Op-ed: For Meta’s Smart Glasses, Access Is An Afterthought

Op-ed: For Meta’s Smart Glasses, Access Is An Afterthought The following op-ed authored by Ariana Aboulafia first appeared in Tech Policy Press on August 12, 2026. A excerpt of the text has been pasted below. AI-enabled smart glasses may very well be tech’s hottest, and creepiest, accessory. Google recently announced that it is releasing its first smart glasses since Google Glass. Snap launched its smart glasses earlier this summer, and Meta—the company behind the nearly infamous Meta Ray-Bans—continues to expand its influence on the market, with the consistent launch of new models and collaborations with celebrities. Indeed, Q4 2025 filings tell us that sales of the Meta AI glasses rose from a combined 2 million in 2023 and 2024 to 7 million in 2025. Despite the momentum, the features that these glasses may contain—as well as their impact on marginalized people, and how they are marketed—should all give us pause. An internal memo from Meta, published earlier this year, suggested that the company planned at some point to integrate facial recognition technology into the glasses, and recent reporting from Wired found that Meta rolled out and subsequently deleted code that would allow facial recognition capabilities for its smart glasses through the companion Meta AI app. This means that at some point in the near future, any person you encounter wearing the relatively normal-looking glasses could not only be nonconsensually recording you—including in sensitive places, like medical offices—but also scanning your face and identifying you. The New York Times reported that the memo also mentioned that Meta initially planned to first introduce the feature to “attendees of a conference for the blind,” and roll it out more widely “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.” Read the full op-ed.