I Wish Someone Else Made These

Whenever I see someone review smart glasses made by Meta, including the Garmin ones I really wanted, the same thing always comes up. These are great but I wish they were made by someone else. This isn't just reviews either, it's normal people that see or use them. They are a great product flawed by the terrible company behind them. Victoria Song writing for The Verge already knows the comments she's going to get whenever she writes about Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. Cool hardware, but hard pass on anything Meta makes.

On the Vergecast this week, Neil kept talking about how the killer app of smart glasses is facial and name recognition. Walk into a room and know who everyone is immediately. Then he said the other half of that idea. To build that product, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database, which is bad. That one sentence sums up everything about Meta's hardware ambitions. The vision is exciting. What's needed to get there is horrifying.

I bought the Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses. I'm training for Boston and as a runner they made total sense to me. Real-time pace through the speakers, Garmin integration so I didn't have to glance at my wrist, automatic video capture at mile splits. The hardware was brilliant. Oakley lenses, speakers that actually worked at pace, a microphone that cut through wind. Everything I wanted.

The only reason I returned them was the fact I couldn't stomach Meta knowing all my health data. Pairing the Vanguards means using the Meta app, the same app that fills your feed with AI generated slop the second you open it. My running routes, my pace, my heart rate, all of it flowing through Meta's servers. The same company that has paid billions in facial recognition and privacy settlements, the same company whose CEO once called his users "dumb fucks" for trusting him with their data, now wants all of my biometric information. I just can't do it.

This is where it gets frustrating for me. I am not someone who takes a hard line on these things. I switched to Android. I use Google services extensively. I've written about the compromises we all make when a product is good enough. That's just life with technology. You give something up to get something back and most of the time the trade is worth it. The difference with Meta is it doesn't feel like a trade. Google wants my data to sell me ads. I can live with that. Meta wants my data to build a surveillance infrastructure and populate my timeline with AI generated fake people designed to keep me scrolling. Internal memos reported by the Times suggest the company is timing the rollout of facial recognition features to coincide with moments when civil liberties organisations are too distracted to fight back. That's not carelessness. That's strategy.

Nobody else is making anything close to this product. That's the real problem. There's no privacy-respecting alternative from a company I'd trust with my biometric data. Apple isn't in this space. Garmin makes the watch but not the glasses. It's Meta or nothing. So for now, I'm choosing nothing. The Vanguards went back in the box and my money went back in my pocket. The product deserved better than the company that made it.