Technology
Meta bets its AI future on smart glasses—despite a privacy backlash it helped create
After the metaverse bust, Zuckerberg is pivoting to AI-powered eyewear, but decades of privacy missteps and real-world misuse are threatening to derail the platform.
The Verge
Mark Zuckerberg has a pattern: chase the next big thing, and move on from yesterday's problems. When child safety concerns mounted in 2021, private WhatsApp messages revealed his candor. While claiming to care deeply, he told an interlocutor that building the metaverse was a higher priority. Weeks later, Facebook rebranded to Meta. Now, five years and over $80 billion in losses to Reality Labs later, that gamble has largely flopped—but Zuckerberg has already found his next obsession: AI-powered smart glasses.
From metaverse mirage to real-world hardware#
Meta's pivot away from virtual reality began quietly after the promised metaverse failed to materialize. Horizon Worlds, the flagship experience, was shelved (though briefly revived after backlash), and the company cut roughly 10 percent of Reality Labs staff. Yet the shift wasn't a total retreat. Smart glasses, initially considered a sideshow, have unexpectedly gained traction.
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses, launched in 2023, have sold millions of units—surprising even Zuckerberg. By mid-2026, Meta and its partner EssilorLuxottica had reached double-digit millions in cumulative sales and dominated over 69 percent of the smart glasses market. The company now frames these devices not as fashion tech but as AI glasses—a platform it claims will determine who thrives in a cognitively competitive future.
"I think in the future, if you don't have glasses that have AI, you're probably going to be at a significant cognitive disadvantage," Zuckerberg stated on an earnings call. It's a reframing that signals Meta's latest bet: AI-powered eyewear as the successor to smartphones.
The privacy liability that won't go away#
Yet Meta's dominance in smart glasses rests on a shaky foundation. A decade of privacy scandals—data breaches, indiscriminate ad tracking, and algorithmic harms—has poisoned public trust. Now, Meta's latest products are channeling those anxieties into concrete, wearable form.
Videos of men using Ray-Ban glasses to surreptitiously record women and retail workers have gone viral, spawning the pejorative label "pervert glasses." Activists have responded with guerrilla campaigns, remixing Meta's own marketing to cast the devices as surveillance threats. Meanwhile, reporting has exposed Meta's plans for facial recognition features, "super sensing glasses" capable of perceiving users' behavior 24/7, and other capabilities that seem designed to intensify, not assuage, privacy concerns.
