A zombie wave of surveillance devices
Every day, a little more, it feels like we’re living in a zombie movie. For one thing, there’s the dazed-out state of people I see on the New York City subway, staring glassy-eyed at the mental fly traps in their hands. Some days when I get a seat on the train I look to my left, and look to my right, and in both directions there’s a long line of people bent over glowing devices.
It always reminds me a bit of the unsettling scene in the movie I Am Legend when Will Smith’s character comes across a pod of zombies, all looking down.
I’m also reminded about zombie movies when I read the news. Arguments we thought were settled years ago are again up for debate, as Will Leitch writes in a NYT Opinion essay (gift link, May 28, 2025). Especially in the tech industry, I find that bad ideas have a way of coming back, even after being discredited. And this is exactly what’s happening with surveillance glasses.
I thought I had helped kill them, but they’re clawing their way out of the grave.
Back in 2013, the day after Google announced Google Glass at the TED conference, I posted what became the most popular essay I’ve ever written at Creative Good. In The Google Glass feature no one is talking about (Feb 28, 2013) I explained that the key to the Google Glass user experience wasn’t anything that the device provided to the wearer. Instead, the most important feature was how Glass affected everyone else – that is, everyone in range of its camera and microphone – who would be subjected to unwanted surveillance.
My column went viral. As I described in a followup post (March 12, 2013), it was translated into six languages and quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Telegraph, and others. I like to think that my little column helped jumpstart the backlash to Google Glass, which led to the device’s swift demise.
Except now it’s back.
Google is relaunching Google Glass, or the zombie reanimation of it, according to the NYT (May 20, 2025):
Google has been working on and off on glasses for more than a decade. Google Glass, which it introduced in 2013, was widely considered to be a failure and abandoned by the company. Warby Parker and Gentle Monster are teaming up with Google to build glasses with its Android XR software system.
Warby Parker? Yes – the company with the stylish eyeglass frames has chosen to work with Google on glasses that will spy on you. As the WSJ reports (May 20, 2025), selling out to a surveillance giant is worth a lot of money:
As part of the deal with Warby Parker, Google has committed up to $75 million toward the eyewear company’s product development and commercialization costs, and is also making a $75 million equity investment in the company.
Thus Google’s surveillance glasses are coming back. With the help of Warby Parker – now practically a Google subsidiary – they likely won’t suffer the dorky, warmed-over Tron style of the original Glass headset:
The new, zombified Google Glass will be different from the original – and not just in its style. The surveillance will be much more invasive. Cameras, microphones, wireless transmission, cloud storage, and AI analysis of surveillance data are all far advanced from Google’s first attempt 12 years ago.
It gets worse. You know how zombies tend to multiply, as more and more people get infected? The same thing appears to be happening in Silicon Valley, as one tech giant after another has announced new surveillance wearables.
Apple’s surveillance glasses could arrive by 2025, reports The Verge (May 22, 2025). This is just days after the WSJ reported (gift link, May 15, 2025) that the Apple face jail, aka Vision Pro, is now considered a failure.
OpenAI is partnering with former Apple designer Jony Ive to create a wearable surveillance device that will listen to, record, and analyze anything said by anyone standing within earshot. More in this WSJ article (gift link, May 21, 2025).
→ As AI expert Gary Marcus writes (May 23, 2025), “A camera and microphone. You would be monitored all the time. Everything you say, everything you do, and not just recorded, but analyzed, interpreted and turned into data, which of course OpenAI train their models on... Dictators everywhere will love it.”
Facebook/Meta, well, let me cover that below.
Why are Big Tech companies so attracted to wearable surveillance devices? Because they need more data to train the next generation of their AI models. Silicon Valley’s growth-at-any-cost business model is the driving force behind all these new devices. Google Glass may have died in 2013, but now it’s back, this time with billions of dollars fueling its rise.
About Zuck’s spy glasses
Let me start this section with another photo.
This is Zuck, as reported by Futurism, wearing a prototype of Facebook-Meta’s “Orion” surveillance headset, an augmented-reality rig somewhat akin to Apple’s Vision Pro face jail. I can only hope that the Orion glasses fail as soundly as Vision Pro, if and when they launch. (Besides, just look at the photo. Is that what anyone aspires to look like?)
But Zuck has another wearable on the market already, the Ray-Ban surveillance glasses. These have been out for awhile: the camera and microphone collect spy data on everyone around the user, then send it up to Facebook’s cloud for processing and storage.
The device poses an obvious threat to privacy, a risk that became even more apparent a few months ago when Harvard students connected a facial-recognition algorithm onto the glasses, allowing them to dox strangers in public. Facebook quickly issued an assurance that they’d never think of such a thing – I mean, just imagine, Facebook engaging in unwarranted surveillance! – and a PR exec took issue with 404 Media’s Joseph Cox when asked about facial rec plans.
And then, well, the zombies struck again. As Joseph Cox wrote in 404 Media on May 9: Well, Well, Well: Meta to Add Facial Recognition To Glasses After All. It appears that Zuck’s surveillance glasses will soon have the ability to identify you, anywhere you go in public. In a store, on the street, in church, in the doctor’s office – wherever you are, if you’re near someone wearing Zuck’s specs, they may soon be able to identify you and send the data to interested companies, brokers, and government agencies.
I recommend listening to my conversation with Chris Gilliard on the May 19, 2025 Techtonic (click “pop-up player”), where we talk about the proliferation of devices like Zuck’s glasses. Chris coined the term “luxury surveillance” to describe devices that people voluntarily buy to spy on themselves, their family, and people around them.
I wish I could say that zombie movies give us a clue toward getting out of this mess. A vaccine, an impregnable bunker, some magic-bullet device – anything that might defend us from shambling mob of exploitative tech devices advancing on us. But I have no answers, except to say – as always – that the first step toward a solution is awareness. Let’s keep at it.
Another way to resist the surveillance invasion from Big Tech is to join me at Creative Good. You’ll both support my work on this newsletter and gain access to my Creative Good Forum, where I (and other members) post a lot more resources, links, and even some games and other fun stuff.
Until next time,
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon