Meta glasses at the school gate

[Minephotographercat]

I know several Dads at our primary school own, and are big advocates of the meta glasses that can record people without them realising.

WIBU to email the school (without naming names) with my concerns that our children might be being recorded at the school gate?

You can listen to audio, make phone calls, get calendar alerts, audio descriptions of the environment etc.

These are genuinely terrifying from a safeguarding and privacy perspective.

And they see if they do maths for adults evening classes so you can learn about percentages😀

@ElsiePiddockSkipsinherSleep- I’m sure there’s some innocent techies who’ve bought them just because they like the idea of “new” and haven’t realised how other people will view the sort of people who buy them, but that doesn’t mean anyone should assume a man wearing them is an innocent geek and really first assumption needs to be “man wearing pervert glasses at the school gate is probably a pervert”.

BTW it was interesting on holiday this summer, hear teenage girls refer to all Ray Bans as “pervert glasses”, not just meta ones (I guess that from a distance it’s hard to tell if they are meta ) and were trying to avoid grown men wearing them. Teen girls have worked out why men are wearing them, the majority of people who have bought them aren’t buying as they are cool new tech and adults should call out this.

The normalisation of videoing people in public and posting online needs to stop. I know that posters saying there is no law granting you privacy when in public are correct but do you really want a video of that time you fell flat on your face when walking down the street posted online for lots of people to laugh at? Do you want your children to be videoed by creepy men chatting them up? Happy to be publicly complimented or given flowers in the street so that some attention seeker can post it online to show how wonderful they are to have cheered up some grumpy old woman? Even if not posted online - happy to have you conversations filmed and watched back by anyone you meet?

I would absolutely judge anyone wearing these kind of glasses and wouldn't want to interact with them. It's not at all hard to turn off the light that indicates that they are recording. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/aug/19/meta-glasses-privacy-surveillance

People really foaming at the mouth about these glasses. They record for a handful of seconds, display a pulsing light when doing so, and make an audible shutter sound when you take pictures. They have really handy bone conducting audio tech. Wearing them in public spaces is completely legal and acceptable. As is general filming in public spaces actually.

Obviously there's no cost of living crisis for some people, if they can afford these glasses.

Yes, OP, you need to raise a concern with the school.

Just read something from Caroline Criado Perez this morning, apparently the perverts who buy the pervert glasses have already worked out how to disable the light.

I don’t really think that’s true.

General purpose facial recognition technology is banned in the EU and UK, and rightly so. Meta will never create a general purpose facial recognition tech for their products.

Are they any different to a smartwatch though? I'm not tech savvy so genuine question. Couldn't you record with a smartwatch without anyone knowing?

…for which there is absolutely no evidence from OP. She just knows 2 men who have them, so immediately ‘perverts at the school gates!’

Those are called "Paedo Glasses" by loads of people. I'd have serious questions why a man would be standing outside school gates with a covert recording device. Definitely complain to the school.

They dont record for a handful of seconds.

The lights and sounds can be bypassed. There's forums dedicated to doing it.

Wow. Are you always this naive?

I have been a school governor for over 30 yrs and would like to give you two examples of why we are not keen on parents using phone cameras in school.

A parent posted a school event on Facebook, unfortunately the child of a drug dealer was spotted by his father, who was on trial at The Old Bailey. The family had been placed into protective custody but were keen to remain at school for some normality. Result: Armed police had to escort the child to and from school.

I worked for TV channel, where we had to get parents to sign off when we were filming in school, one family said a blanket no, which was fine. Unfortunately the boys were desperate to be on TV and managed to get filmed and get through the edit. We got a call after the first clip was shown and the programme was pulled from both live stream and web. The reason, the boys were recently adopted, they had been removed from their parents due to drugs, alcohol and neglect and were at risk of being taken by their birth parents.

And yes, there are more, but the point I want to make is, just because you do not have a problem with filming, other people may and for good reason.

Not a big deal and nothing that the school can do about it anyway. We are constantly recorded, cctv, facial recognition, dash cams, ring door bells. I don't particularly like it but that horse has bolted. Time to invest in a balaclava like the teens around here.

I'd like to flag to the school that these devices are in use in the school community and ask if there is any official stance on them and if not, if they could at least consider what their stance is.

It's not about a witch hunt or throwing accusations at individuals, which is why I said originally I wouldn't name names.

I think YABU, I have meta glasses and I use mine for listening to music and phone calls mostly but when I do take pictures of my own kids there is a flashing light for pictures and videos. It's not hard to miss to be honest.

I think if people are out to take pictures of kids then they will find a way to do it, regardless if its a phone, meta glasses, secret spy camera etc.

At the moment I can be fairly confident that the school grounds are a safe space for the children to exist without the risk of being videoed. I'd like that to continue to be the case.

I agree that the horse has bolted for being out and about in public but this is specifically about use on school grounds.

It's not being naive. Meta are aware of the concerns and have updated the software so that if anyone tampers with the camera, pulsing light, shutter noise, it disables the product.

The hackers are always one step ahead - all these can be disabled.

Smartwatches don't have cameras built in, and even if they did it would be obvious if you were recording with it as you would be holding your wrist out in an unusual position. The problem with the pervert glasses is that it is very easy to film covertly. They have a small telltale light built into them that illuminates when recording but it is possible to disable it and it doesn't show well in sunlight anyway.

There is currently a gov petition request to ban them if you google it.

Its not covert, there is a light you cant turn off on the glasses

If it is happening on school grounds, the school can totally do something about it. If at the gates, outside school property then it's going to have to be direct action parent power rather than a school enforcement. Make the parents concerned feel uncomfortable enough that they stop wearing them.