Courtney McAnuff was out of a year-long relationship in the summer of 2024 and starting to date again when she agreed to grab drinks with a potential suitor.
They met at a bar in midtown Manhattan. He arrived wearing a baseball cap pulled low and sported a pair of black-framed glasses, she says. As conversation flowed, from discussions about navigating life in New York to past relationships, he mentioned that his glasses were Meta Ray-Bans.
“I wasn’t familiar with them,” McAnuff, a 28-year-old project manager who now lives in Toronto, tells WIRED. It was her first time seeing the smart glasses up close, which can record images and video from the wearer’s viewpoint. He let her try them on and even showed her a couple of videos that he’d taken previously, she says. “That was it. We stopped talking about it after that. I figured that was the end of the use.”
The next day, checking her Instagram, McAnuff noticed she’d been tagged in one of his story posts. To her surprise, it was footage of them at the bar and on the subway together, en route to a basketball game uptown. In the video, McAnuff is captured from an above angle, sitting across from her date who is holding a drinking glass; WIRED has seen screenshots of the footage. “I felt super violated,” McAnuff says. “Like, what if I don’t want everyone knowing what I’m up to? He felt so free to film me and post it. There was no conversation about it.”
Meta sold more than 7 million pairs of the Ray-Bans in 2025, as its smart glasses have infiltrated public spaces thanks to pranksters with dreams of viral fame, some of whom even film people while they’re at work. The phenomenon, which has also spread to pickup artists hitting on women, has earned the hardware the nickname “creep glasses.”
Among singles, and particularly women, Meta’s AI-powered eyewear has become a recurring nuisance, as people share a spreading unease about being covertly filmed on dates.
“Ban those glasses completely,” posted a young woman on Bluesky in August, writing that her date “leaned over to show me pictures he took of me I had no idea he was taking.” One TikToker claimed in a video after a date that she “immediately felt uncomfortable,” questioning why people are “so comfortable videoing everything. It’s a terrible way to portray yourself, wearing a fucking camera on your face and you’re sitting in my face.”
In a Reddit post from August, users debated the ethics of the trend, wondering if it was OK to continue a date when someone showed up wearing them; in a separate thread, one person said they had ghosted a guy after realizing he’d worn the glasses on their date. “I didn’t notice until toward the end of the night. I kissed him while he was wearing the glasses,” they said. In July, a man was put under investigation in Seoul, South Korea, for allegedly filming four women he had gone out with and later uploading clips to social media, according to The Korea Herald.
In many regards, dating has been reframed by our dependency on technology. Apps connect people. Chatbots are used for all sorts of things these days: as wingmen and for role-play. Smartphone cameras capture important moments together. But while a phone being held up to someone’s face gives them a clear opportunity to object, smart glasses largely erase that opportunity. (Meta’s glasses do have a front-facing LED that switches on when the glasses are recording, but the light is the only warning, and it can be disabled by hacking the hardware.)