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Disney songs, a 'covert' Khan Market video & a legal notice: What Meta's smart glasses can do and how to spot them
Sales of Meta's smart glasses have risen over the past year. A guide to the risks, the rules, and the options if you are caught on camera
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Somewhere on the internet, the advice is to start singing a Disney song.
The idea, which has circulated on TikTok and Reddit as Meta's camera-equipped smart glasses have gone mainstream, is that copyrighted music picked up on the glasses’ microphone would trigger automated takedowns if the footage is uploaded.
Fortune reported this month that people have tried a range of tactics, from loud singing to scanner apps, to avoid being filmed by strangers wearing the glasses. An attorney interviewed by the magazine said none of the methods were foolproof.
The workarounds have surfaced for a reason. Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses don’t make it easy for a bystander to tell whether a nearby person is wearing ordinary spectacles or has a camera pointed at them.
Back home, HT reported on Wednesday, a Delhi resident sent a legal notice to Meta and an Instagram creator, alleging that he was covertly recorded using the glasses while he was at a cafe in the capital’s popular Khan Market. The notice said that his video was later posted as a reel to mock him online.
The man has sought removal of the video, an apology, preservation and disclosure of evidence, and ₹2.05 crore in damages, advocate Apar Gupta – who filed the notice on the man’s behalf – said.
So, what happens when a camera can look exactly like a pair of ordinary glasses? Can a person know they are being recorded? And if they can’t, who is responsible — the person wearing the glasses, the platform hosting the footage, or the company that made the device?
Here's what we know:
The rollout
Meta’s manufacturing partner EssilorLuxottica disclosed in its fourth-quarter results on February 11 this year that the company sold more than 7 million pairs of smart glasses in a single year, more than triple the 2 million units sold cumulatively over previous years and taking lifetime sales close to 9 million.
Meta leadership has described the product line as one of the fastest-growing consumer electronics segments in the company's history.
Counterpoint Research, a global technology market research firm, reported in March that Meta's global market share in smart glasses rose to 82% in the second half of 2025, from 73% in the first half. That share, however, is of a category that is still small in absolute terms.
Counterpoint's tracker shows the entire global market crossed 2 million units in shipments for the first time only in 2024, and another research firm Omdia put total AI glasses shipments for 2025 at 8.7 million units.
The glasses arrived in India last year through an official partnership with Titan Eye+, which stocked them across more than 50 flagship stores. Counterpoint tracked a fifteen-fold surge in smart glasses shipments to India in the second half of 2025, following Meta's official India launch in May that year. The country still accounted for only 2% of the global smart glasses sales, according to the same tracker.
The entry-level Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 1) glasses were launched in India at ₹29,900, the second-generation was priced at ₹39,900, and the sportier Oakley Meta HSTN, ₹41,800.
The concerns and the debate
The glasses integrate cameras, microphones, speakers and AI features into frames that look conventional.
A smartphone camera generally requires a visible gesture of holding the device and pointing the camera at a person being filmed or captured. Smart glasses record from the wearer's line of sight without an obvious one.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US-based digital rights group, said in a March post that the glasses are "designed to be invisible to those being recorded", with the only signal being a small indicator light that "cheap hacks can disable".
In October 2024, two Harvard undergraduates, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, demonstrated a project called I-XRAY that paired Ray-Ban Meta glasses with facial recognition software and public databases. Their demonstration, which the two said was intended to raise awareness rather than encourage misuse, matched strangers on the Boston subway to their names, addresses, phone numbers and relatives within seconds.
There have also been reports of harassment. A BBC investigation earlier this year found that some male influencers were using Meta glasses to covertly film women for social media content, according to a summary published by the US National Law Review.
Researchers at the University of Sydney's Governing Immersive Technologies team analysed 350 publicly available Instagram videos recorded with smart glasses and posted between 2023 and 2026.
The team, whose work was funded by the Australian Research Council, published its findings on August 11 in a preprint paper titled ‘Harm Through the ‘#RizzCam’: Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment’.
Their analysis found that around 60% of the covert point-of-view videos showed behaviour that may be classified as potential harassment, and that women were subjected to derogatory commentary in the comments of 43% of those videos.
Does the Disney song trick work?
Not reliably.
