In August, Toru Hinkle was stocking shelves at their job at Target when they noticed two customers and asked if they needed any help. The men requested a price check on an item — but even after Hinkle told them the item was $20, the customers asked for the price again and again. 

“After a while, I realized that I’m basically being pranked, and I noticed the glasses,” Hinkle says, referring to the frames with a blinking light. They were the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and the customers were filming. Hinkle eventually called a store manager over, but the pranksters antagonized her, too — asking the price repeatedly, deliberately misgendering Hinkle as “ma’am” and the female manager as “sir.” At one point, Hinkle attempted to stop the recording by saying “Meta, stop recording” out loud, hoping to trigger a voice control setting. The customers pretended to be confused by the accusation that they were recording Hinkle.

The confrontation made Hinkle queasy. “I felt like this pit in my stomach just started to build up,” Hinkle recalls. “After this whole exchange happened, the rest of the shift, I was just quiet and didn’t even talk to anyone because I was just so shaken up by it.” Another customer called the police, Hinkle says, and the two men were escorted out of the store. Target declined to comment.

The two customers were, in fact, recording Hinkle, and the entire exchange was turned into content for social media. Another Target manager came across the video while scrolling online, without even looking for it. One clip featuring the incident with Hinkle viewed by The Verge had almost 400,000 views on Instagram and 155,000 views on TikTok. 

Meta has sold millions of pairs of its AI-powered smart glasses over the last several years — but as sales boom, so too has the backlash to the devices. The glasses allow wearers to listen to music or take calls, but the feature that has sparked outrage is the ability to record using them: Many people see them as a new notch in the surveillance apparatus at best, and “pervert” and “creep” glasses at worst. 

Ordinarily, if you are recorded against your will, you can try to leave the area or otherwise resist being recorded. But many people are encountering smart glasses for the first time while at their job, especially those who interact with the public, like retail and service workers. In the workplace, smart glasses exacerbate the power imbalance between the customer and the employee, or the boss and subordinate. Resisting invasive technology is risky when you depend on your job to pay rent or buy groceries. It’s harder still when many workplaces don’t yet have policies around a new gadget that the public is grappling with in real time.

Service and retail workers in particular have become a target for stealth — and annoying — smart glasses recording. People wearing Meta glasses are going into stores and harassing or “pranking” employees, using the footage for content and making unwitting workers the butt of the joke. The video made of Hinkle and their manager without their consent is the exact kind of content that Instagram has claimed it will now remove — yet the account that uploaded it was filled with similar “prank” videos harassing workers at their jobs. 

There’s little recourse for those who have been unknowingly recorded. In one of the videos posted to social media that Hinkle is featured in, the Meta glasses wearer is seen chumming it up and dancing with a police officer who arrived at the Target store.

“You boys stay out of trouble,” the cop says as he fist bumps the person recording. Instagram banned the account — and along with it, removed the video of Hinkle — after The Verge asked the company about it.

Emily, who works at a popular Seattle tourist destination, deals with vlogger questions and videographers trying to get close-up shots of the food her attraction sells. As a worker in an area with lots of foot traffic, being in the background of a video was just part of the job. More recently, though, the encounters have left her feeling deeply uncomfortable. The worst is when a much taller man stands over her and films her with his Meta glasses. She thinks — hopes — he is not filming down her shirt. But that’s what it feels like.

“If someone was [holding] a phone up from that angle, I could obviously be like, ‘Hey man, please stop that,’” Emily says. The glasses make it much harder to tell what, exactly, a customer is filming. (Emily asked that The Verge only use her first name and not name her workplace, citing concerns of getting targeted.)

Emily works as a cashier and interacts with up to 2,000 people a day. Even before Meta released its AI-powered smart glasses, people from all over the world visited and recorded videos at Emily’s workplace. But the new method of filming has quickly become part of her daily working environment: On some days, she says up to 10 people an hour will come in wearing smart glasses. The most preferable situation is that a customer filming her will use the video for relatively innocuous purposes, like a travel vlog or a food review.

“Worst-case scenario, they’re doing something significantly more nefarious with it,” Emily worries. “That is what’s significantly more scary to me … That feels like it’s a very easy way to get content of young women specifically.”

Many of the encounters filmed using Meta glasses are explicitly gendered, like a genre of videos where men approach women with pickup lines and make content out of the encounters. Meta glasses have a light that indicates when they’re recording, but some people have tampered with the glasses to secretly record without being noticed. Meta says it is working on disabling filming capabilities if the glasses detect the light has been damaged or covered. 

