Monitoring Has Emerged as a Popular Trend

I set the glasses up—and then immediately hid them in a sock drawer. I was uneasy—worried they’d be listening and worried I’d sacrificed the last fragment of privacy I had. They stayed there for two days. I realized I needed to retrieve them, and I eventually did. But then I tucked them away in a different drawer, in another room.

After all, I had just spent more than $300 to build my own panopticon—and one I could wear on my head.

We’re in the midst of what looks like a wearables arms race, a contest consumers didn’t really ask for. Device makers, Meta especially, are betting that people are tired of carrying phones and will want glasses instead, with Google and Snap throwing their hats into the ring as well.

Two models of wearable glasses landed a week apart, each pursuing a starkly different strategy and offering a distinct set of features. Evan Spiegel of Snap (the company behind Snapchat) drew widespread mockery for the size of the $2,195 Augmented Reality Specs, sold via Specs Inc., with launch partners including Imogen Heap, Jack Harlow, and Kaia Gerber.

Mark Zuckerberg rolled out a new era for Meta Glasses, cheaper but with fewer features. Yet after enduring his own ridicule in a prior moment wearing Meta glasses, he made one of the most famous people in the world the face of the campaign: Kylie Jenner.

Her Meta Starfire Kylie Edition glasses carry a $399 price—$100 more than the base models—but come with her voice as the onboard AI assistant. Say “Hey Meta,” and Kylie Jenner answers.

This marks Meta’s first eyewear under its own brand, designed in-house but developed in partnership with EssilorLuxottica. The launch followed the script: a New York influencer event, visuals of Kylie wearing and using the glasses, privacy advocates voicing concerns, and a broad exchange of opinions.

A lot of the discussion centers on something that’s been evolving for some time: Surveillance is fashionable now.

The lineage here runs deep. In April 1996, a college student named Jennifer Ringley trained a webcam on her dormitory and broadcast her life in grainy still images—untouched by editors—to millions who wanted to watch. This was JenniCam, the first evidence that being observed could become a product to sell (and Jenny eventually sold access).

Ringley turned off the camera in 2003 and has spent two decades trying to stay as far from the Internet as possible, according to her latest interviews. In a 2014 Conversation with ReplyAll, the hosts note that “Jenny’s one of the few people who shuns social media entirely. In fact, she’s nearly absent from the Internet.” Jenny herself explains that she was eager to take her husband’s last name, Johnson, so she could be unGoogleable. She was an early tester of what’s since become ubiquitous—exposing our lives to the world in photo dumps or live streams or … through glasses we wear on our faces.

Around the turn of the millennium, fashion underwent a phase designer and scholar Eric Howeler dubbed “Paranoid Chic” in 2002: Versace ads staged like grainy security-camera footage or a Givenchy perfume line named RWD, PLAY, and FFWD, or an Estée Lauder campaign featuring Elizabeth Hurley looking startled and overexposed in the camera flash. The ads sold the glamour of being watched, but they sold the image of surveillance rather than actual surveillance. The clothes themselves didn’t monitor your heart rate or reveal whether a package from Amazon had arrived. The cameras belonged to the state and the tabloids rather than to you.

In the past decade, the dynamic has flipped. Consumers hold the camera, and they continually turn it back on themselves. Ring doorbell footage has become a genre of its own. Jack Harlow (a familiar figure at many consumer-surveillance moments) shot a music video using one in 2024, and “fit checks” filmed with doorbell cams have become a complete social-media category. The Oura ring and smartwatches have turned biometric self-tracking into jewelry. Parents monitor their teenagers by default through apps like Find My or Life360 (I don’t have kids yet, but even my dog wears an AirTag). Now Meta sells glasses that track every movement around you when activated (and play music) with a frame silhouette from Kylie Jenner, one of the most photographed people of all time.

