Meta and Ray-Ban’s smart glasses have been commercially available since 2021, and sex workers have raised privacy concerns since their release. With the ability to record everything a wearer sees and hears, our community already faces documented risks from these products. Internal documents now reveal that Meta is actively developing facial recognition capabilities for their smart glasses—posing significant threats to sex workers’ privacy, safety, and anonymity.
What are the plans for Meta’s smart glasses?
It’s been reported in the New York Times (NYT) that Meta has plans to add their facial recognition software “Name Tag” to their smart glasses by as early as the end of 2026. A document from Meta’s Reality Labs, seen by the NYT, said that “We [Meta] will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”
The NYT article suggests that not only is Meta considering adding this deeply concerning feature to their smart glasses, but they plan to take advantage of an unstable political environment to prevent blowback. This is the kind of move that we’ve come to expect from Big Tech, an industry that seems to care only for the unrestrained progression of technology.
Meta initially planned to include facial recognition with its smart glasses when they were released, but reportedly ethical and technical considerations prevented it. Although the feature currently doesn’t come standard with the smart glasses, techy-types have already been able to jury rig facial recognition features into Meta’s smart glasses. Specifically, in October 2024, a pair of students from Harvard fucked with a pair of Meta and Ray-Ban’s glasses, setting them up so that a facial recognition search engine could be used to identify people that came within eyesight of the glasses.
What are the implications for sex workers?
Of course, doxing is the most obvious danger to our community. We ensure our identities are private to keep ourselves safe and minimise discrimination. If anyone can slip on a pair of smart glasses and use facial recognition to find out our real names, then our privacy is blown to smithereens. Not only do sex workers face the current threat of being recorded during private encounters, in the near future we may have to contend with smart glasses feeding anyone who wears them personal information about us, putting us at dire risk of discrimination, incarceration, and violence.
There are already proposals to implement smart glasses in US law enforcement. As first reported by journalist Ken Klippenstein in April 2026 from leaked Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget documents, the DHS has allocated $7.5 million to develop its own smart glasses for ICE agents—building on existing smart glasses technology and integrating facial recognition and biometric databases to identify people in real time. Separately, ICE and Border Patrol agents in six states have already been found using Meta's Ray-Ban glasses in the field, reportedly in violation of DHS rules. The ability of these products to surveil the public is alarming, and has serious implications for many marginalised communities, including sex workers.
What can we do?
At this point, it’s mainly down to us as individuals. Steps you can take include outright asking clients if they are wearing smart glasses, or insisting that all clients remove their glasses and put them away during bookings (though this could be a bit of an ableist move—some people require glasses for basic vision and daily function.) It also helps to stay informed about emerging technologies and their capabilities by reading articles like this one (and many more on tech and sex work right here on the Tryst Link blog!)
In simpler times, we’d have suggested strengthening the separation between personal and professional identities online—something sex workers have long been doing. But facial recognition undoes all that work. Even going “face in” again to protect your identity is no longer enough. Some ‘anti-trafficking’ organisations have been reported to use technology to scrape sex workers ads and profiles periodically and share that data with law enforcement. They’ve been doing it for years, so if you've been face out at any point, they may have that information in their databases already.
If the decision to add facial recognition features to smart glasses is left up to the Big Tech companies, there will be so little oversight. Mandates that could rein in their power are slow to catch up with rapidly evolving technology, as we’ve seen with so many current technological advances like AI-assisted mass-surveillance and unrestrained Large Language Model (LLMs including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini) growth.
Meta has suggested that the smart glasses facial recognition feature could be limited to identifying only people who the wearer has connections with on a Meta platform, or only those with a public-facing Meta account, like Instagram. But with Big Tech’s history of implementing features, products, and policies that have the potential to cause harm and erode privacy, the chances that they will regulate themselves are slim.
To read more about sex workers and tech, see What is Shadowbanning and How Does it Affect Sex Workers? and Five iPhone Safety Features Sex Workers Should Know About.
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