Look at them look at you: For a low-privacy, low-consent society like India, AI glasses pose risks that outweigh benefits

There's suddenly a frenzy around AI glasses. Ads for Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses are everywhere. Snap has unveiled its new AR glasses, Specs. Apple has taken a more immersive route with Vision Pro. Google, of course, tried this much earlier with Google Glass, whose wearers acquired the unflattering nickname 'glassholes' because others could never be sure whether they were being watched or recorded.

People have long worried about the intrusive nature of such devices. But reports about Meta's 'super sensing' prototype make the debate more sinister. The glasses can continuously capture audio and take images every few seconds, creating an almost permanent record of what the wearer sees and hears.

Even more troubling are reports that the warning light, which tells others that recording is taking place, could remain switched off during always-on mode. Meta says the product is still being tested. But the direction is unmistakable. The glasses are no longer merely helping us see the world. They are beginning to see the world for Meta. So, who's looking at whom?


We think we are the subject, looking through the glasses at the world. But the relationship may be the other way around. The glasses are looking at us, learning our routines and listening to our conversations, constructing a continuous map of our social lives, a new social graph. The wearer may be the customer. But everyone within range becomes the product.

Meta has spent years struggling inside app stores controlled by Apple and Google. AI glasses offer it the possibility of owning the next computing platform, rather than renting space on someone else's. If the smartphone was Apple's device, Mark Zuckerberg hopes ambient AI will become Meta's.

That is also why the prospect is unsettling. Meta is not a company with a reassuring privacy record. Facebook's history is marked by repeated promises of control, confidentiality and responsible data use, followed by scandals involving profiling, political manipulation, behavioural targeting and the monetisation of attention.

Its products have also faced criticism for their effects on children and teenagers. To trust Meta with AI glasses is to trust a company built on observing human behaviour with perhaps the most intrusive consumer device it has yet designed.

The problem becomes more acute in India. Indians tend to be less privacy-sensitive than people in the West. Western privacy thinking is rooted in individual autonomy - what Samuel D Warren and Louis D Brandeis, in their 1890 essay, 'The Right to Privacy', called 'the right to be left alone'.

Indian attitudes are often more pragmatic and collective, routinely trading privacy for convenience, access or economic benefit. We live in denser homes and public spaces, share devices, ask personal - even intrusive - questions, and have historically shown greater trust in institutions that collect our data.

That makes India an especially attractive market for AI glasses. Translation, navigation, convenience and status may matter more to many consumers than 'abstract' concerns about data capture. But lower concern does not make the intrusion less serious. It makes population more vulnerable.

India is not just a low-privacy society, but also a low-consent society. We take photos/selfies at weddings, schools, offices and public events without asking permission. CCTV cameras proliferate with little meaningful public debate. AI glasses could make this far worse because the camera would no longer be fixed to a wall. It would move through society on millions of faces. This marks the transition from centralised to decentralised surveillance.

CCTV largely meant that a central authority - police or government - was watching. AI glasses could mean everyone watching everyone. Surveillance would no longer come only from above. It would spread horizontally, socially and almost invisibly.

There are, of course, real benefits. AI glasses could provide live translation, navigation, assistance for people with visual or hearing impairments, medical guidance, and contextual education. Yet, these benefits may pale beside the risks, making strong safeguards essential.

• Recording light should be prominent and impossible to disable.
• Recording should require deliberate user action, not run indefinitely in the background.
• Raw audio and video should not be retained automatically.
• Bystanders should have enforceable rights, not merely the hope that wearers behave responsibly - a vain expectation in a society where people routinely play videos and music aloud on public transport without regard for others.

We may even see the rise of an anti-glasses industry: clothing, patterns, lenses or electronic signals designed to confuse cameras and facial-recognition systems. Just as computer viruses created the antivirus industry, wearable surveillance may produce wearable resistance.

The philosopher Carissa Veliz argues that privacy is power. Privacy is not merely the ability to hide embarrassing facts, but to retain agency when institutions know, predict and manipulate more about us than we know about them. AI glasses magnify that asymmetry because they do not merely collect what we type. They accumulate everything we encounter.

In mythology, Shiv's third eye is no ordinary eye. It opens when the world must be transformed - or destroyed. If used recklessly, AI glasses could become that third eye: not merely recognising and remembering everything but eroding the last spaces where people can exist unobserved. In helping us see more, they may take away our final expectation of being left unseen.