Meta glasses and child safety 

What parents need to know about smart glasses, the hidden risks, your kid’s privacy and how to protect them in public.

At first glance, they look like an ordinary pair of glasses. Nothing about them immediately gives away what they can do. You could be sitting opposite someone on a train, standing beside them at a playground or passing them in the shops, completely unaware that a camera is built discreetly into the frames and could be pointed directly at you.

Not long ago, glasses capable of secretly capturing the world around you belonged in spy films. They were the sort of futuristic gadget reserved for undercover agents and fictional espionage. Now, they are sitting on the faces of ordinary people in everyday life.

That is part of what makes smart glasses such an interesting piece of technology. It is also what makes them more than a little unsettling, particularly when children are involved.

Meta glasses allow the wearer to take photos, record videos, make calls and use artificial intelligence without having to pull out a phone. For most people, that might simply mean an easier way to capture a holiday or record something while their hands are full.

But there is another side to the technology that parents should be concerned about. What happens when the person being recorded does not know it is happening? And what happens when that person is a child?

When the camera doesn’t look like a camera

Most of us have developed a pretty good radar for knowing when someone is filming. If a stranger pulls out their phone and points it towards your child at the park, chances are you are going to notice.

Smart glasses change that. Unlike an obvious phone or camera, Meta’s glasses can look remarkably similar to ordinary eyewear. Unless you already know what to look for, there may be little to alert you that the person standing nearby is wearing a recording device.

Meta has included a small recording light as a safety feature, which turns on when someone takes a photo or video. Meta also advises people to respect others’ privacy and ask permission before recording them. However, the recording light itself is fairly small. A child playing several metres away is hardly going to recognise it and many adults probably would not either.

That becomes particularly relevant in public spaces where families spend a lot of time, such as parks, swimming pools, beaches, shopping centres, train stations, sporting events and areas around schools.

The risks may be even greater in a private setting, where people reasonably expect not to be recorded at all.

As cameras become smaller and more discreet, it becomes harder for people to know when their privacy is being crossed.

Filming without consent

One story shared on Instagram recently shows how easily someone can be recorded without realising it. A young woman was waiting at a train station when a man wearing Meta glasses interacted with her. She did not know his glasses were recording. It was only later that she discovered footage of the encounter had been uploaded to the man’s TikTok account without her knowledge or consent, and she was just one of many women he had uploaded onto his page.

Consent was not part of the conversation. She did not get the opportunity to say, “Please don’t film me”, because she did not know there was a camera running in the first place.

Now imagine that same scenario involving a child. A child might happily answer a stranger’s question at a park, sporting event or train station without realising the adult’s glasses are capturing their face and voice. A parent standing nearby might not realise either.

By the time they find out, the video could already be on social media. Once an image of a child’s face is online, parents can lose control over how it is copied, shared, altered or reused.

That is a real concern as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly capable of manipulating existing photographs, videos and voice recordings. Images and audio can potentially be taken out of context or used to produce convincing synthetic content.

The potential harms therefore go beyond embarrassment or an unwanted social media video. There may also be consequences for a child’s reputation, children’s privacy and, in some circumstances, their physical safety if identifying details about where they live, study or regularly spend time become public.

This isn’t just a hypothetical concern

Along with the story above, there have already been other reports of people using smart glasses to secretly film strangers. In the United States, a woman named Toluwa Omitowoju discovered she had been filmed by a man wearing Meta AI smart glasses after friends began sending her the video. The footage of the interaction received more than 200,000 views across social media before it was eventually removed.

For parents, stories like these raise another question. If adults are already struggling to know when they are being recorded, what chance does a six-year-old have?

Younger users are particularly vulnerable because they may not recognise recording technology or understand what agreeing to a photo or video actually means once that content reaches the internet. Children may understand that someone is taking a picture, but they are unlikely to grasp that it could be watched by thousands of people, downloaded, copied or reposted somewhere else.

Once something reaches the major social media giants, getting every copy removed can be difficult. A video deleted from one account may already have been screen-recorded or shared elsewhere.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has raised concerns about men using devices including Meta AI glasses to record women without their knowledge, including while approaching them or asking them out. Some of those videos have then been uploaded online, where the women have been subjected to sexualised or degrading comments.

Rules at public pools

In Australia, Brisbane City Council has taken action. In August, the council introduced new rules banning people from filming others without their consent at its 21 public swimming pools.

