Meta addresses ‘pervert glasses’ reputation with a privacy fix and a new marketing campaign

Meta is updating its AI-powered smart glasses to adjacent a loophole that allowed wearers to support signaling aft covering the front-facing LED. Alex Himel, Meta’s vice president of augmented reality, writes successful a station connected Threads that “the camera will now extremity moving if the ray is covered during a recording.”

The company’s statement of smart glasses already disables their built-in cameras if personification covers the LED seizure light, which blinks to alert others that you’re signaling aliases taking a picture. However, immoderate wearers recovered that they tin bypass these restrictions by covering the LED ray after they started recording. This latest hole comes a small complete a period aft Meta updated its glasses to move disconnected its camera erstwhile wearers physically tamper pinch the seizure light.

“We’re going to support rolling retired updates for illustration this to make judge the seizure LED tin reliably alert bystanders erstwhile photos aliases videos are being captured for someone’s gallery,” Himel writes. “Only a mini number of group effort to get astir these protections, and the truth they person to spell to these lengths shows our efforts are working.”

But now, Meta is trying to dispersed “awareness” astir its LED seizure ray by launching its ain run successful communities “where glasses income person been popular,” Meta spokesperson Albert Aydin tells The Verge. One billboard, which is presently up successful Los Angeles, shows Meta’s smart glasses alongside a caption that says, “The camera lets you seizure the moment. The ray lets everyone astir you cognize erstwhile you do.” A video shared by Meta likewise says that the seizure LED “signals erstwhile the glasses are capturing photos and videos,” and that “no light” intends “no capture.”