Consent has become the defining fault line in wearable tech this summer.
A satirical mock advertisement featuring the late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein wearing Meta's camera-equipped Ray-Ban smart glasses has appeared at London bus shelters and sandwich boards, placed strategically near Meta offices and flagship Ray-Ban retail locations.
The unauthorized poster, created by the British activist group Everyone Hates Elon, uses a doctored version of Epstein's New York State sex offender registry photograph. Its tagline reads: "Glasses for people who don't do consent."
It is not subtle. That's the point.
Everyone Hates Elon is a British political campaign group formed in 2025 to oppose Elon Musk, citing his role in the Department of Government Efficiency and his promotion of disinformation.
The collective creates parody advertisements and viral social media campaigns targeting Musk and other billionaires. Past stunts have included posters calling Musk a "bellend" and parodying Tesla's latest vehicle as "the Swasticar."
The Epstein poster follows an earlier Everyone Hates Elon action that drew wide attention. A lenticular spoof ad near Meta's London headquarters transformed a Kylie Jenner Meta glasses campaign image into a skeletal, X-ray version of the reality TV star with the tagline "We're always watching."
That installation was shared on Instagram, where it racked up more than 23,000 likes. "Meta has spent years tracking us online," a spokesperson for the group told Hyperallergic.
"Now it wants to track us in the real world too."
Both stunts arrive amid a genuinely accelerating backlash against Meta's AI-powered eyewear. Internet users have saddled the shades with the nickname "pervert glasses."
In October 2025, the University of San Francisco issued a warning after reports that a man wearing the glasses was approaching women on campus and recording interactions later shared on social media. Wired also found in June that Meta had silently added a facial recognition system to the glasses' software but hadn't activated it.
Institutional responses have started piling up. DEF CON 34, the world's largest hacker conference, explicitly banned "Meta-style glasses with recording capabilities" from its August gathering in Las Vegas, with zero exceptions.
The U.S. Air Force banned them in uniform earlier this year, and New York State courts barred them from all 1,240 courthouses in July. UK Comic Con organizer Monopoly Events followed suit after celebrity guests reported feeling covertly filmed.
Legal pressure is mounting in parallel. In Bartone et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., filed March 4, 2026, in the Northern District of California, plaintiffs accused Meta and Luxottica of pairing privacy-centric marketing claims with inadequate disclosures about human review of captured media.
Swedish newspapers reported that workers at Sama, a Kenya-based subcontractor, had reviewed footage including nudity, sexual activity, and other private moments inside users' homes.
Even the commercial response has turned absurd. DuckDuckGo released a pair of "Normal F***ing Sunglasses" carrying no camera, no microphone, no battery, and no electronics of any kind. Priced at $35 and made with San Diego eyewear brand Knockaround, they went on sale July 30. The first production run sold out in under a week.
Whether guerrilla posters in London or satirical sunglasses in San Diego, the message keeps landing the same way.
Recording-capable eyewear has a trust deficit no software update can fix, and activists, regulators, and hackers alike seem intent on making sure Meta knows it.
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