The new software spots a covered or destroyed light at any point in a recording, not just when filming starts. Drilling the light out ends the camera for good; peeling off a sticker brings it back.
Thousands of Meta’s AI glasses can no longer take a photo or shoot video. The company said on Tuesday it had shut the cameras down through a software release after finding their owners had tampered with the light that signals the camera is on.
The loophole was in the timing: the earlier update checked the light only as filming began, so a wearer could hit record, wait a few seconds, cover the LED and carry on. Whoever took a drill to it is left with an expensive pair of Bluetooth headphones.
Meta put the number at under a tenth of a percent of every pair sold — about 7,000 of the 7 million sold in 2025 alone — and has never published a lifetime total for the line, launched in 2021. The light became worth policing after reports of wearers filming strangers who had not agreed to it and harassing people for social-media footage.
Meta is arguing the other side loudly. Chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth calls the glasses the most privacy-forward camera on the consumer market, since phones — the most commonly held cameras on earth — give no signal at all. Alex Himel, who runs wearables, called the fight over the light “a little bit of a cat and mouse game” and does not expect it to end.
The camera being policed is also the one Meta is pitching as an assistive device. A blind wearer can ask the glasses to read a menu; the company has donated 130,000 pairs to legally blind US veterans and wants federal health agencies to classify the glasses as assistive, which would open the way to Medicare and Medicaid coverage. Facial recognition, which that community asks for often, is not something Meta says it is pursuing now.
Keri Gray, a disability advocate who sat on the advisory board of Meta’s Reality Labs, told Semafor she sees more blind people using the glasses and still wants rules: “There does have to be regulation, and there should be places and moments that can be sacred to people.” Several workplaces have already banned the devices outright.