Someone put an X ray warning about Meta's AI glasses on a bus stop outside its London office
A lenticular bus stop ad near Meta's London headquarters flips between Kylie Jenner's official campaign image and an X ray reading We're always watching, targeting the always on recording built into Meta's smart glasses.
Activists put an X ray of Meta smart glasses on a London bus stop, right by Meta offices, with a warning.
A UK activist group installed a lenticular ad at a bus stop near Meta's London headquarters that flips between Kylie Jenner's official campaign image promoting Meta's AI smart glasses and an X ray style image reading We're always watching, aimed squarely at the glasses' always on recording capability.
What the ad is actually targeting
The critique is not the celebrity endorsement. It is the hardware: Meta's smart glasses can record covertly, without the obvious cues a phone camera gives the person being filmed, and the protest cites reports of the glasses being used to film women without consent. The lenticular format means the ad itself performs the point, a normal seeming image that reveals something hidden depending on where you stand, the same trick the glasses are being accused of.
Why the location is the point
Placing it by Meta's own London office rather than anywhere else turns a general privacy complaint into a specific, addressed one. It also lands in a market where hardware makers are under more active regulatory attention on data and recording than most: the UK and EU have both been actively scrutinizing wearable AI devices' consent and recording indicator design.
Why a build studio cares
Recording indicator design, consent defaults, and what a device does when it is uncertain whether it should be capturing data are real engineering decisions, not just PR ones, and they show up in far more products than smart glasses: any always listening or always on device inherits the same problem. This is a useful, concrete example of what happens when that decision is made wrong, or made invisible, in public.
Next step: see Hyperallergic's coverage of the campaign. If you are designing a product with always on sensors and want to think through consent and recording indicators properly, write to us at hello@gattyworks.com.