A graphic designer in Delhi, filmed without consent at a protest. A police force using the same technology to surveil student demonstrators for weeks. A legal framework that was never designed to handle any of this. Smart glasses are no longer a niche gadget story. In India, they are already reshaping who gets watched, who gets harmed, and who gets to decide.
The Camera That Doesn’t Look Like One
This is what most coverage misses: the core problem with smart glasses is not the recording itself. It is the disguise. Devices like Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are styled to look like ordinary Wayfarers. There is no lens visible to a bystander, no obvious signal that footage is being captured. The only safeguard Meta offers is a small LED light that activates during recording. That light, the company insists, cannot be disabled without also disabling the camera.
Except it can be worked around. Tutorials demonstrating how to cover or obscure the indicator while continuing to record have circulated online. According to reporting by Wired, a market for “stealth mode” modifications that physically disable or remove the light entirely existed as early as March. Meta’s stated safeguard, in practice, is optional for anyone determined to ignore it.
The case of Shubnam, a 38-year-old transfeminine graphic designer and educator who uses a single chosen name, illustrates what this means in human terms. At a Delhi protest against a bill that would have narrowed legal recognition for transgender people in India, a content creator approached Shubnam and asked why they were wearing “female clothing.” Shubnam told him to back off. Only later, when a friend sent them the video, did they learn the exchange had been recorded on Meta smart glasses, edited into a mocking reel, and published. The footage drew millions of views, along with transphobic abuse, reaction videos, and AI-generated memes. It spread from Instagram to X and YouTube. Copies remain online.
“All it took was one unconsented video to rewind two decades of progress that I made all on my own,” Shubnam told MIT Technology Review. They have not worn a sari outside their neighborhood since.
Surveillance From Below and Above
The harm is not limited to viral harassment. In India, smart glasses have also become a tool of state surveillance, and that is where the situation becomes structurally difficult to address.
During protests over problems with India’s education system, Delhi police used Meta smart glasses to record demonstrators. A petition filed before the Delhi High Court by Aishe Ghosh, former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, alleged that police filmed protesters continuously for weeks, including while they were eating and resting, and threatened to send footage to their parents and colleges. India’s solicitor general dismissed the case as “luxury litigation.” Police responded by opening 10 criminal investigations against the students themselves, for offenses including rioting and assault on public servants. Some protesters told MIT Technology Review they never saw the LED on the glasses police wore.
This dual dynamic, where the same device enables both private harassment and official surveillance, makes regulatory intervention unlikely. Indian law enforcement is itself adopting AI-powered surveillance tools, including facial recognition systems and smart glasses. There is little institutional incentive to restrict technology that authorities find useful.
The market is expanding regardless. Smart glasses are among the fastest-growing devices in India’s wearables market, according to the International Data Corporation. Reliance Jio, one of India’s largest telecommunications companies, has announced plans to launch a sub-$105 rival to Meta’s glasses later this year. Meta’s current model carries a $420 price tag in India. A cheaper alternative will extend access significantly.
What Happens When the Law Hasn’t Caught Up
India’s legal framework for privacy was built around more recognizable forms of abuse: secretly filming someone undressing, using a toilet, or engaged in a sexual act. It offers limited protection when someone is filmed in an ordinary public setting and the footage is then used to humiliate them. That gap is not a minor technical detail. It is the space in which most smart glasses harm currently occurs.
Social media platforms offer another route to removing harmful content, but not a fast one. Under India’s current rules, platforms can have up to 36 hours to act on certain complaints. That window is long enough for a video to be downloaded, copied, and circulated beyond any platform’s reach.
The problem is likely to grow. According to the Financial Times, some internal Meta prototypes include AI features that continuously photograph and listen to the wearer’s surroundings, enabling the glasses to later recall what they saw or heard. These functions would not activate the external recording indicator. Meta has said it intends to keep the LED for active capture such as photos and video, but not for AI features that interpret surroundings passively. The distinction matters: bystanders would have no way of knowing when information about them is being collected.
Janusz Świerczyński, a researcher at Oxford Saïd Business School who studies privacy and emerging technology, frames the underlying shift clearly. The expectation is increasingly placed on bystanders to protect themselves, by spotting a small LED, by assuming they might be recorded, by navigating a legal system that was not designed for their situation.
In Short
Smart glasses cause real harm not because the technology is inherently malicious, but because the gap between what the hardware can do and what the law, the platforms, and social norms can handle is wide. In India, that gap is especially large. Marginalized groups bear a disproportionate share of the risk. Law enforcement adoption of the same tools reduces the likelihood of regulatory pushback. And cheaper devices entering the market will extend these dynamics further. The LED is not a solution. It is a placeholder.
Based on reporting from MIT Technology Review.