On a Sunday night in February 2026, Rita, a dancer at a Toronto strip club, was about to begin a lap dance with a customer in the VIP section when she noticed him hit a button on the corner of his glasses. “The light turned on immediately,” she says. 

Rita swiftly recognized that the client’s glasses weren’t a regular pair—they were Meta smart glasses. Designed to look like normal eyewear, the thick-rimmed spectacles feature an ultra-wide camera integrated discreetly into the frame. A white blinking LED light flashes in the corner when the device is recording.

“My heart dropped,” she says. “Just when I thought physical and verbal assault was all I had to worry about … [the customers] have found another way to violate us.” 

She ended the dance and told her manager, who confiscated the glasses. 

“I was hoping the policy would be zero tolerance and they would kick him out. They didn’t, and they gave him back his glasses as he was leaving … I cried that night on the way home.”
 

The second time Rita spotted a customer wearing Meta glasses, it was a different man, sitting near the club’s entrance. Rita saw the activated light of his frames, and knew he was recording the room, violating the privacy of the dancers on stage and walking the floor, and of the other customers in the club. When she approached security and asked if they knew the guy, the bouncer told her, “Yeah, don’t worry, he’s cool.” The customer, noticing the attention drawn to him, turned off his glasses unprompted, but was allowed to remain in the room. 
 

Rita isn’t the only dancer who has noticed Meta glasses being used in her club. Strippers across Canada have also begun to see customers showing up with the devices and nonconsensually recording dancers while they work. 
 

Dubbed “pervert glasses” and “Cybertrucks for the face,” Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses have generated controversy in recent years. The company has sold millions of pairs, and positioned the devices as cute fashion accessories thanks to collaborations with the likes of Kylie Jenner. At the same time, Meta’s glasses have sparked outrage for their ability to allow wearers to record video of others, often without a person’s knowledge or consent. Abroad, cinemas in the U.K. are considering a ban on Meta’s smart glasses, while in Germany, a digital rights advocacy group has lodged a criminal complaint to stop the devices from being sold in the country entirely. 
 

For sex workers, Meta’s glasses pose a particular risk to their privacy, mental health and physical safety at work. 

Rita says the constant threat of violation, compounded by the risk of being recorded without her consent in the workplace, makes her jumpy, even to nonsexual touch. “I guess you would literally call it nervous system dysregulation that comes with the general feeling of being unsafe.” 

“Men don’t care to protect us most of the time,” she adds. “This is something sex workers are alone in dealing with. It feels we often have no support.” 
 

Sex workers are often described as “canaries in the coal mine” when it comes to surveillance technology. What’s used by law enforcement and private corporations to censor, punish and exploit the privacy, livelihood and safety of sex workers will eventually be used on the general population. 

SESTA/FOSTA, for example, is a powerful pair of American anti-sex-trafficking bills passed into law in 2018 that holds websites liable for content posted by its users that could be interpreted as sexual solicitation. Among other harms, it made online communication about sexual health and safety among sex workers a crime, while grossly restricting and censoring the free speech of anyone on the internet, especially women and LGBTQ2S+ communities. 
 

Now, Meta glasses are emerging as one of the latest persistent threats to sex worker health and safety in workplaces like massage parlours and strip clubs. 
 

As a dancer on and off for the last decade, I know sex workers take our privacy seriously, and by necessity. To mitigate the negative impacts of social stigma and criminalization, we often use fake names, blur faces and tattoos in promotional photos and use encrypted channels like Proton Mail and Signal for online communication. We go to great lengths to protect ourselves from predators by keeping professional and personal lives separate.

The presence of any device that can stealthily record in workplaces like parlours or clubs can override those safety measures. And tech that includes facial recognition especially can put workers at higher risk of being doxed. (Doxing is the act of collecting and publicly sharing someone’s personal information—including their government and dead names, home addresses or phone numbers—without their consent, and with the intention to harass, intimidate or cause distress.) 

While Meta’s own facial recognition software, internally named “NameTag,” is dormant and does not, according to the company, currently identify anyone, the code was quietly installed, as of January 2026, on more than 50 million phones using the Meta AI companion app, which is required to use any pair of Meta glasses. One security researcher described the software as “one switch away” from activation.
 

Whether dormant or active, the ability for Meta glasses to dox anyone via facial recognition technology presents a massive threat to sex worker health and safety. This tech has already been used to stalk and dox sex workers.
 

That doxing could become easier. According to a 2024 investigation from 404 Media, two Harvard students successfully embedded a facial recognition code linked to PimEyes, a facial recognition search website, into their pair of Meta glasses and the modification allowed them to identify strangers in real-time based on their face alone. The students then used AI to scrape the internet using commercially accessible data brokers like FastPeopleSearch, to access the full names, home address and phone numbers of unsuspecting victims within seconds. The pair didn’t release their code, instead using the project as a way to raise awareness of how tech like smart glasses can obliterate privacy and security. 
 

Sex workers need to familiarize themselves with the dangers of websites like PimEyes. As an open-web reverse image search tool, it works by scanning publicly available images across the internet, and allows users to find images of a person by uploading a sample photo of their face. The implications for sex workers are far-reaching, especially for those who are “face-in”: a single photo taken with Meta glasses can expose a legal name along with personal information that can leave the worker and their families vulnerable to harassment and worse. 
 

