Smart glasses are already sowing chaos in India: police surveillance and harassment without consent

MIT Technology Review's article, by Anuj Behal, documents how camera-equipped smart glasses —led by Meta's models with their Ray-Ban Wayfarer styling— are causing serious incidents of non-consensual surveillance and harassment in India, a country whose legal framework and culture of consent are not yet ready for this kind of device.

The central case is that of Shubnam, a 38-year-old transfeminine graphic designer and educator. At a protest held in Delhi this spring against a bill that would have restricted legal recognition of trans people in India, a content creator known for "rage-bait" videos approached Shubnam —dressed in a green sari, her head shaved— and asked her why she was wearing "women's clothes." Shubnam asked him to move away. Only when she saw the video days later, when it was already circulating on Instagram, did she realize the conversation had been recorded with Meta smart glasses without her noticing. The video, edited to mock her, racked up millions of views, unleashed transphobic abuse, spawned reaction posts and AI-generated memes, and spread to X and YouTube, where copies are still circulating. Shubnam describes the personal toll: she felt that a single non-consensual video erased two decades of personal progress, and she has not worn a sari outside her neighborhood since.

The article places this episode within a broader trend: smart glasses are one of the fastest-growing segments of India's wearables market, according to the consultancy IDC. Reliance Jio, one of the country's largest telecom operators, plans to launch a rival model this year for less than $105, compared with the $420 price of Meta's latest model in India. The underlying problem, says Janusz Świerczyński, a researcher at the Oxford Saïd Business School specializing in privacy and emerging technologies, is that these cameras do not look like cameras: the burden of spotting them falls increasingly on the person being recorded, who has to watch for a small LED that lights up during recording. According to Świerczyński, Meta also defers to the good judgment of whoever is wearing the glasses. Reliance Jio did not respond to a request for comment on these privacy risks for its forthcoming device.

The LED indicator itself has already proved vulnerable: content creators have posted tutorials on covering or hiding it while continuing to record, and in March Wired magazine documented a market for "stealth mode" modifications that disable or physically remove that light. Świerczyński stresses that the harm is not distributed evenly: women and other marginalized groups suffer greater consequences when discreet devices record and circulate images without their consent, as happened to Shubnam.

Beyond viral "pranks," the report documents a troubling institutional use: Indian police are already using smart glasses as a surveillance tool. In June, during protests by thousands of young people over problems in the education system, Delhi police used Meta glasses to record demonstrators. A petition filed with the Delhi High Court by Aishe Ghosh, former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University students' union, alleged that police filmed protesters continuously for weeks, even while they ate or rested, and went so far as to threaten to send that footage to their parents and their universities. In July, India's solicitor general had the case dismissed in court, calling it "luxury litigation." Far from investigating the students' complaints, police opened ten criminal investigations against the protesters themselves for offenses such as rioting, assaulting public officials and damaging public property. Several protesters, speaking on condition of anonymity, say they never saw the LED lit on the AI glasses worn by police during the demonstrations.

Meta maintains that its notification system works: it says every pair of glasses includes a capture LED that blinks when taking a photo or recording video, that it cannot be disabled, and that if someone covers or damages that LED the camera stops working. The company insists it is the user's responsibility to comply with the law and respect other people's privacy. For Sameer Parmar, a counselor at Meri Trustline —an organization that works with Meta and YouTube to support victims of harmful online content— that approach is risky in a country where norms around recording and consent remain hotly contested and digital literacy is uneven: the hardware improves, but weak social understanding of consent gives an invisible camera far more room to cause harm. Parmar notes that in India being in a public space is often read as implicit consent to be photographed, and that his helpline has recorded a marked increase in cases of covert recording and non-consensual distribution of footage, affecting people in medical settings, private encounters and public spaces, with the most vulnerable groups the preferred targets of trolls and malicious pranks.

India's legal framework, according to Apar Gupta, a lawyer and founding director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, has failed to adapt to this new form of harm: laws against voyeurism and the distribution of intimate images were designed for more recognizable forms of abuse —such as secretly filming someone undressing, in the bathroom or during a sexual act— and offer little protection when covert recording happens in an ordinary public setting and is then used to humiliate the person. Platform rules offer no immediate remedy either: according to Gupta, the rules in force in India allow platforms up to 36 hours to act on certain complaints, enough time for a video to be downloaded, copied and circulated through other channels.

The problem also threatens to get worse. As the Financial Times reported, some internal prototypes of new Meta glasses include AI features that continuously photograph and listen to the wearer's surroundings, making it possible to retrieve later what they saw or heard, without those features triggering the external light indicator, which would make it impossible for anyone nearby to know they are being recorded. Meta has said it intends to keep the LED for active capture —photos or videos that can be saved or shared— but not for AI features that simply interpret the surroundings, arguing that a constantly blinking light could end up being normalized to the point that people stop noticing it.

Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Boston University, warns that this logic risks locking society into a perpetual game of catch-up: tech companies have an enormous capacity to bring these tools to market faster than society can absorb the threat they pose, so that by the time society finally reacts, normalization has already happened. For Shubnam, the danger is not only getting used to being recorded, but getting used to versions of yourself circulating that you never chose to show the world: feeling boxed into a narrative you neither composed nor consented to, she says, creates the sense of having no power over how people know you.