Google Glass made a critical misstep—actually several. It debuted publicly in 2014 at $1,500 and died as a consumer product within eight months, partly because the glasses offered function without fashion: a gadget resting on your face that made you the operator of something decidedly unglamorous. But it was also misdirected. Glass was inward-facing, a screen for the wearer with directions and search. The camera wasn’t the primary focus.

Meta went straight to the source: the intersection of fashion and function—the aesthetics of watching and being watched—with the emphasis on the camera. They enlisted a woman with more than 380 million Instagram followers (more than the entire U.S. population!) to design glasses shaped by her style and fashion sense, yet the aim was practical: to get camera glasses onto millions of faces and price them accordingly.

Meta is juggling three price considerations.

The sticker price: Heavily subsidized pricing. Meta’s glasses start at $299, undercutting Ray-Ban’s line at $379 and Oakley’s at $499. The Kylie edition hovers around $399. This comes as Meta plans to spend roughly $145 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, largely on AI, with its stock lagging this year—driven mainly by concerns about the sustainability of that spend. Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth was frank about the approach at the prelaunch event, saying, “Reaching people isn’t just about design and style. It’s about the price point you can reach.”

Meta doesn’t appear to expect to make a fortune from the glasses. They’re comparatively inexpensive, all things considered, because they sit at the top of the funnel for AI training. Every pair acts as a distribution node for Meta AI, effectively a sensor feeding the model the company is spending billions to train. This hardware is a customer-acquisition mechanism for the business, which isn’t selling glasses so much as generating data and attention for monetization.

Adoption data suggests this strategy is working. Global shipments of smart glasses grew about 110 percent year over year in the first half of 2025, and nearly 140 percent in the second half, according to Counterpoint Research’s public figures. Meta’s market share rose to 82 percent. When a market grows this fast, it usually fragments as entrants pile in (Google is collaborating with Warby Parker, and Samsung with Gentle Monster, for example). Yet Meta remains dominant, largely thanks to this pricing approach.

Snap has flirted with both sides of this equation. In 2016, it priced its first Spectacles at $130—cheap, with no ad empire to subsidize them—and it ended up taking on nearly $40 million in unsold inventory within a year, telling investors demand had been misread. Now it markets them at a premium for a niche audience, and rightly so: the glasses perform more advanced functions than Meta’s, including true augmented reality, dual processors, and a display embedded in the lens.

The privacy price: The hidden cost beyond the $299 sticker is a substantial loss of privacy. The terms of service are as long as a novel, and the device can see, hear, and infer almost everything you do when it is turned on. It feeds ad targeting and model training—the standard bargain of a free internet now attached to a camera on your face. The hardware costs $299, but the real price is paid by you—every bit of your personal data interwoven into the system.

The social price: Early smart glasses failed largely because they looked like surveillance devices, and that carried a social stigma (people got upset about being filmed). The design language of this launch is meant to soften that response. The Starfire frame is slim and oval—an almost universally approved look right now. The technology fades into the design, making the surveillance aspect harder to notice. Meta cites a recording-indicator light and privacy settings, but those measures aren’t a comprehensive fix.

So what ought we to think about all of this? I genuinely like the glasses. I’m excited by new technology. I dislike how we deploy it. The hands-free capture is truly remarkable, the translation is respectable, they provide decent sun protection for my sensitive eyes, the audio is superb, and the video quality is impressive.

But at what cost? The person photographed on the street without consent does not consent to being filmed. They can’t opt out or decline—often they aren’t even aware it’s happening. In January, the BBC reported instances of men using Meta Glasses to film women in public and post the footage; one video of a 21-year-old woman drew over a million views on TikTok with her phone number visible in the frame.

ICE and Border Patrol agents in at least six states have been seen wearing Meta’s consumer smart glasses during enforcement operations since early 2025, a usage that runs counter to DHS’s own rules on personal recording devices, according to an investigation by The Independent. DHS has since asked Congress for funding to formalize the practice, with its FY 2027 budget requesting $7.5 million for field technologies, including “operational prototypes of smart glasses” per budget documents first reported by Ken Klippenstein. And an internal memo leaked to the New York Times reportedly showed Meta planning to add facial recognition with a “name tag” feature to the consumer glasses, potentially enabling wearers to identify people and access their information. More than 70 organizations urged Meta to drop the plans, which it did.

