They met at a bar in midtown Manhattan. He arrived wearing a baseball cap pulled low and sported a pair of black-framed glasses, she says. As conversation flowed, from discussions about navigating life in New York to past relationships, he mentioned that his glasses were Meta Ray-Bans.
“I wasn’t familiar with them,” McAnuff, a 28-year-old project manager who now lives in Toronto, tells WIRED. It was her first time seeing the smart glasses up close, which can record images and video from the wearer’s viewpoint. He let her try them on and even showed her a couple of videos that he’d taken previously, she says. “That was it. We stopped talking about it after that. I figured that was the end of the use.”
The next day, checking her Instagram, McAnuff noticed she’d been tagged in one of his story posts. To her surprise, it was footage of them at the bar and on the subway together, en route to a basketball game uptown. In the video, McAnuff is captured from an above angle, sitting across from her date who is holding a drinking glass; WIRED has seen screenshots of the footage. “I felt super violated,” McAnuff says. “Like, what if I don’t want everyone knowing what I’m up to? He felt so free to film me and post it. There was no conversation about it.”
Meta sold more than 7 million pairs of the Ray-Bans in 2025, as its smart glasses have infiltrated public spaces thanks to pranksters with dreams of viral fame, some of whom even film people while they’re at work. The phenomenon, which has also spread to pickup artists hitting on women, has earned the hardware the nickname “creep glasses.”
Among singles, and particularly women, Meta’s AI-powered eyewear has become a recurring nuisance, as people share a spreading unease about being covertly filmed on dates.
Anyone wearing these anywhere is a huge red flag.
7 million? People actually bought this?
Jeez there’s a lot of perverts in the world
77 million MAGA, so 1 in 10, it would be higher, but most are too poor to buy these because of Joe Biden.
Last week i walked by a store that rented them out.
Just for pervs who want to hang outside the playground on the weekend, huh
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Pervert glasses.
They’re called pervert glasses.
Get it right, Wired.
And let’s also lay it all out: the only people wearing them are sick enough in the head to need immediate institutionalization. Full stop, end of story.
I still like the original Glass Hole.
MenWearing Meta Glasseson DatesIs an Instant Red FlagI’ve read this story about it where the people who bought them stopped wearing them within a few weeks because they felt uncomfortable wearing them - common theme was, when people notice you were those glasses they shun you and find an excuse to end the conversation. Guess people in general agree with you.
That was my first though, yeah …
On dates does add to it though
Pol Pot be like:
MenWearingMetaGlasseson DatesIs an Instant Red FlagIts times like this I’m glad I got frameless glasses
Oh, how fun. Now we’ll all be even more repressed because literally every interaction will be recorded and you better not do anything cringe.
My Meta Glasses memeable thought of the day:
If you feel violated when a private citizen follows you around with a camera, might want to also feel violated when the state follows you around with millions of cameras.
Right. Flock, et al. are a violation of our 4th Amendment rights. These autonomous deputies are annotating our movements and our private vehicles.
I thought the convention was to call them “perv glasses”?
Pervvision
How fucked up do you have to be to wear these to a date?
People evidently wear them on dates then feed the footage to ai in order to improve their game.
Narrator: It doesn’t work.
I am sure they go well with those apps that generate naked versions of people. Surely they exist for video as well.
Maybe they poor and have no other glasses 😥
Right. With prescription lenses the perv glasses are north of $500. If you need to perv and you can’t afford another pair, then you just need to wear the perv glasses all the time.
If you need to perv
What does that even mean
Sarcasm wasn’t explicit enough here it seems
I know, right? Why won’t anyone think of the poor techbros!
Better sub/donate to the poor content creator.
A poor person doesn’t waste their money on this shit
*people wearing creep glasses is a red flag
creep glasses
They’re called pervert glasses.
“Creep” isn’t inclusive enough, “pervert” is.
I haven’t seen a story yet about women wearing these glasses for nefarious purposes. Do you have any to share?
Given that you’re operating on anecdotal evidence, the onus would be on you to prove that the effect is exclusively gender linked.
I quite frankly wouldn’t be surprised if men are more of a problem with them than women or non binary folk, but as-is the headline is needlessly and intentionally divisive,and does not support that conclusion. Hell, I would argue that the majority of what most people post on social media is creepy, men and women included. It’s weird to share non consensual images of people publicly, regardless of how insta rotted your brain is.
We should all always be trying to use people first language unless there’s a really specific reason not to, and in this case the point is that people being creepy wear creep glasses, there’s no reason to bring gender into it, the reader can draw their own conclusions based on what they know about creepy people.
I linked an article that has a focus on men using these glasses on dates. I didn’t come up with the article title myself.
Do you have any stories of women abusing these glasses?
I can think of countless cases of women sharing stuff on social media that they shouldn’t.
The point is that creeps wear creep glasses.
Just because the author is being needlessly divisive for clicks doesn’t mean you need to continue that chain.
