

On the other hand, Meta has created a new gadget that, like every other before, can be enhanced or modified for other purposes, for better or worse. Should Meta stop building tech because a small number of people will use it for evil? If they had served this use case on a silver platter then yes, they should be held accountable. They didn’t. Sure, Zuck’s no friend, but he’s not the one sneaking into your privacy.

So what do we do?

Do we freak the hell out?

Do we protest for the risk the glasses entail?

Do we stay home forever, just to avoid any suspicious glasses-wearer?

Do we assume most people are good and would do nothing to threaten our privacy?

Do we wait until this thing is so common that we’ll unconsciously hide its intrinsic flaws under the “cultural norm” carpet?

Do we forget it all and join the “everyone does it now” and the “you’re not important, who would want to rob you” normalizer crowds?

Do we accept most people are so tech-illiterate that the probability of stumbling upon some street hacker in the middle of Madrid downtown is near zero?

I don’t know. I’m just asking the hard questions.

Society will have to answer them.