Every Sunday, David Zucker rents a basketball court at a gym in New York City to play a pickup game with a few of his friends. In late 2024, he became one of the first people he knew to own a pair of Meta smart glasses.
He loved them because the tech-loaded eyewear let him film his pickup games to share with friends on social media. But he liked them for another reason: they helped him navigate a world built for people with better vision than his.
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Zucker was born with oculocutaneous albinism type 2, one of the most common forms of albinism, which qualifies him as legally blind.
“I don’t drive. I have a disabled state ID. So, kind of in that weird middle space of I’m not blind, but I’m not fully sighted,” Zucker told Straight Arrow.
He would often edit the video he captured with his glasses to show “What it’s like for me to exist normally versus here’s what it’s like to exist with this product,” he said. No one batted an eye when they saw him wearing his smart glasses. Most people even thought they were really cool — that was until recently.
By April, the narrative about smart glasses among news outlets and social media began to change. What people once saw as a cool new gadget quickly became a potentially dangerous one that could film people without their knowledge. Even The Guardian used the phrase “pervert glasses in a headline.
Zucker is one of a growing number of blind or people with low vision who use smart glasses as a functional tool. From reading menus and identifying products to navigating hands-free, the technology can help a lot. As the backlash has grown, advocates and users worry the fallout could jeopardize a technology many in the visually impaired community have come to depend on.
As the public narrative around the tech changed, Zucker began to notice odd looks or cautious glances from people. His friends still knew he wasn’t doing anything nefarious with them, but the rest of the city didn’t, and eventually he said it just wasn’t worth the hassle anymore.
“Unfortunately, I’ve really just stopped wearing them anywhere lately because of the radically altering public perception of them,” Zucker said.
A tool, not a toy
Several companies make smart glasses, with some specifically made for the blind community. But the Meta smart glasses are much cheaper than most other smart glasses and the most widely used by people with visual impairments.
“It’s that affordability. It’s also style choice, in a sense too,” said Tony Stephens, the assistant vice president of communications for the American Foundation for the Blind. “I mean, they’re fashionable Ray-Bans, and it’s integrated into Facebook and things like that that a lot of people from our community are already using for communication.”
The glasses feature a camera, a microphone array and open-ear speakers. They come in classic Ray-Ban frame styles and are barely distinguishable from a regular pair of sunglasses.
Walking the busy New York City streets, on the subway or at the airport, Zucker said, the open-ear design lets him listen to a podcast or music without blocking out the world around him — “in case there’s a biker whizzing by or somebody’s trying to get your attention.”
While Meta has largely marketed them as a tool for content creators, those with visual impairments use them to read the mail or pick out clothes for the day. Zucker said in the past he would have to pull out his phone, take a picture of the menu and zoom in so he could read it. But with the glasses, he could skip those steps.
“My phone was already my magnifying glass,” he told Straight Arrow. “This just removed a few layers of friction — you could take a photo with one click of a button or talk to it in real time.”
Privacy concerns
Concerns over smart glasses didn’t emerge in a vacuum. Around the same time, Flock Safety’s network of AI-powered license plate readers was facing its own backlash. A security researcher had already shown the cameras could be easily hacked, and a mounting number of police officers nationwide were being caught using the system to track ex-partners and others without legitimate reason. The public wasn’t just wary of a new camera — it was wary of cameras, period.
Those privacy concerns weren’t lost on Aaron Preece, the editor-in-chief of AccessWorld, AFB’s technology magazine.
“I wouldn’t want the glasses to be able to identify anybody on the street. I get the privacy issues around that,” he told Straight Arrow. “We don’t want it describing us either, or some random person just IDing us on the street.”
The glasses have an LED indicator light when someone is using them to record, but someone found a workaround. People who wanted to record video without raising suspicion began paying people to drill out the light and replace it with epoxy resin. It became easier once people discovered they could simply cover the light with a sticker.
Meta has since said it has updated the software to prevent either loophole from working, but it still raised concerns that people were willing and able to bypass the company’s own safeguards relatively easily.
Then there are the concerns regarding smart glasses spying on their users. In late February, a Swedish newspaper reported that workers at a Meta subcontractor in Kenya were watching footage from customers’ glasses, including while they were naked, having sex and using the bathroom. Meta saw a rush of privacy lawsuits after the story was published.
There’s also a broader unease that the glasses are always listening, not unlike how people have grown wary of their phones. Zucker said that fear doesn’t bother him much.
“Maybe people needed to see the camera to feel that there’s always a presence listening, trying to sell us targeted goods,” Zucker said. “But I guess I just never really felt like it was that different.”
The cost of suspicion
Some states and, more locally, some establishments are already banning smart glasses. In July, New York state banned smart glasses from every state court, despite the courts already prohibiting recording generally.
Just days ago, one of New York City’s most popular nightclubs, Basement, issued a similar ban, citing its no-photo/no-video policy. Gyms are another location where bans have occurred, something Zucker has personally dealt with.
“I had to stop wearing them at the gym,” he said. “I used to go to the floor where there’s a lot of people. This was before people really knew what they were. But now it feels like everybody knows and everyone hates them.”
Schools are also bringing down the hammer. In Florida, Polk County Public Schools recently announced that students would be prohibited from using smart glasses in class over privacy concerns and potential disruption. The school did add an exception for students who use them for disabilities, but those students would need to contact the school beforehand.
Stephens said concerns over privacy and suspicion of smart glasses are similar to service animals. As people began registering their untrained dogs as service dogs, it became harder for those with real ones to use them in public places, like airplanes.
“The people that are using these nefariously, they’re impacting our lives,” Stephens said. “We’ve had a taste of what greater inclusion can feel like through this technology, and it’s disheartening to think that there are people out there abusing it — because it’s hurting groups like ourselves that can really use this to live more independently, in a society that, for millennia, hasn’t made that easy.”
Some optimism, some resignation
While bans are happening, Preece doesn’t think the negative reaction to smart glasses will stop the technology’s forward motion. He said that even if Meta scales back some features because of the backlash, other companies are developing the benefits the blind community relies on.
Stephens sees the backlash as part of a familiar cycle — new technology draws intense scrutiny at first, then improves and gains acceptance as it matures.
“My hope is, and a gut feeling is, that it’s actually going to be getting better for us,” he said. “I feel like we’re going to get over this anxiety wave and that we’re going to continue to innovate in this space. But I’m an optimist. That’s my hope.”
But that feeling, that optimism, isn’t universal. Zucker said he’s hyperaware of how the glasses are perceived online and saw how quickly and overwhelmingly the negativity grew.
For Zucker, the device he once used to read menus and show friends how he sees the world is now something he associates with suspicion instead of independence.
“What I loved about them was they allowed me to exist anonymously, invisible with my disability — and instead made me such a more visible target,” he told Straight Arrow. “You couldn’t be further from your estimation of me as a person.”
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