Emily is conscious of the fact that she’s a young woman working in a public place all the time, which adds to the baseline discomfort she feels.

“I also want to emphasise how creepy I think the general surveillance aspect of it is, not just as a young woman, but as a person living [among] other people,” she says. “It does add to the feeling of constantly being watched.”

Meta has maintained that privacy features are built into its smart glasses.

“People use our glasses because they’re genuinely helpful – from listening to music, to live translation or hands-free calls. For those wearing them and the people around them, trust matters. That’s why we built privacy into our AI glasses from the ground up,” Meta spokesperson Dina El-Kassaby said in an email. El-Kassaby pointed to the LED indicator light that blinks when a user is taking a photo or video, and the tamper-proofing the company has started to roll out.

El-Kassaby said Meta has begun blocking hashtags on its platforms associated with harassing content, including “rizz,” “pickup artist,” and “cold approach,” and has removed thousands of pieces of content under its bullying and harassment policy. The same rules apply to content filmed on other devices, like a smartphone, El-Kassaby says. But for years, the contemporary social media ecosystem has depended on strangers unwittingly becoming content — everything from this new wave of Meta glasses-powered “pranks” to people-of-Walmart-style gawking. A social internet cleansed of all content that takes advantage of others would be quite empty.

For the first few weeks, Jennifer didn’t think much of her new boss. Then one day, he was wearing a different pair of glasses at their job at a Sprouts grocery store in the Atlanta area.

She looked at him and asked, “Are those Meta glasses?”

“Yeah, they are,” he said. “What of it?”

Jennifer recalls starting to shake because their presence — and her boss’s lack of concern about how violating a recording device in the workplace could be — was so disconcerting. 

Sprouts workers are barred from wearing headphones on the store floor because it’s a safety hazard when operating heavy machinery, Jennifer says, and non-managers are not allowed to have their phones with them. (She asked that The Verge use a pseudonym so she could discuss her experience freely.) What’s more, Jennifer says Sprouts stores prohibit videography and photography inside — customers who come in know the store has security cameras, but are likely not expecting employees to have glasses with built-in cameras in them, too. An employee wearing Meta glasses could break that trust with customers. Store employees also handle sensitive data at their jobs, including customers’ names, email addresses, and credit card information.

Jennifer imagines her manager wearing Meta glasses in the break room, or the bathroom — places where a worker expects a certain level of privacy. “It essentially collapses the social contract, in my opinion, to allow this,” she says.

Jennifer also worries that women and children shopping in the store are particularly endangered by the technology, and noted that the recording light on her boss’s glasses looked like it had been obscured in some way. Jennifer told The Verge that she filed a complaint to HR and asked that Sprouts make a formal policy around smart glasses, but found the company to be largely unresponsive and unhelpful. Instead, she says, she was given an ultimatum: Accept the working conditions or quit. She resigned. 

“The issue is about the data that is collected, the footage, the audio, and the facial recognition that can be added to these glasses,” Jennifer says. “I want it so that it’s not acceptable for anybody to be doing that in the workplace.” Sprouts didn’t respond to The Verge’s requests for comment.

Spy-like smart glasses are no longer a distant sci-fi future; they’re here now, and more tech companies are reportedly developing them. Workers, meanwhile, are left in the lurch as laws and company policies catch up to their daily reality.

Experts say laws governing privacy in the US are scattershot, state-dependent, and often outdated. Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Boston University, says information privacy law generally states that if you are in public, you have a reduced expectation of privacy — though some instances, like recording someone in a locker room changing, could open up the person recording to liability. 

Workplace protections around being recorded, though, are almost entirely governed by corporate policy. Some workplaces have explicitly banned smart glasses: In August, Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a policy that bars its employees from wearing Meta glasses because of the potential of capturing sensitive information. Some courthouses have also restricted smart glasses because they could be used to do things like identify jurors. 

“The best hope for employees is through collective bargaining and policy-level rules around what kinds of recording technologies will be allowed and when they’ll be allowed to be used,” Hartzog says.

Having smart glasses in the workplace could also create new liabilities for corporations that permit the devices: Businesses are charged with being stewards of customer and employee data, and as surveillance increases, so will the amount of abuses and breaches that accompany that surveillance, Hartzog says. He recommends strong and clear policies prohibiting the use of smart glasses — for both employees’ and customers’ sake.

