Mark Zuckerberg largely ignores smart glasses privacy backlash at Meta Connect

At Wednesday's Meta Connect 2026 , Meta's annual conference and product showcase, CEO Mark Zuckerberg mostly ignored the brewing backlash against the company's smart glasses.

In recent months, concerns over smart glasses and privacy have reached a tipping point.

The backlash has become so intense that Apple reportedly delayed the release of its own smart glasses.

Yet at Meta Connect, Zuckerberg chose not to directly address the bad behavior associated with Meta Ray-Bans, which some critics are now calling "pervert glasses." Zuckerberg did talk about privacy in general, emphasizing that the company's new glasses and Muse AI assistant will provide users with a secure environment .

For the Muse assistant, Zuckerberg emphasized that Muse already runs on a dedicated computer in the cloud, known as Muse Secure VM.

He also promised a future version with added encryption, which would prevent Meta from accessing user data altogether.

And for its glasses, Zuckerberg announced that private processing will be available for some of the glasses' AI features, starting with live translation.

Why is there a backlash against smart glasses? Credit: Screenshot courtesy of Meta As Mashable has reported previously (as have plenty of other journalists), Meta Ray-Bans have enabled some really bad behavior .

At some point this year, the sheer number of creeps and nuisance streamers using Meta Ray-Bans to harass people in public became impossible to ignore, and Meta started facing a serious backlash.

Filming in public spaces is perfectly legal, of course.

But a behavior can be legal while also being deeply antisocial.

The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri , eventually announced that the platform would crack down on smart-glasses videos that feature harassment and other types of bad behavior.

So, even though Meta has sold millions of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses in recent years, public opinion has very much shifted against them, for a variety of reasons.

General fears of surveillance tech (see also: Flock cameras ).