How Meta’s New Face Camera Heralds a New Age of Surveillance

For the past two weeks, I’ve been using a new camera to secretly snap photos and record videos of strangers in parks, on trains, inside stores and at restaurants. (I promise it was all in the name of journalism.) I wasn’t hiding the camera, but I was wearing it, and no one noticed.

I was testing the recently released $300 Ray-Ban Meta glasses that Mark Zuckerberg’s social networking empire made in collaboration with the iconic eyewear maker. The high-tech glasses include a camera for shooting photos and videos, and an array of speakers and microphones for listening to music and talking on the phone.

The glasses, Meta says, can help you “live in the moment” while sharing what you see with the world. You can livestream a concert on Instagram while watching the performance, for instance, as opposed to holding up a phone. That’s a humble goal, but it is part of a broader ambition in Silicon Valley to shift computing away from smartphone and computer screens and toward our faces.

Meta, Apple and Magic Leap have all been hyping mixed-reality headsets that use cameras to allow their software to interact with objects in the real world. On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg posted a video on Instagram demonstrating how the smart glasses could use A.I. to scan a shirt and help him pick out a pair of matching pants. Wearable face computers, the companies say, could eventually change the way we live and work. For Apple, which is preparing to release its first high-tech goggles, the $3,500 Vision Pro headset, next year, a pair of smart glasses that look nice and accomplish interesting tasks are the end goal.