“We know that when people are being watched, they feel less free. They chill their behavior, they feel pressure to conform. They worry about even minor deviations from norms being used against them,” he says. “It’s just a sort of suffocating atmosphere to be a part of.”

It’s not just service and retail workers who have come face-to-face with unwanted recordings while they’re working — creatives and performers are also grappling with a strange new reality. Earlier this summer, comedian Electra Telesford was onstage in the middle of a joke when she noticed blinking lights coming from the crowd. In an audio recording of her set that she shared with The Verge, Telesford can be heard addressing the man in the audience directly.

“Are your glasses blinking?” she asks. 

He responds that he’s recording her.

“Oh, could you not?” she says.

“That’s what they’re there for,” he says, defiantly. “I’m here to watch you, and you’re here to perform for me.” The audience member refuses to stop filming even after being asked to. Rather than argue back and forth, Telesford cuts her set short and walks offstage.

“I was like, ‘I can’t do anything about it except get myself out of view of the camera on your face,’” she says of the exchange. “That’s all I can do.”

At a comedy club or a more formal venue, audience members are typically told that recording isn’t allowed before a show starts. Events at bars, like the one Telesford was performing in, are typically more relaxed, she says. After the set, producers and hosts of the event spoke to the audience member and explained that comics are working on material for future opportunities where they can be paid for their performances, like television; having sets posted somewhere public could prevent performers from getting other distribution deals, since the material would no longer be exclusive. Going forward, the bar plans to announce at the beginning of performances that recording with Meta glasses is not allowed, Telesford says.

“It’s definitely kind of tarnished every other interaction I’ve had,” Telesford says, even in front of audiences where the glasses aren’t present. “Every time I’ve been onstage since, it’s been a worry, a concern.”

Being surreptitiously (or blatantly) recorded while at work isn’t just a problem for public-facing workers; it’s just as easy to imagine concerns that could arise if a coworker at your office starts wearing smart glasses, or if a medical professional wears them while providing care to a patient. Smart glasses reframe person-to-person interactions, creating a watchful technological mediary between two people. There’s a stark difference between having a casual, private conversation and the threat of everything you say or do being captured for limitless dissemination without your consent.

Meta’s current smart glasses can only record for a few minutes, but it has ambitions to make the tech even more integrated into daily life. The company is reportedly developing smart glasses that record all the time, continuously pulling in data from audio and photos that the wearer could ask Meta AI about. What’s more, with the “super sensing” mode, the LED indicator light would not be on except when the wearer is actively taking photos and videos that are saved. The number of routine encounters that are recorded, saved, processed, and accessed later could skyrocket, effectively quantifying even the most mundane or private parts of our lives.

Hartzog, the law professor, says, “This is just another way for employees who already have less power in their roles to be further marginalized and dissected, and is part of a larger story about the way in which being an employee means taking on increased suffering as part of the job.”

The brand trip is a right of passage for influencers. It’s a mark of legitimacy that a sponsor wants to invite them on an all-expenses-paid vacation, often with luxurious freebies and activities. Trips can also spur hard feelings from uninvited influencers, trigger criticism from the public, and project a certain frivolousness. 

Usually it is fast fashion companies or beauty brands flying out influencers with the goal of flooding social media with sponsored content. This time, it was a major AI company.

Over the weekend, several influencers began posting about OpenAI’s “first ever brand trip,” which appears to have taken place outside of New York City at a nature-filled retreat (for those curious, it looks to be the Instagram-bait Wildflower Farms). The trip was marketed as “Summer Club,” and influencers posted photos and videos from their cabins, showing off branded merch and monogrammed pajamas and talking vaguely about the scheduled programming. Many of the content creators appear to be in the career and business niches, posting about workplace culture or about being CEOs. Grace McCarrick, who has 145,000 followers on TikTok, vlogged from her suite as she ran a bath at night. Another influencer, Nat Lucy (57,000 followers), filmed herself spotting a deer outside of her cabin. All hell broke loose.

“People will literally sell their soul and their planet down the river for a nice free hotel room,” one commenter on TikTok wrote under McCarrick’s video. “Wow! Beautiful greenery! They should put a data center there!” reads a comment on Lucy’s post. Most of the videos got relatively little traction: McCarrick’s video has just under 300 likes, and Lucy’s video has fewer than 15,000 views. It’s measly engagement compared to what other splashy brand trips can command — but videos reacting to the trip have made it something of a scandal (a pair of clips alone has over half a million combined views).

