I am very glad the trend of calling Meta Glasses ‘pervert glasses’ is catching on. I think it might be the very pushback we need.

Yesterday, partner and I were perched on a window ledge on a crowded station platform, when a bloke came out of the waiting room wearing heavy-rimmed glasses with that tell-tale ‘glass eye’ bit in a corner and, because I’d been reading about these damned things on social media, I automatically bashed partner’s arm and – I didn’t shout – I hiss-whispered ‘pervert glasses!’

But it was enough to startle the pervert, and he spun away and headed off down to the end of the platform. Good, that meant we could carry on perching and chatting (only now, chatting about surveillance) in peace.

Shoshana Zuboff published Surveillance Capitalism in 2018.

I got around to reading it in 2026 (click here for what I thought about it then). I read about ‘incursion, habituation, adaptation, redirection’. Here’s a snippet…

I read about how ‘Google glass’ and ‘Pokemon Go’ were both part  of tech valley’s determination to document everything and everyone everywhere; how at its peak, the Pokemon chase had people leaping over fences and breaking into all manner of private spaces, using hand-held or wearable devices, and helping Google Earth and other projects to learn and to document, for example, (as we now know) all the stuff that ICE use to torment Americans, and Israel uses to wipe out journalists and medics in Palestine.

There was, fortunately for us, a huge push-back against Google Glass, once it dawned on people that it wasn’t just the (already unacceptable) recording of personal spaces and conversations, it was also the fact that wearable real-time facial filming allowed your common or garden pervert or thief to sight on a stranger, poke around the internet, do some face-and-location matching and find out far, far too much, far too easily, about the person they might just fancy following home.

That four-step process Zuboff documented, ‘incursion, habituation, adaptation, redirection’ is the standard practice of the tech valley set, when they’re trying to do something you don’t want them to do. Time and again, they’ll get pushed back, change their product or practice (a bit) then when the fuss dies down, come at it again from a different angle.

So now, only a few weeks after the ads started popping up for Meta glasses, we’re seeing them out in the world where we don’t want them. Thanks to Zuboff, I understand a bit about the problem. Thanks to social media (the irony of our age) I know what we need to do about it.

Maybe we can’t directly stop tech valley doing this, but we can have an effect on the people around us. I didn’t point and I didn’t shout ‘pervert glasses’ because it felt too doubtful and new and strange but, if we all resolve that it’s the thing to do, and keep doing it, others will understand and join in and with any luck, we can embarrass them off the streets.

Let’s have a little practice:

Nudge, point, shout: ‘Pervert glasses!’

 ********************

Dear Reader,

Times are hard, and so the articles on this site are freely available but if you are able to support my work by making a donation, I am very grateful.

You can make one-off or monthly payments by BACS to Mrs K Green, Sort: 07 01 16, Acct No: 43287058, Reference: blog

Or via Paypal…

Click here to donate via Paypal

Another great way to support this, and other independent blogs you read, is liking and sharing on social media, signing up for email updates, or by emailing a link to friends.

Cheers,

Kay

********************