Following the explosion of smart glasses onto the market, the rollout of Meta glasses in particular has unleashed a whirlwind of controversy. Collaborating with Ray-Ban and Oakley, the tech giant boasts a star-studded sponsorship lineup that includes Kylie Jenner and Doja Cat. Through this, it appears Meta is attempting to ride the coat-tails of Generation Z’s cultural influence to break their new tech into the mainstream. However, rising concerns over privacy and women’s safety have awarded smart glasses the nickname of “pervert glasses”. As courtrooms and venues around the UK have taken measures to ban them, should King’s College London enforce campus-wide restrictions to protect its students from the very eyewear that is being marketed towards their demographic?

Targeted For Simply Existing Publicly

Disturbingly, there has been considerable evidence to suggest smart glasses are being weaponised disproportionally against young people, particularly when it comes to targeting vulnerable demographics that include women and children in public areas. On Brighton beach last year, a woman told the BBC that a man asked her out, to which she politely declined. She later learnt that he was recording the entire interaction through his smart glasses, after watching the video of herself on TikTok. The comments were flooded with “derogatory” and “sexually explicit” comments, significantly impacting the woman’s mental health and leaving her “afraid to go out in public.”

A 17-year old girl was similarly subjected to covert filming in Waterloo station, after rejecting a pickup-artist who had secretly captured her on his Meta glasses. He then proceeded to post the video online, even manipulating the footage to insinuate that the girl had accepted his advances to disingenuously promote a “manfluencer course”.

In both of these instances, the perpetrators had appropriated their target’s consent to achieve viral content, monetising the continual harassment of women and girls. Arguably, Meta is also monetising a pervert-shaped gap in the market. While they may not directly be endorsing it, they are making the production of voyeuristic, nonconsensual footage frighteningly easy in even the most innocuous of public places: train stations, grocery stores and universities.

This makes the clear marketing towards young women particularly insidious. Through buzzy influencer and celebrity campaigns, Meta has attempted to channel female spending power while detracting from the 65-74% male consumer base. Most sinisterly, this base includes those who see covertly filming women as the product. With countless dangerous cases like this circulating online that include the harassment of LGBTQ+ people and people of colour, it now appears critical for institutions like King’s to consider the safeguarding of their students, many of whom use busy stations like Waterloo on their daily commute.

Furthermore, Meta are also considering implementing facial recognition into their smart glasses. This could have alarming safety implications for students, particularly those involved in political protest and demonstration on campuses like Strand. Following the suspension of pro-Palestine activist and student Usama Ghanem (who has now been reinstated) last year for allegations of non-academic miscoduct, as well as Roar’s own investigation into King’s use of private intelligence to identify Palestine-supporting students on social media, one can only imagine how further profiling might intimidate students from expressing their political stances. What happens when even university campuses, which should be areas of free speech as well as knowledge, instead become harbingers for a conformist future?

All Eyes On Campus

If smart glasses successfully latch on, it is more than likely that it will dramatically alter the student experience on campus. For visually impaired students, for example, this could even have positive implications as the built-in AI feature can describe immediate surroundings. Potentially, this could prove helpful for navigating crowded hallways, or the streets of London generally.

However, Birmingham City University has voiced their concerns over filming in lectures and cheating on tests. This comes especially as the only indication of someone recording is a minuscule light in the frames. While Meta has said that its glasses will automatically stop recording if a user obstructs the light, reports suggest that the lights are easily dismantled, transforming the already discreetly recording glasses essentially into spyware. Vendors then sell the tampered-with glasses on the market as “Ghost Metas”.

In this vein, the threat of undetectable recording could also heighten anxiety among students. This could manifest itself as discouragement from contributing in lectures and seminars, where they may make an error. With the possibility looming in the air of hidden cameras leering at you at any time, it is no surprise that the pressure on young people to constantly embody algorithmic picture-perfection will only increase.

How should King’s Respond Against Smart Glasses?

While student-favourite pub chain Wetherspoons has stated that smart glasses will be banned on their premises, along with courtrooms and other venues, university rules have largely been slow on the uptake. King’s already has security staff stationed at each campus, as well as a “Report + Support” Platform, which goes about tackling assault, harassment and discrimination within the university. In terms of restrictions on casual filming, King’s does prohibit recording in designated study zones in libraries, to preserve privacy and a calm study environment.

However, it is clear to see that the covert subtlety of filming through smart glasses could slip through the cracks of these fragile regulations, which are only really designed to penalise the distracting, obtrusive kind of filming that is easily identifiable by a phone camera. This is a concern that should be anticipated by any university, although it is still truly up in the air whether any explicit covert filming restrictions on KCL campuses will ever come into force.

Nonetheless, perhaps it is Meta who should shoulder the blame for not implementing safety features appropriately in the first place, an accusation that the tech giant has built a thick armour around. Currently, they are facing a lawsuit for deliberately “hooking” a generation of children to social media, which has just reached a settlement of up to $18 billion. Even with this step towards accountability, the lawsuit shows that many feel Meta’s carelessness has inflicted wholesale damage to online privacy. With further embedding of smart glasses into communities like university campuses, the average bystander surely has fewer corners to hide in and more reason to be suspicious of their surroundings. Activist groups like collective Everyone Hates Elon have unleashed campaigns to warn people against the normalisation of surveillance and even the threat of techno-fascism. As Maggie Harrison Dupré of the Guardian writes: “When you feel like anyone could be filming you, you act like you’re always being filmed.”

This premonition fundamentally undermines the very nature of spaces like university campuses, which can only work around the mutual trust that every student can feel safe to exist without inhibition in the public eye, free of the need to constantly look over their shoulder. Indeed, freedom of expression has always been what makes university life flourish for so many students, as campuses offer them a safe space to explore their identity and beliefs.

In fact, it is this unique spirit that forms part of what keeps the “university experience” relevant and alive today in the face of higher tuition fees and lower graduate prospects across the UK. Therefore, whatever steps King’s takes in the future, it is crucial for them to support student’s imperative ability to consent over their own digital image, especially in a time where this power is in many ways diminishing. As young people and their privacy increasingly become target practice for experiments in surveillance, it is high time for universities to stop shying away from the line of fire, and to start considering bans.

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