Platforms such as Instagram and YouTube run automated copyright detection systems that scan uploaded audio against a library of licensed music. In practice, these systems would typically mute or block the audio track rather than take down the visual footage, which means that a video of a bystander would likely remain online even if a background Disney track is flagged for copyright violations.
The trick also does nothing about footage that is never uploaded to a public platform, whether it is stored on the wearer’s device, shared privately or shared to a small group.
Further, the glasses support direct livestreaming to Instagram and Facebook, which means content can reach viewers before any moderation kicks in.
What Meta says
Meta has pointed to the capture LED as the main privacy safeguard on its smart glasses. The white light is designed to activate whenever the camera is recording, giving bystanders a visual cue.
The company says the glasses can detect when the light is obstructed and disable camera functionality, and that additional measures have been added to detect physical tampering.
Meta also publishes guidance asking users to respect the wishes of people who do not want to be filmed and to avoid recording in places where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri, HT reported, had recently said that Meta cannot prevent people from filming others, but tries to ensure that the recording light remains on. He said the company would remove harassing “pickup line”-style content and did not want people “surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them”.
But independent reviews have flagged that the LED is small and can be difficult to spot in bright sunlight or from a distance.
The company has faced separate scrutiny over how footage from the glasses is processed. Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten reported in February this year that recordings, including intimate scenes and images of financial documents, had been reviewed in a sub-contracted operation in Kenya's Nairobi as part of training Meta’s AI systems. The reporting triggered a class-action lawsuit in the US, an investigation by the UK’s Information Commissioner's Office, and a probe by Kenya's Office of the Data Protection Commissioner.
The global rulebook, so far
The nature, scope and punishment for privacy violations, and who can be held responsible, varies sharply across countries.
In the US, courts apply the “reasonable expectation of privacy” test derived from a 1967 Supreme Court ruling that focused the topic away from the location where the alleged violation is occurring to the person’s expectation of privacy.
The European Union takes a different approach. Under the General Data Protection Regulation, identifiable faces and images can constitute personal data, bringing their collection and use within a data-protection framework in many circumstances.
France's data protection authority, the CNIL, issued a specific warning on smart glasses in May, saying that the devices involve extensive processing of personal data and that their use is, in principle, subject to the GDPR and French data-protection law. It also warned that the technology raises wider ethical and societal concerns.
Despite the rule, it doesn’t mean every person wearing smart glasses on a French street must obtain consent from every passerby. There are always exceptions, issues with enforcement, and context.
The Khan Market incident, and in India
Like elsewhere, the Khan Market incident has raised questions about how existing privacy protections would apply when someone is recorded without knowing it.
The notice – sent by Apar Gupta, founder of digital rights advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) – also asks if Meta has a mechanism to report abuse and whether such a mechanism had been incorporated for third parties to file complaints.
An expert told HT on Wednesday that the legal question was nuanced because there is no exact law in India that requires consent for every recording made in the public. But being in a public place also doesn’t mean that a person had made their personal data publicly available.
The use of smart glasses had drawn scrutiny in India before this notice too. In July, a Delhi Police officer was spotted wearing a pair while monitoring student protesters at Jantar Mantar, feeding a pending Supreme Court case on protest surveillance.
What can you do if you think you are being filmed?
There is no technology that can guarantee a bystander will never be recorded in a public space. There are, though, practical steps that can help.
Look for the capture-light. If you spot it and feel safe doing so, you can ask the wearer to stop. Not being able to spot the light may not mean the camera is off, since the LED is small and easy to miss.
Prioritise safety over confrontation. If the wearer follows you, appears aggressive or otherwise makes you feel unsafe, move away. In restaurants, gyms, salons, workplaces and other private venues, staff or security can be asked to intervene. Some establishments overseas have begun barring camera-equipped eyewear on their premises.
Document what happened. Note the time, location and description of the person. If footage of you later appears online, save screenshots, the account name, the post URL and timestamps before making any complaint.
Report the footage. Use the social media website’s reporting tools and pick the category that most closely matches the problem, such as harassment or privacy violation. In India, complaints of online harassment can also be filed on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal at cybercrime.gov.in.
According to a Meta spokesperson, Instagram enforces rules against content that uses smart glasses to harass or exploit people in public.
(With inputs from Sejal Sharma in New Delhi)