Many of the comments on the influencers’ videos cite the environmental effects of the AI boom, the contentious buildout of data centers across the US, and the potential for job replacement or job loss as a result of companies integrating AI in the workplace. Some also questioned why so many of the content creators who went on the trip appeared to be young women, as if OpenAI was targeting a specific demographic via media they were more connected to (though based on photos and videos posted to social media, there were men on the trip, too). According to Pew, even as the AI usage gap between men and women has all but disappeared, women tend to view AI more negatively and are twice as likely to say AI will negatively impact them personally. Some audiences wondered whether female influencers were essentially being used to launder the reputation of an industry under scrutiny. 

McCarrick, who describes herself as a creator who talks about “soft skills we need at work to millions online and to teams like Spotify, Amazon, Uber and DoorDash,” has since made multiple videos responding to commenters accusing her of essentially abandoning her morals for a fancy trip. On LinkedIn she wrote that she “genuinely had no idea that people were this anti-AI,” and that the negative response to her videos exposed her to “the shocking AI psychosis running rampant online” — by which she means anger about AI, not the more common definition of being driven to paranoia or delusions of grandeur by using AI. People in the real world “do not run around like a chicken with their heads cut off, screaming about water usage and wildlife and (curiously) fascism,” she wrote.

None of the influencers The Verge reached out to responded to requests for comment. OpenAI said creator marketing is part of how they reach people and that the event was meant to be educational.

“Creators are an important part of our community and how people get information and learn about our products today,” OpenAI spokesperson Edie Campbell-Urban said in an email. “We welcome healthy debate as AI becomes more prevalent, and we value creators who choose to engage with us, attend our events, ask tough questions, and learn alongside everyone else. We’ll continue to value them, just as we do traditional media and other marketing partners.” 

Setting aside the backlash to the trip for a moment, a few things stand out. First, all things considered, this appears to be a relatively simple trip. That’s not to say it wasn’t luxurious — the rooms at the retreat cost upwards of $2,000 a night — but it is nothing compared to the brands that go all out in order to milk content from every last moment (some commenters poked fun at the fact that it was a domestic trip, not a far-flung, international vacation). Second, there’s a sense that everyone involved is testing the waters: Multiple influencers noted it was the first brand trip they’d attended, and one influencer indicated they were not paid for their attendance, which big brands often do for top talent. Third and most interestingly, the goals of the trip are muddled: It’s not entirely clear what the influencers were actually doing on the trip, because there is surprisingly little content online from the event. Typically, if an influencer is on a brand trip it’s inescapable — every little luxury, every meal, every activity is TikToked and photo dumped. Instead of content about the capabilities of ChatGPT, the videos and photos are largely aspirational lifestyle content focused on the free swag and pretty setting — and even then, there’s a conspicuous lack of content, period. There isn’t the same flood of picturesque montages, clips from expert sessions or Q&As, or summaries of what a creator learned from their time with OpenAI. At least not yet. 

AI companies have used influencer marketing in straightforward ways, like paying creators to make content about their product offerings. But they’ve also dabbled in the kind of influencer marketing people expert from more traditional consumer brands: Anthropic has hosted more lowkey influencer dinners at trendy locations with lifestyle influencers, and there are rumblings of a second OpenAI trip on the West Coast. 

As backlash to the industry has grown, AI companies have adjusted how they communicate with the public: “Your jobs will soon be obsolete” has clearly not been the right framing for why people should trust these companies or get on board with their mission. Instead, AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have tried to add a bit of human touch, whether that’s through in-person pop-up coffee shops, stylized merch drops, or ad campaigns that take concerns people have about AI and try to turn them into pro-AI inspirational content. 

What better way to reach consumers directly than through the talking heads they already know and trust? Influencers are a convenient vessel, both for brands looking to disseminate their message and for the inevitable backlash from audiences who give them a platform in the first place. In this case, the content broke containment out of the girlboss-style business circles into the mainstream — an AI brand trip dressed up as an aspirational lifestyle retreat is both confusing and enraging to a public fatigued by this line of work. By tapping a certain kind of creator for a weekend of sponsored content, OpenAI is able to test a new audience without fully committing; it’s the content creators, after all, who will get the angry comments, whose faces will be plastered on the backgrounds of an ever-increasing number of reaction videos (influencers received similar backlash for a Shein brand trip in 2023). The AI industry wants the soft power and cultural relevance influencers wield and realized the price of reaching their audience is surprisingly cheap. You get what you pay for.