Do you have stories of women or non-binary people abusing these glasses?
I’m sincerely asking.
I think remember reading one about a South Korean lady wearing them on dates and feeding the footage into Claude to analyze and improve her dating skills.
That’s interesting! The article goes into some men using the glasses for the same thing:
Gary Lewandowski, a psychology professor at Monmouth University whose research focuses on the science of romantic connection, says adding covert cameras to the mix will only make building trust harder. He says beyond posting for the ’gram, a number of factors could be driving men to do this. The most logical, non-creepy reason may be tied to post-date analysis, in that the glasses can help men identify blind spots around their own behavior.
“A lot of men out there are eternal optimizers. They want better, more efficient ways of doing things, so reviewing game tape allows them to learn from mistakes,” Lewandowski says. “But I do wonder if some are doing it to build a case instead of a connection—why they’re right and the other person is wrong—or to help better identify red flags.” That type of surveillance “makes the date less about getting to know each other and more about fact gathering,” he adds.
I can see the benefits of that approach as long as the person being recorded is aware of what they’re being used for.
I have no stories of anyone abusing these glasses other than the small handful of anecdotes in the article that can fit on one hand.
And as the article points out, 7M of these glasses were sold, so 2-3 stories is not exactly statistically significant or relevant.
I can find you numerous stories of female stalkers and creeps using cellphones though, if that is would help.
This is far from the first article I’ve seen covering these glasses. Many of them are posted to this community.
I’d honestly be interested to see if women and non-binary people are similarly abusing privacy issues with these glasses and in what circumstances. I haven’t seen it reported.
I can find you numerous stories of female stalkers and creeps using cellphones though, if that is would help.
No, the topic is the smart glasses and their use to intrude on other’s privacy.
whatabout
I’m old enough to remember when Google came out with their version. People went appoleptic and cried invasion of privacy. What happened, why were these not shunned in the same way? It’s our because they just look like sun glasses? The only acceptable use for these is to aide blind people
I am curious too
Velma Idk what it is about your post but they seem to make the misogynists crawl out of the network. Always multiple people telling on themselves in the comments. Not every post with “Men” in the title needs someone saying “b-but women!”
I think some people have decided Velma’s username is “the place to settle the gender wars”. They make a lot of posts and are pretty famous. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have stalkers who follow every post, or at least the same people repeating the same opinions in different flavours. Usually some variation of “gender problems don’t exist” denial.
Where is the “hue hue people have cameras in their phone and you have no problem with that, checkmate” guy…I know you’re in here.
The Instagram part of the story perfectly highlights the difference. Busting out a camera to start filming the entire date so I can make a highlight reel later is way more conspicuous than simply wearing my glasses. One leads to a discussion while the other is inconspicuous and likely never had consent in the first place.
This is the only sane take on perv glasses.
If someone pulled out their phone to photograph me on our first date, I’d nip that in the bud, and maybe just walk away. I guess I might be okay if there was a scenic background and they said “want to get a selfie together?” but a photo just of me across the table? Creepy.
And with a conversation about it all that can be laid out and consented to.
Hey this view is really pretty can we take a selfie? Sure!
Later that evening: Hey that photo came out good, do you mind if I post it to my Instagram? I’d prefer if you didn’t.
Okay no problem.
It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than this.
Yeah im a huge nerd and techno-weenie but this is just creepy abuser behavior and a major red flag if it wasn’t consented to im advance
hue hue people have cameras in their phone and you have no problem with that, checkmate /s
I wonder what’s gonna happen when someone who has like a reactionary-style mental illness, yet is cognitively aware enough to know what the glasses are and keeps up with current events, sees someone with the glasses on and just punches the person in the face. 🤣.
So you mean if I buy these I don’t have to talk to people? Where do I sign up?
I actually think these kind of technology have potential great use.
Eg. Real time translation with subtitles / vocie to text translation. It will be great when you travel to othet counties and talk to the locals.
Or like…
Real time navigation from GPS
Calories control etc.
I think this technology is great, but people just gonna abuse it
The key is buying a pair of regular glasses that look similar enough, and put some logo stickers on to fake it. Then, you don’t support evil, and you still don’t have to talk to people. Win win!
I would advise against this. The time is coming where people wearing perv glasses are going to be encountering bats to the face. BTW, I also know of a couple of people working on adversarial QR codes to attack the glasses’ systems.
I know nothing of their capabilities besides the ability to record video. Do these perv glasses really parse and execute QR codes? Seems dumb if so, but I don’t know the intended use case
You know you can just not talk to people, you don’t have to creep people out to achieve that goal
But then I have to talk to them to make them stop 🫠. Would be better if they avoided me in the first place.
What’s wrong with good old fashioned headphones/mean mug?
Just start talking to yourself like you’re on Bluetooth. “Hold on, this person is trying to talk to me, one sec”