The change does not specifically ban Meta glasses. It applies to camera-enabled devices generally, including phones, action cameras and wearable recording devices. People can still wear smart glasses at a council pool, but they cannot use them to record another person without permission. Someone who ignores the rules can be asked to leave.

The decision followed concerns about people potentially being secretly filmed while swimming. Families should be able to use public pools knowing that they and their children are not being secretly recorded.

It makes sense that swimming pools have become one of the first places to introduce clearer rules. Children are in swimmers, parents may be sitting nearby in swimwear and people reasonably expect a certain level of protection in that environment.

Rules like these are not about assuming everyone wearing smart glasses has bad intentions. They are about recognising foreseeable risks and putting boundaries in place to protect children’s safety and other vulnerable people.

The bigger question is whether we will eventually see similar rules introduced in other places frequented by kids.

Once the video exists, where does it go?

The recording itself is only one part of the issue. Once someone has footage of your child, you have very little control over what happens to it. It could stay on the person’s device. It could also be uploaded to TikTok, Instagram or another social media platform within minutes.

Videos can also reveal a surprising amount of information without anyone deliberately giving it away. A school uniform might identify where a child goes to school. A sporting jersey could reveal their club. A train station or street sign could show where they live or regularly travel. Even family members appearing in the background may provide more clues about who a child is.

With smart glasses capable of capturing both video and audio from the wearer’s point of view, children’s privacy becomes about more than protecting photographs. A seemingly harmless interaction could capture a child saying their name, mentioning their school or talking about where they are going next. Information that seems insignificant on its own can become much more revealing when combined with other details already available online.

This is also why parents are increasingly encouraged to think about how much personal information they share about their own children. One birthday photo may not reveal much, but years of public photos containing names, schools, sporting clubs, locations and family members can gradually create a detailed digital footprint.

Then there is facial recognition technology

The issue becomes even more interesting, and more concerning, when smart glasses are combined with other technology.

In 2024, two Harvard students, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, demonstrated a project they called I-XRAY. They connected Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses with facial recognition technology, artificial intelligence and publicly available databases. Their system demonstrated how a person’s face could potentially be used to locate information such as their name, home address and phone number.

It is important to be clear about what this demonstration showed. Ordinary Meta glasses do not simply look at someone and automatically tell the wearer where that person lives. The Harvard students created their own system by combining the glasses with separate tools and databases.

Their project was designed as a warning about what is already technically possible when several existing technologies are brought together. That distinction matters because it would be misleading to suggest that Meta’s smart glasses currently identify every stranger they look at. They do not.

The concern is what could become possible when cameras worn on the face are combined with a separate AI system, facial recognition technology and huge amounts of personal information already available online.

For a tech giant such as Meta, developing products like these also comes with an enormous responsibility to think ahead about how the technology could be misused, particularly when children are involved. Parents are not only thinking about what Meta’s glasses can do today. They are also watching how quickly artificial intelligence, facial recognition and wearable technology are developing alongside one another.

That is where some of the potential harms become harder to predict.

What can parents actually do?

There is no need to make children suspicious of every person wearing glasses. Most people using smart glasses are not secretly recording kids, but it is probably worth adding wearable cameras to the conversations we already have with children about phones, photos and online safety.

Older children can be taught that cameras are no longer always obvious. Glasses and other wearable devices can sometimes record photos, video and audio too.

Children should also know that they can move away and tell a trusted adult if someone is filming them, repeatedly approaching them or simply making them uncomfortable. Parents may also want to be more careful about publicly connecting a child’s face with identifying information such as their surname, school, sporting club or regular locations.

It is also worth asking schools, swimming pools and sporting organisations what their policies are around smart glasses and other recording devices.

If footage of your child does appear online without permission, keep a record of what has happened. Save the link, username and screenshots before reporting the content or asking for it to be removed.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to keep teaching children about consent from both sides. Just because technology makes it easy to take a photo or video does not mean every moment needs to become content.

We are going to need clearer boundaries

There are plenty of positive uses for smart glasses. They can make it easier to capture memories, communicate and access information, and the technology has the potential to be particularly helpful for people with certain disabilities.

The issue is not that everyone wearing Meta glasses is a threat to children. It is that cameras are becoming increasingly difficult to see.

For most of our lives, there has been an obvious signal that somebody is recording us. They had to hold a camera or point a phone in our direction.

Smart glasses blur that line.

Read next: Three questions about photo consent you need to ask your kid’s childcare or school