Woman Goes to Get Brazilian Wax, Alarmed to Notice Waxer Is Wearing Meta’s Video Recording Glasses

Advocates have long contended that so-called "smart glasses," which when activated record whatever the wearer sees, pose serious privacy risks.

There was a sharp outcry when Google debuted Project Glass more than a decade ago, and now with Meta's Ray-Ban AI glasses, a new generation is finding out the hard way just how creepy these surveillance wearables can be.

In a recent viral TikTok video, influencer Aniessa Navarro said that she was in the middle of a Brazilian wax — which involves removal of body hair from intimate areas — at her regular Manhattan location of the European Wax Center chain when she realized that her esthetician was wearing a pair of Mark Zuckerberg's spy spectacles.

Surprised, Navarro asked the esthetician if she was "wearing Meta glasses," and the EWC employee copped to it — but promised they were neither charged nor turned on, and claimed they were prescription as well.

"After that I kind of shut down, and I could not stop thinking, 'could this girl be filming me right now?'" the influencer recounted. "I literally could not stop thinking about it the whole entire time."

Visibly perturbed, Navarro asked her followers for advice on what to do, and many urged her to contact lawyers and EWC headquarters. In a followup, the young woman said that she emailed the waxing chain and was given only a "generic" response — and when EWC sent her a customer satisfaction survey, she again expressed her distress at the situation.

Once the incident started attracting media attention, the chain had more to say. In a statement to the Washington Post about the upsetting incident, a spokesperson for the company provided a bit more of a response, claiming without evidence that the employee's smart glasses had been powered down while she was performing the procedure.

Regardless, Navarro said in her second video that she had already spoken to two law firms, which both told her she could well have a case.

Still, she appeared to get cold feet because she didn't want to "get anyone fired if she did not do anything wrong," and is more interested in raising awareness and getting those sorts of recording devices banned in such intimate settings.

Unfortunately, this is not the first such incident of inappropriate recording using Meta's $350 AI Wayfarers. After an exotic dancer warned last year on Reddit that she'd seen an uptick of "creep men wearing [Ray-Ban] Meta glasses in the club," a female bouncer at a gentleman's club in Atlanta recorded herself last month having a tense exchange with a man who tried to wear them in her establishment.

"I wear 'em everywhere!" the off-screen man intones.

"Not here!" the bouncer responded. When the patron asked why he couldn't, the bouncer noted plainly: "because they've got cameras in them."

Ultimately, the unseen club patron complies and leaves his recording glasses at the door — but his reticence to do so, and even his entitlement at wearing them to the club in the first place, says a lot about what kind of future we might be in for once those sorts of surveillance devices become cheaper and more commonplace.

More on smart glasses: Harvard Startup Says Its Smart Glasses Will Do "Vibe Thinking" for You