Yet the technology already exists in various formats and is in use. Ring Camera, owned by Amazon, sought partnerships with police departments as far back as 2016. By 2020, law enforcement requested home-camera footage more than 20,000 times a year, no warrant required. After years of pushback and a nearly $6 million Federal Trade Commission settlement over privacy failures, Ring scrapped its police-request feature in 2024, only to revive it in 2025 under returning founder Jamie Siminoff. Last October, Ring announced a collaboration with Flock Safety, whose camera-and-license-plate-reader network is shared across thousands of agencies. In February of this year, amid reports that federal immigration officials were accessing these data sources, Ring canceled the Flock deal.

This is a negative externality—a cost created by a transaction and dumped on someone outside of it; here the cost is lost privacy shouldered by individuals who didn’t consent to the arrangement. Whether it’s Ring footage shared with the government or a recording you didn’t opt into, many people bear the burden of something they never agreed to.

The market is already producing countermeasures: Reflectacles are anti-facial-recognition glasses, with infrared-blocking lenses and reflective frames, and they’re currently sold out. Privacy advocates are now steering camera buyers toward local storage options and approaches like Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video. Privacy is increasingly something you pay for, rather than a default.

So does it matter that Kylie Jenner is selling Meta glasses? In a sense, yes. The subsidized sticker price and the hidden privacy cost have been tempered, but Jenner’s involvement has brought the social cost closer to zero. That final barrier could spark a wave of little panopticons across the country. I finally pulled my glasses out of the drawer and onto the trail, recording footage from my bike ride. Meta gained something too: data for its AI systems and the assurance that I’d likely buy whatever bike-related content they feed me. That’s probably worth far more than $299.

Chili’s is enjoying one of the strongest periods in the history of sit-down chains, a boost tied in large part to its fried mozzarella sticks. Kevin Hochman, a former KFC executive, took the helm in 2022 and implemented the usual ceo playbook: trim the menu and streamline operations. He also scrutinized pricing closely. Fast food had become so expensive that a sit-down restaurant could undercut it—out-Big Mac-ing the Big Mac, in a sense. Chili’s began advertising the math itself: $10.99 for a burger, fries, chips, and a drink, with a server attending to you the entire time. For consumers weary of inflation, this was ideal.

TikTok also helped. The Triple Dipper—an old three-item appetizer platter—went viral for its cheese pull. Chili’s joined the comments and fed the algorithm. The chain sold 41 million Triple Dippers in the last fiscal year and it now accounts for roughly 15 percent of all sales. Same-store sales rose 31 percent in a single quarter, and the two-year compound growth rate reached 39 percent. The average Chili’s now does more than $4.5 million in annual sales, up from $3.1 million when Hochman started.

Chili’s didn’t need to overhaul everything. The chain simply had to lean into what it was, listen to the market, and meet customers where they were—on price and on social media.

Amazon shifted Prime Day from July to June this year to dodge a crowded calendar with the World Cup and America’s 250th birthday. Americans spent more than $26 billion online during the four-day window—covering all of e-commerce, per Adobe Analytics, not just Amazon, since Walmart, Target, and others ran competing sales the same week. It was Black Friday and Cyber Monday rolled into the middle of summer. A faux holiday became a real one!

But the more notable fact is that shoppers arriving at retail sites via AI tools—chatbots like ChatGPT, which now offer product recommendations with links—converted 50 percent better on the event’s first day than regular traffic. That means customers were 50 percent more likely to finish a purchase than visitors arriving through other channels. During last year’s Prime Day, AI-referred shoppers actually converted 23 percent worse than everyone else. AI-referred traffic to retail sites also roughly doubled year over year. Whatever you think the AI economy will look like, a major part of it appears to be a robot guiding you to a good deal on a stroller (up 220 percent, per Adobe).