For blind and low-vision users, smart glasses that can read a letter aloud or identify a package on sight are nothing short of transformative. But those benefits rely on a camera that’s always on, always recording, and always sending data somewhere.

Combined with facial recognition, though, they can provide far too much information to a stalker or form a grid of real time facial-recognition for a surveillance state. Same hardware. Same camera. Wildly different outcomes depending on who's wearing it and who's standing nearby.

In this episode, Claudio and Bianca trace what happens when an assistive technology becomes a data pipeline — for facial recognition, for corporate data-selling, for law enforcement. They dig into a leaked Meta feature that quietly built in facial recognition, and photo of a federal agent wearing the glasses at an immigration raid, and explore the risk when someone else's glasses are recording you without your consent.

Is this freedom or surveillance? Who's accountable when the tool works exactly as designed and someone still gets hurt? And is there a way to flag "this device is recording" that doesn't stigmatize the person wearing it?

Florida, USA meets The Netherlands for a conversation that doesn't land on easy answers.

Mentioned in this episode:

• WIRED — Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones
• Futurism — Meta Had the Worst Possible Response When Its Workers Were Watching Naked Footage of Its Ray-Ban AI Glasses Users
• 404 Media — A CBP Agent Wore Meta Smart Glasses to an Immigration Raid in Los Angeles

Correction: In this episode, the agent photographed wearing Meta smart glasses at a Los Angeles immigration raid is referred to as an ICE agent. Per 404 Media's reporting, the agent was with Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a related but separate agency.