Sometimes club and parlour managers do step in to try to avoid these worst-case-scenario breaches to their workers’ privacy. But even when they do, there’s little they can do if footage has been recorded and winds up online. Tanya is a queer co-owner and attendant of a massage parlour in Toronto. In March this year, a customer claimed he had “light sensitivity” that required him to keep his sunglasses on during the service, without revealing they were Meta glasses. During multiple visits, he nonconsensually recorded interactions between himself and two of Tanya’s colleagues, posting them to his public Instagram account for his thousands of followers. A compilation reel of his nonconsensual exploits showed up on Instagram and TikTok, outing both attendants. 
 

“This is dangerous!” Tanya says of the doxing of her colleagues. “You [could] lose your home because maybe your landlord disapproves. Your relationships, your family cutting you off. Future jobs, who knows.”

Attendants also face an increased risk of violence, incarceration and deportation. In 2020, for example, a Toronto massage parlour worker was murdered by a 17-year-old perpetrator motivated by incel ideology. Being able to maintain anonymity in the face of these realities is key for workers’ well-being. 
 

Once Tanya discovered the Instagram account where her parlour was posted, she shared the account in several group chats and implored hundreds of users to report it for harassment. Shockingly, the users who reported the account received messages back from Meta saying that, upon review, the man’s account was not found to violate Instagram’s terms of service.
 

While sex workers face the constant threat of censorship, shadow bans and deplatforming on Meta—thanks, in large part, to SESTA/FOSTA—it turns out we can be outed with impunity on their platforms too.
 

While Tanya tried to stand up for her employees, there’s normally little recourse when workers are recorded against their will. Many clubs and parlours have fallen behind this new tech, and have failed to put into place policies to protect their employees against it. When workers complain about the presence of smart glasses to club managers, sources tell Script, bosses often do nothing. Sometimes they may even punish the sex workers for speaking up. 
 

Within 15 minutes of dancing for her customer, Gabriella, a queer dancer in a southern Ontario city, discovered the client was wearing Meta glasses—not by the light on the frame, but by clocking the curious sound it emitted: a song. “I asked him if his glasses were singing,” she says, before removing and confiscating them. When Gabriella threatened to end the lap dance, the customer apologized and insisted she stay by offering to buy out the rest of her night for a flat fee, which she accepted. With the customer’s permission, she continued to hold the glasses and dance for him until closing. Later, the customer had trouble withdrawing the total amount from the ATM, which drew the attention of management. When she asked to discuss the situation with her manager, he fired her.
 

Without a clear policy, workers risk termination for taking safety matters into their own hands. 

Gabriella points out that while filming with a phone at the strip club is prohibited, “if you’re filming with Meta glasses, you’re probably not going to be reprimanded every time because people can’t really tell.” 
 

The only visible way to tell if a pair of Meta glasses is recording video footage is by a small white blinking indicator light on the right corner of the frame. However, there have been robust workarounds to disable this feature. In response, Meta rolled out an update to disable the camera when users tamper with or destroy the recording indicator light.

But the latest update does not address the cheap and easily accessible LED-blocking sticker kits that avoid Meta’s tamper detection software while hiding the LED from bystanders. Whether the light is on or off is essentially meaningless. It is safest to assume Meta glasses are always recording. 
 

Clearly, strip clubs and other sex work establishments need to develop specific policies to deal with the scourge of Meta glasses. One easy change workers would like to see is signage indicating an explicit “no smart glasses” policy at the door.
 

The most important harm reduction happens at the entrance, Gabriella says. If there’s a bag check, there should be a smart glasses check too. If a customer is found to be wearing smart glasses inside the club, the onus is on security and management for failing to screen them upon entry. A customer can be turned away for wearing sweatpants—they should also be turned away for wearing smart glasses.

Unfortunately, as Gabriella says, customers are likely more willing to listen to the club ground rules if it’s coming from the bouncers. “Men only want to listen to other men,” she says.
 

Rita says a social media announcement banning Meta glasses would go a long way, as would a notice on the club’s website. Other entertainment establishments like dance clubs are doing it, so why not strip clubs? 
 

Workers themselves also need to establish a smart glasses protocol, sex work advocates say. Pleasers on the Ground, a harm reduction collective in Montreal, recently released a helpful step-by-step guide for dancers. They suggest reporting the incident to a manager, and then making the customer open the Meta AI app on their phone. From there, they should open the “Glasses” tab to find the gallery and delete all captured footage. The group also recommends checking the phone’s photo gallery, just in case. 

Finally, customers who use smart glasses should be removed from the club or parlour and barred permanently.
 

***

Smart glasses are not going away any time soon. Google and Samsung are rolling out new Android AI glasses this fall, while Apple is expected to enter the smart glasses market in 2027. Mark Zuckerberg noted in April that the number of people using Meta glasses daily has tripled year over year. Even Clearview AI, a powerful facial recognition system used by law enforcement that uses billions of images scraped from social media, is exploring a pair of smart glasses that could run its facial recognition technology.

So, what can be done? Sex workers should opt out of PimEyes and other facial recognition search engines, to start (opting out of Pimeyes can be done here). And while the technology isn’t 100 percent accurate, apps like Nearby Glasses can attempt to confirm if someone is wearing Meta glasses in one’s vicinity. 

Smart glasses technology is moving far faster than governments can regulate it. Policy that starts at the door to keep Meta glasses out of sex work establishments is essential to protecting sex worker health and safety. 

“I would love to say [the strip club] is a place where I can feel safe to make my money,” Rita says. 

If sex workers are the “canaries in the coal mine,” we aren’t just chirping; we are screaming for the right to privacy, safety and dignity in our workplaces—rights that should be afforded to us all.