A TikTok video shows a teenage girl walking through the front doors of a large high school. It’s filmed point-of-view style using smart glasses, and a hashtag in the caption reads “#metaglasses.”
“Excuse me, could I get your Roblox?” the adolescent boy wearing the head-mounted camera badgers the girl.
“No,” she responds, glaring unhappily as she quickly moves past him. She keeps walking, but the boy filming follows her.
“Come back! Pleasepleaseplease!” he wheedles as the girl continues to walk away. “Your LinkedIn, at least? Your LinkedIn, please? Your Reddit? Come on, your Reddit? I know you have a Reddit!”
The girl, clearly uncomfortable with the unwanted attention, doesn’t turn around.
The video has the distinctive style of the invasive “rizzcam” and other “POV” videos in which self-styled “pickup artists” and other online creators use smart glasses to record themselves harassing women at malls and boardwalks or pestering employees at their place of work for content. But the people in this video aren’t adults. Everyone in the clip — the girl, the boy filming, and hallway passersby — is a teenage student.
A Futurism review found large numbers of videos recorded at middle and high schools using smart glasses — almost always Meta’s AI Glasses, designed in partnership with the eyewear titan Ray-Ban — and shared to social media platforms TikTok and Instagram. Recordings take place in school hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms, and feature interactions with other students as well as with staff and faculty.
Much of the behavior on display is plainly harassment and bullying, often filmed without the subjects’ knowledge or consent and uploaded online to humiliate them further. Strikingly, every single one of the many smart glasses videos we found were captured by teen boys — and their bad behavior was overwhelmingly directed at girls.
In some clips, neither the boys’ classmates nor teachers appear to realize they’re being recorded. In others, they do — and express frustration and distress, making it clear that they don’t want to be in the video. (We’re not linking directly to any of this content due to concern for the privacy of the many minors who appear in the footage.)
In one video, a student even filmed himself dropping his smartphone into one of the pouches that schools use to confiscate phones during class — suggesting that smart glasses are being used by students in spaces where teachers are seeking to limit electronic devices.
Other students kept recording as teachers caught them filming in the classroom, in interactions they’ve also posted online.
“These are way more discreet than I thought they would be,” one teacher who caught a teenage boy filming remarked as he turned over the AI-infused glasses in his hand.
Many of the posts shared by students are vlog-style “Come With Me” or “Day in My Life” videos. Kids film themselves arriving at school, walking around with their friends, and sitting in the cafeteria or in class.
In other videos, students record themselves interacting with staff like teachers, aides, and security personnel. Though some of these adults realize they’re being filmed, most don’t appear to have a clue. Many of these encounters are relatively benign: one student recorded himself telling a teacher a ChatGPT-generated joke, for example, and another shows banter with a security guard.
But kids are also using Meta glasses to record and post videos of themselves or other students arguing with their teachers. “Teacher gets mad!!!” reads the caption of one video in which a teen filmed another student in an argument with a teacher about grades. In another clip, a student records himself quarreling with a teacher asking him to take out his notes.
It’s clear that some teenage boys are taking cues from viral pickup artists and online pranksters who have abused Meta glasses to record themselves harassing unsuspecting women in public or badgering employees at their place of work. These young smart glasses users are copying those tactics and deploying them against other teens at their schools, and the overwhelming majority of this harassment has been directed at teen girls. (Many middle and high schools haven’t even started class yet in the United States, and others are in their first days or weeks, so expect far more chaos as the school year starts in full.)
One trick we found replicated across many accounts was for a boy wearing smart glasses to record himself asking a fellow student — often younger — for “help.” The filmer then approaches a girl who happens to be walking or sitting nearby and tells her that his “friend” — the unsuspecting student he asked for help — is interested in her and wants her number. The girls usually respond with confusion, and sometimes are noticeably annoyed; the duped peer, meanwhile, looks embarrassed.
One prolific teenage boy who has more than 64,000 combined TikTok and Instagram followers has made dozens of videos that range from havoc-causing pranks — grabbing phones and running away, goofing around on a basketball court — to clear bullying and harassment of peers, particularly of teen girls.
In several videos, the poster follows young women around as they plead with him to go away. He sometimes films himself “ragebaiting” young women by making fun of their appearance, laughing as the teen girls grow more and more upset. All of these recordings become fodder for social media, opening up the people in his recordings, including his fellow students, to online laughter and further bullying.
When victims notice they’re being recorded by the poster, they often ask him to stop. He never does.
“I’m about to break those glasses for real,” one girl tells the troublemaker in one of the videos. “He’s recording you,” an out-of-frame voice can be heard warning the girl. The girl, visibly frustrated, shouts back: “I know!”
In a different video, the same boy films another upset girl approaching him with a metal stool in her hands. An adult intervenes before anyone is hurt.
Over on another channel, a teacher is filmed butting in as a boy records himself asking a passing girl for her number. The teacher is completely unaware that the boy is recording the encounter for content — and instead interrupts the boy’s “approach,” as pickup artists call it, to shake his hand and congratulate him on his “confidence.”
As we scrolled through more and more videos, it was hard not to wonder: is this content even legal?
After all, schools aren’t exactly public spaces. (Public schools may be considered public property, but aren’t public areas in the sense that anyone can waltz in.) Several states also have two-party consent laws mandating that all parties involved in an interaction have to consent to it being recorded. Add in the fact that the people involved in these recordings tend to be minors, and there are a lot of fraught legal lines that kids are running up against when using inconspicuous wearables to film their peers.
Andy Liddell, a principal at the Austin, Texas-based EdTech Law Center, told Futurism that using smart glasses to film at school is “a terrible idea.”
“Traditionally the classroom has been a private place that not everybody in the world has access to, and so you do have an expectation of privacy in the classroom that’s greater than you have on the street,” said Liddell. “In states with one-party consent recording laws, this could potentially be in violation of those laws, and those can carry very steep penalties, including felony charges. So that’s a problem.”
“Really, school is the last place that these glasses belong,” Liddell added.
Neither Meta nor TikTok responded to a request for comment.
As the school year kicks off, many districts around the country have moved to explicitly ban smart glasses from classrooms. Reasons for banning go beyond non-consensual recordings: kids may try to use Meta glasses’ AI features to cheat, or do distracting things like listen to music in class. But even if smart glasses aren’t yet specifically discussed in a school’s policies, many already restrict the gadgets by limiting internet-connected or camera-equipped devices.
The overarching problem is that the devices can be hard to spot, especially if they’ve been modified to disable their recording light. (Kids might also opt for lower-tech light blockers like cheap stickers.) Though the majority of the boys in the videos we reviewed were using Meta’s market-leading smart glasses, which retail for a few hundred dollars and in many cases are likely to be gifts from parents, there are many lower-cost “dupes” available on TikTok and Amazon that might be more accessible to young people.
Schools may have gotten used to cracking down on smartphones. But are they prepared to deal with a new wave of wearable tech that embed features that can be used for surveillance, bullying and harassment directly onto kids’ faces?
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