Kylie Jenner was the face of the latest campaign for the more “subtle and stylish” models of Meta glasses. The most famous iteration of these AI-powered accessories reportedly sold 7 million pairs in 2025 alone. Launched with an Instagram post in late June, the backlash was intense and immediate. Commenters denounced the advertisement as “promoting predator glasses” and “surveillance capitalism.”
“The anti-AI glasses sentiment might be getting louder simply because the glasses are getting more popular: They're a thing young people actually encounter out in the world,” suggests tech correspondent Katie Notopoulos when considering the backlash towards the Meta x Kylie ad campaign. “They also come with the potential creep factor.”
This real-world exposure certainly carries negative connotations. A Wired article denounced pranksters harassing service workers and men attempting to pick up women as some of the worst (and most popular) types of content creators to capitalize on the creepiness of the glasses.
Concluding that “smartphones normalized our constant, often aggressive recording of one another, and now there’s just a more convenient, frictionless, and secretive means to accomplish the same result.” This technology is merely a step up in a pre-existing level of entitlement that it is now even easier to feel shameless about. Some of the most popular tutorials about smart glasses are on how to hide the recording light to decrease the chances of being caught filming.
It isn’t just other people who have to take care when it comes to this covert recording, but potentially those wearing the glasses as well. There have been reports that Meta content reviewers, supposed to improve the user experience, may view images and recordings without the wearer knowing. Those who own the glasses may also be in the uncomfortable position of being watched without their explicit consent.
This is not to say that there aren’t some benefits to this wearable technology. Meta executives have talked up the potential benefits of the glasses for blind people, with its artificial intelligence designed to answer any questions the user may have about their surroundings while wearing them. Even for those who don’t have vision issues (and have no ethical objections to AI), the ability to get instant answers without pulling out a phone is arguably an attractive draw for many.
That being said, much of the conversation around Meta Glasses is less interested in its ability to help those who need it and more concerned about its ability to contribute to the creator economy. Using Kylie Jenner as the face of the ad campaign isn’t just obvious pandering to a lesser tapped market of younger, trend-conscious women. It is also a poignant reminder that much of Jenner’s life and career has been a lesson in how surveillance has become culturally normalized. The most famous influencer in the world who first starred in reality TV at the age of 10 is the perfect advocate for such a potentially invasive product.
She isn’t the only celebrity to promote the combination of fashion and surveillance technology, either. Samsung recently promoted their own smart glasses collaboration with the brand Gentle Monster by recruiting famous models like Alex Consani and Anok Yai to wear their frames, and fashion personality Alexa Chung has split opinion by showcasing her outfits via stills captured on her front door Ring camera.
At an AI convention in San Francisco last week, OpenAI CEO and tech villain of the moment Sam Altman offered a bleak vision of the future: “You will have no freedom, you will have no agency, it will be a perfect surveillance state.” Seemingly, an important part of normalizing that is giving the average person the opportunity to engage in some surveillance of their own in both their own lives and those of others, whether they consent to it or not.
There have been attempts to counteract the spying abilities of smart glasses, however. Apps have been developed to tell people when these types of glasses wearers are close by, and in Denmark, there have even been discussions of a new law to give everyone copyright protection over their own likeness, thus avoiding viral infamy through covert recording. While the backlash seems to have almost as strong a voice as the relentless promotion, this doesn’t yet decrease the risk of a content creator’s nonconsensual recording landing on our feeds. Hands-free recording is the ideal in the age of the influencer.
Just because it is possible to use this kind of technology in a benign and even helpful way doesn’t mean that it deserves to be accepted without criticism. It may be a natural progression of the social and technological trends that we have already witnessed, but that does not make it inevitable. We can at least try to opt out by making it clear that it isn’t cool and shouldn’t be normal.
