‘I Felt Super Violated’: Men Wearing Meta Glasses on Dates Is an Instant Red Flag

Courtney McAnuff was out of a year-long relationship in the summer of 2024 and starting to date again when she agreed to grab drinks with a potential suitor. They met at a bar in midtown Manhattan. He arrived wearing a baseball cap pulled low and sported a pair of black-framed glasses, she says. As conversation flowed, from discussions about navigating life in New York to past relationships, he mentioned that his glasses were Meta Ray-Bans. “I wasn’t familiar with them,” McAnuff, a 28-year-old project manager who now lives in Toronto, tells WIRED. It was her first time seeing the smart glasses up close, which can record images and video from the wearer’s viewpoint. He let her try them on and even showed her a couple of videos that he’d taken previously, she says. “That was it. We stopped talking about it after that. I figured that was the end of the use.” The next day, checking her Instagram, McAnuff noticed she’d been tagged in one of his story posts. To her surprise, it was footage of them at the bar and on the subway together, en route to a basketball game uptown. In the video, McAnuff is captured from an above angle, sitting across from her date who is holding a drinking glass; WIRED has seen screenshots of the footage. “I felt super violated,” McAnuff says. “Like, what if I don’t want everyone knowing what I’m up to? He felt so free to film me and post it. There was no conversation about it.” Meta sold more than 7 million pairs of the Ray-Bans in 2025, as its smart glasses have infiltrated public spaces thanks to pranksters with dreams of viral fame, some of whom even film people while they’re at work. The phenomenon, which has also spread to pickup artists hitting on women, has earned the hardware the nickname “creep glasses.” Among singles, and particularly women, Meta’s AI-powered eyewear has become a recurring nuisance, as people share a spreading unease about being covertly filmed on dates. “Ban those glasses completely,” posted a young woman on Bluesky in August, writing that her date “leaned over to show me pictures he took of me I had no idea he was taking.” One TikToker claimed in a video after a date that she “immediately felt uncomfortable,” questioning why people are “so comfortable videoing everything. It’s a terrible way to portray yourself, wearing a fucking camera on your face and you’re sitting in my face.” In a Reddit post from August, users debated the ethics of the trend, wondering if it was OK to continue a date when someone showed up wearing them; in a separate thread, one person said they had ghosted a guy after realizing he’d worn the glasses on their date. “I didn’t notice until toward the end of the night. I kissed him while he was wearing the glasses,” they said. In July, a man was put under investigation in Seoul, South Korea, for allegedly filming four women he had gone out with and later uploading clips to social media, according to The Korea Herald. In many regards, dating has been reframed by our dependency on technology. Apps connect people. Chatbots are used for all sorts of things these days: as wingmen and for role-play. Smartphone cameras capture important moments together. But while a phone being held up to someone’s face gives them a clear opportunity to object, smart glasses largely erase that opportunity. (Meta’s glasses do have a front-facing LED that switches on when the glasses are recording, but the light is the only warning, and it can be disabled by hacking the hardware.) For McAnuff, the trend is about more than privacy instructions. She was worried about what would happen with the footage afterward. “He didn’t ask if I wanted to be recorded or if I wanted my face uploaded. And now he has this video file of me forever. It’s definitely a big trust issue,” she says. In a 2025 YouGov survey of US adults focused on factors contributing to successful relationships, trust ranked the highest, with 94 percent of respondents categorizing it as “very important.” Gary Lewandowski, a psychology professor at Monmouth University whose research focuses on the science of romantic connection, says adding covert cameras to the mix will only make building trust harder. He says beyond posting for the ’gram, a number of factors could be driving men to do this. The most logical, non-creepy reason may be tied to post-date analysis, in that the glasses can help men identify blind spots around their own behavior. “A lot of men out there are eternal optimizers. They want better, more efficient ways of doing things, so reviewing game tape allows them to learn from mistakes,” Lewandowski says. “But I do wonder if some are doing it to build a case instead of a connection—why they’re right and the other person is wrong—or to help better identify red flags.” That type of surveillance “makes the date less about getting to know each other and more about fact gathering,” he adds. The trend has also reanimated discussions around consent when it comes to dating. Yue Xu, cohost of the Dateable podcast, believes new social norms are needed to keep up with our evolving tech. “It’s bringing in a third party, which is disturbing. It just shows that this person lacks respect for the integrity and privacy of the date,” Xu says, adding that she fears that the glasses are triggering a future “where people have no more anonymity.” Concerns have intensified as issues about the device have continued to make headlines. Meta and EssilorLuxottica, which owns Ray-Ban, are facing a class action lawsuit alleging that they captured and stored users’ private data without consent. This month, Semafor reported that Meta disabled the recording function for thousands of users who tampered with the light that notifies people that the Meta Ray-Bans are filming. Following the addition of an unreleased face-recognition feature called NameTag to its eyewear earlier this year, revealed by a WIRED investigation, Meta scrubbed the code from its app in June and is facing another proposed class action over allegedly breaching Illinois and California privacy laws by collecting biometric information from users’ photographs without their knowledge. “This lawsuit is without merit and misrepresents our work,” a Meta spokesperson tells WIRED in reference to the NameTag lawsuit. “We've been transparent about how we use people's information to build and improve our AI products. As for NameTags, nothing has shipped to consumers, and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything. If we do decide to roll something out, we will take a thoughtful approach and do so with full transparency. One decision we can be clear about—we are not building a universal face database.” EssilorLuxottica did not respond to a request for comment. According to Meta, if people tamper with the recording light, including placing blockers over it, the camera will not turn on. Additionally, the company says it removes accounts and content that violate its policies when it becomes aware of them, including content meant to degrade or shame others. In August, Meta expanded its public awareness efforts through a social media campaign focused on helping people identify when someone is recording with the glasses. “We don't want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we're trying to fight that every way we can,” Meta's head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said in July. That hasn’t stopped regulators around the world from pushing to enact harsher privacy laws for consumers. A California bill just passed both chambers that mandates visible recording indicators on recording devices and bans users from turning them off. Likewise, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is asking tech companies to automatically blur people’s faces recorded with their smart glasses, writing that “as smart glasses evolve and become more common, they may become increasingly interconnected with and create new ways to perpetrate different types of harms, such as image-based abuse, adult cyber abuse, cyberbullying of children, or the livestreaming of violent or other harmful content.” When McAnuff realized footage of her had been uploaded without her approval, she confronted her date over text. He apologized for his actions but she says that “he didn’t think it was that serious.” She hasn’t seen him since. For McAnuff and many others, Meta’s smart glasses have simply become the latest privacy issue hiding in plain sight. “Being in each other’s physical space is such a beautiful experience in itself. We don’t need to have gadgets around,” McAnuff says. “I don’t think that every moment needs to be captured.”