As much heat as Meta’s Ray-Bans get for being a privacy liability, Mark Zuckerberg and co. can at least take solace in knowing they’re not the only company stumbling into glasshole territory. According to a recent report from the Xiaoxiang Morning Post (machine translated), Rokid AI glasses, which are sold in the U.S., are purportedly being used to film people in China without their knowledge or consent. Not only that, but that unsavory footage appears to be being shared publicly inside Rokid’s own community forums.
Videos captured by Rokid’s smart glasses, which were trending on the Chinese social network Weibo, show interactions with flight attendants on Spring Airlines who were reportedly being filmed without their knowledge. The Xiaoxiang Morning Post notes in their report that there were plenty of other cases of such content on Rokid’s community forum, all of which were seemingly taken without the subject’s consent. Gizmodo has reached out to Rokid for its statement about the videos, but did not hear back before publication.
If people using Rokid’s glasses for surreptitiously recording others wasn’t enough of a parallel with Meta’s glasses, the Xiaoxiang Morning Post also reports that they discovered third-party merchants online selling stickers designed to obscure the recording light on Rokid smart glasses. The stickers, like the ones sold to fit the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, cover the LED on the front of the glasses that’s designed to tell people when they’re recording. The hitch here is that they do so without triggering sensors in the smart glasses that are meant to recognize and disable recording abilities when the light is obscured.
Stickers aren’t the only method of disabling visual indicators on smart glasses, by the way. A recent report from journalist Joanna Stern shows that people across the U.S. will take money in exchange for drilling out the light, making Ray-Ban Meta glasses even more discreet for recording.
As bad as all this is, Meta and Rokid aren’t the only companies that will be dealing with problems like this. Smart glasses with cameras, for whatever utility they may have, are inherently good at encroaching on people’s privacy, and it’s damn near impossible to police the way people use them once they’re in the real world—just ask courtrooms, or classrooms, or people shopping. The question is whether damage control from companies selling smart glasses can actually convince lawmakers and people that they can and should be worn on your face, and that part of the equation is still firmly TBD.
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