Meta and the Battle for Smart Glasses | I'm a Creep

**David Brown** (0:12)
It's June, 2025
In a Home Depot parking lot in Los Angeles' Cypress Park neighborhood, an immigration raid is underway. Agents in dark sunglasses and bulletproof vests hop out of their cars, shouting orders as they look for people to apprehend. This sight has become common around LA. The Department of Homeland Security has sent swarms of federal agents into the city, some from Customs and Border Patrol or CBP, others from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement or ICE. In less than a month, around 2,000 local immigrants have been rounded up. It's a time of fear and uncertainty, made worse by the agents' anonymity. Many of the names and badge numbers aren't always visible, and their faces are often hidden behind baseball caps, hoods and masks. It's nearly impossible to know who the agents are.
In this Home Depot parking lot, a crowd of observers has started to gather, recording everything they can to document what is happening. As the Border Patrol agents try to push them back, they keep recording. And that's when they notice something surprising about the sunglasses worn by one of the agents. They're Meta Ray-Bans. In the middle of an immigration raid, someone from Border Patrol is wearing a personal recording device. Observers wonder, is he recording right now? Will the glasses be used to identify protesters at the scene? Or is he just wearing them for intimidation? Whatever the agent's intentions, this moment adds to the growing unease over Meta's AI glasses. When the company formerly known as Facebook jumped into the smart glasses race in 2021, few saw it as particularly newsworthy. There were much bigger stories breaking about Facebook at the time, like whistleblower Francis Haugen sharing thousands of internal documents with a Wall Street Journal, revealing Facebook's knowing contributions to real world harms, or Facebook's subsequent rebrand to Meta, meant to signal a pivot away from data collection and toward its Metaverse. Against all of that, Meta's collaboration with Ray-Bans seemed like a harmless side quest. But as interest in the Metaverse faded, and interest in AI boomed, Meta pivoted. And once it added an AI assistant to its glasses, it brought a host of new questions to light about privacy, data security, and the modern surveillance state.
To explain how we got here, we're going back to the exact moment Meta Ray-Bans stepped into the spotlight and found their way into daily life in a way no other smart glasses ever had before. With that surge in popularity came hidden consequences. Because now, the question isn't whether smart glasses are here to stay. It's what people should do to protect themselves from their ever-widening reach.
From Audible Originals, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars.
The origin story of smart glasses started before Meta and before Google Glass, with a pair of Stanford students who really wanted to impress Mark Zuckerberg. Their invention, a pair of black-framed sunglasses with a small camera embedded in the frame. They envisioned a future where those simple camera glasses could one day do more, like recognize faces and provide augmented reality displays. And while those students' specific version of smart glasses didn't quite make it, the future they predicted did. It's here. Meta sold 8 million pairs of its Ray-Ban smart glasses in 2025 alone. And similar products are rolling out from every major tech giant. The future of smart glasses has arrived. And so has the reckoning.
This is episode two.
I'm a creep.
It's September 27th, 2023 in Menlo Park, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. Meta employees are gathering for the annual MetaConnect Conference, where the company unveils new products, initiatives, and goals for the coming year. CEO Mark Zuckerberg walks on to the outdoor stage, the lush California greenery framing the screen behind him. He waves at the crowd, trying to look casual. But if you look closer, his posture is ramrod straight. Zuckerberg has a lot of careful messaging he needs to get right.
Every major tech company has a conference like this. Think Google's IO. They've been a staple of the industry long before Steve Jobs revealed Apple's first iPhone. But ever since then, every tech CEO has been chasing that iPhone moment. That moment when the crowd sees your new product and audibly gasps, knowing its debut will usher in a sea of change. And Zuckerberg is no different. He knows he's no Steve Jobs, at least where product reveals are concerned. His last two MetaConnect keynotes made that painfully clear. Both of those presentations had been hyper-focused on one thing, the Metaverse. Remember those strange looking digital avatars with no legs? Zuckerberg presented them at Connect 2021 as the future of remote work. He predicted people would meet up in Meta's virtual realm called Horizon Worlds, a sprawling app that costs billions to develop. But Horizon Worlds and its legless avatars flopped, and Zuckerberg was roasted as an out-of-touch leader with no conception of what humans actually want. And by 2023, the entire Metaverse gambit is looking shaky. Meta Reality Labs, the division behind All Things Metaverse as well as its smart glasses, lost $13.7 billion in 2022, and Meta's shares dipped 60%.