When Shubnam opened an Instagram video sent by a friend, the footage was already days old but the damage was immediate. The clip had been recorded at a Delhi protest this spring against a bill that would have narrowed legal recognition for transgender people in India, and it showed a content creator approaching Shubnam, a 38-year-old transfeminine graphic designer and educator, while they stood in a green sari with a shaved head. The creator asked why they were wearing "female clothing." Shubnam told him to back off. Only later did they learn the exchange had been captured on Meta smart glasses, designed to look like ordinary Wayfarers.
What followed was a familiar and increasingly dangerous pattern in India's online ecosystem: the footage was edited into a mocking reel, then pushed across Instagram, X and YouTube, where it drew millions of views, transphobic abuse, reaction videos and AI-generated memes. Copies remain online. For Shubnam, the consequences were deeply personal and immediate. "All it took was one unconsented video to rewind two decades of progress that I made all on my own," they told MIT Technology Review. "For a moment, it felt like this entire adult life I had lived was just a long lucid dream, and I was going to wake up as that clueless queer child again." They said they have not worn a sari outside their neighborhood since.
Their experience is becoming a warning sign for a broader privacy crisis. Smart glasses are among the fastest-growing devices in India's wearables market, according to the International Data Corporation, and the country is poised to see even wider adoption. Reliance Jio, one of India's largest telecommunications companies, says it plans to launch a sub-$105 rival to Meta's glasses later this year. Meta's latest model costs $420 in India, a price point that still places the device within reach of a growing class of urban consumers, creators and tech enthusiasts.
The appeal is obvious: hands-free photos, video and AI-assisted features packaged into eyewear that looks almost ordinary. But privacy advocates say the very design of the devices makes them uniquely dangerous. Unlike a phone camera, a pair of smart glasses can be difficult to spot, and targets may not realize they are being recorded. In a country where covert recording and the circulation of images without consent are already widespread, that invisibility can supercharge abuse.
Janusz Świerczyński, an Oxford Saïd Business School researcher who studies privacy and emerging technology, said the burden is increasingly shifting away from platforms and device makers and onto the public. "More and more, the expectation is being placed on bystanders to look out for themselves," he said. In practice, that means people must notice a small LED on the glasses frame that is supposed to activate when recording begins. Meta, he said, relies on wearers to behave responsibly. Reliance Jio did not respond to requests for comment on privacy issues related to its upcoming glasses.
But even that safeguard is fragile. Creators have already shown ways to circumvent the recording light on Meta's glasses, including tutorials that explain how to cover or obscure the LED while continuing to record. Back in March, Wired documented a market for "stealth mode" modifications that physically alter the device. The result is a technology that can be used to record first and ask questions later, with the recorded person often learning only after the clip has already been edited, amplified and weaponized.
The risks are especially acute in India because the online harms that smart glasses can intensify are already entrenched: cyberstalking, sextortion, deepfakes and non-consensual image sharing are all growing problems. For marginalized communities, including transgender people, the consequences can be severe and long-lasting. A single viral clip can expose someone to harassment in public, online abuse at scale and a chilling effect on how they dress, move and present themselves in daily life.
A crackdown, experts say, appears unlikely. Indian law enforcement authorities are themselves increasingly adopting AI-powered surveillance tools, including facial recognition systems and their own AI-enabled smart glasses. That creates a political and institutional environment in which the state is more likely to embrace the technology's surveillance potential than to restrict it. In that sense, the same devices that can humiliate bystanders may also fit neatly into a broader expansion of monitoring power.
For now, the pace of adoption is outrunning the rules meant to govern it. As smart glasses move from novelty to mainstream consumer gadget, India may be entering a period in which the right to move through public space without being silently recorded becomes harder to defend. For people like Shubnam, the cost is already being measured not in abstract policy debates but in the clothes they no longer feel safe wearing outside their own neighborhood.