It used to be that smart glasses were just another Silicon Valley stunt, the sort of thing tech enthusiasts wore to look like Tony Stark but ended up making them seem more like a mall kiosk employee testing new sunglasses. But, as we showed in our recent report, Meta’s latest iteration has added a chilling twist: the ability to be modified to add facial recognition capabilities that turn these devices into walking surveillance hubs. And at the heart of their dystopian magic trick lies an unholy alliance with online people search databases — a tool so invasive it makes old-school private investigators seem quaint.
These tools scrape publicly available data, sometimes without even a pretense of consent, and resell it to anyone willing to pony up a few bucks. The result? Your phone number, address, and possibly even your high school crush are now accessible to anyone with an internet connection.
