**Hit on, then shamed: Inside the world of men who secretly film women using smart glasses**

Imagine being approached by a stranger in public, thinking you've politely rejected them, only to discover later that your conversation has been secretly recorded and shared online for millions to see. For many women, this is now a terrifying reality.

Kassy Zanjani, a 25-year-old social worker from Vancouver, Canada, was one such victim. After a night out with friends, she was approached by a man in sunglasses who complimented her beauty and asked for her number. Unbeknownst to her, he had been wearing smart glasses equipped with a hidden camera, recording their entire conversation.

When Zanjani discovered the video online a week later, she was left feeling "anxiety-provoking" and violated. "I think he's purposefully targeting intoxicated women, vulnerable women, to elicit a response from them to use as content," she said.

Zanjani's experience is just one of many cases documented in this article. Entire accounts on social media are dedicated to sharing videos of men secretly filming women in public places, often using sophisticated smart glasses like Meta's Ray-Bans.

One such account belongs to "itspolokidd", an American content creator with 1.6 million followers on Instagram. His shtick is stopping women in the street and chatting them up, often with a full-on approach that can be distressing for those involved.

The videos are frequently accompanied by derogatory comments from viewers, ranging from insulting to sexist to lascivious. In one instance, a woman featured in a video was subjected to hundreds of such comments after being posted online without her consent.

But it's not just the women who feature in these videos who are affected. When footage is shared online, their personal details – including location and phone number – can be exposed, leaving them vulnerable to harassment, trolling, and doxxing.

Rebecca Hitchen, head of policy and campaigns at the End Violence Against Women coalition (EVAW), says: "The safety risks of this are huge, as is the subsequent level of harassment."

The tech behind these smart glasses raises significant concerns. Meta's spokesperson claimed that the devices have an LED light that activates when recording content, but expert Jake Moore demonstrated how easy it is to override this feature.

Moore's main concern, however, is not sexual harassment but cyber security. He managed to rig his Meta Ray-Bans so they were secretly recording a live feed, which was then fed into facial recognition software. This enabled him to access a person's name, place of work, alma mater, and hobbies in under a minute.

Brits are the perfect targets for this kind of infiltration tactic, with our tendency to prioritise politeness over asking questions. Someone could misuse tech wearables by socially engineering a conversation with a target and pretending to already know them: "If you can get someone to believe you, you can break into any company," says Moore.

Campaigners are calling for the government and online regulator Ofcom to take urgent action to ensure the Online Safety Act is fit for purpose. Many of the women targeted by men in smart glasses believe our privacy laws need an overhaul in a world where covert filming is becoming increasingly easy.

"It felt very violating and made me feel very powerless... Just because there are things that are technically legal, it doesn’t mean that it’s not completely wrong, immoral and unethical," says Zanjani.

As we navigate this new reality, Moore recommends being on guard and taking a "zero trust" approach when it comes to strangers. The depressing reality is that perpetrators will always exploit new technologies to find novel ways to harm women and girls, according to Hitchen: "Smart glasses are therefore not an exciting innovation – for women, they present a new threat to our everyday lives."

As we continue to push the boundaries of technology, it's time to ask ourselves whether this is a world we truly want to live in.