This Tech Offers a Tentative Fix for the ‘Pervert Glasses’ Problem

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Wearable cameras and smart glasses pose a threat to everyone’s privacy. But what if they couldn’t see your face?

Principal Writer

Katie Collins

Principal Writer

October 1, 2026, 2:36 pm ET

A man walks into a party and spends the evening networking with new people without getting his phone out even once. As he leaves at the end of the night, he tells his smart glasses to add the people he just met that evening on LinkedIn with a note about how they could collaborate.

This is the vision that Shawn Shen, co-founder of Memories.ai, put forward at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii last week. Shen presented this idea as a net positive – a problem solved. In this scenario, the glasses were allowing the man to be fully present and handing off the labor of remembering everyone’s names and faces to an invisible third party.

But this is also an example of how one person’s utopian ideal can be another’s dystopian nightmare. As Shen spoke on stage, pitching his vision for smart glasses and AI agents, there was an undercurrent of uncomfortable shuffling and side glances around the room. People were clearly not comfortable with the notion of surrendering all rights to personal privacy simply to avoid a minor inconvenience.

Is obscuring faces the answer to a privacy nightmare?

At best, it feels icky. At worst, it feels like we’re all being encouraged to actively participate in and perpetuate mass surveillance.

But what if the glasses could see everything but also exclude people’s faces? Call it facial obfuscation, an idea that Qualcomm is putting forward as a way to maintain the privacy of the people you come into contact with while still enabling AI-driven experiences that require context about who we are and the lives we’re living.

It’s a capability called “all-sensing camera” that’s available right now, built into the sensing hub of Qualcomm’s most recent wearable chips. This feature enables very low-resolution imaging that can detect a mouth and two eyes, which indicates a face, but covers up the specifics so the face can’t actually be recognized. In other words, it knows someone is there, but not exactly who that person is.

“I don’t really need to send all these faces for AI processing,” Ziad Asghar, Qualcomm’s general manager of XR, wearables and personal AI, said in a roundtable with journalists. “What I really need to do is to be able to send the context.”

Having a vague understanding of who is around you helps the glasses understand where you are – at home, or out in public, for example. But you don’t need to know exactly who is in a room with you at all times, with facial recognition noting down individual people’s presence and performing background checks linking you to your LinkedIn and other social media.

In business circumstances and in specific regions, there are already data protection rules that prevent this type of invasive data gathering, processing and storing. More widely, the idea of taking no more than what you actually need isn’t revolutionary – except in tech, which has long traded on a business model of hoarding the maximum amount of our data at all times.

The catch is this: Qualcomm makes the underlying chipsets, not the consumer-facing products we actually buy, meaning Qualcomm itself can’t solve privacy concerns posed by wearable cameras, said George Jijiashvili, senior principal analyst at Omdia.

“Basically, the buck stops with the service providers, be that Meta or Google or whoever that may be,” he said.

Your move, glasses-makers

Last week, Meta unveiled its first pair of audio-only glasses, with other smart glasses-makers set to follow. This is certainly one solution to the privacy issues caused by camera-equipped glasses, but it does mean that any AI agents working for you in the background will be missing out on visual information about your surroundings.

In light of this, facial obfuscation could well be another solution companies including Meta would consider deploying, said Ben Hatton, analyst at FDM CCS.

“You can maintain that kind of vision-led context without having to completely change the kind of composition of the product by taking the camera out,” he said. “Whether that fully alleviates any of the privacy concerns is kind of yet to be seen. But this is the kind of development that I guess the industry is going to need in order to start sort of quelling some of those real fears.”

Asghar wouldn’t name any companies considering adopting Qualcomm’s facial obfuscation, but said, “We have multiple partners that we’re engaged with right now to be able to create that sort of an experience.”

All of Qualcomm’s partners in the rapidly growing smart glasses market are concerned about privacy and establishing people’s trust, Ashgar said. “It is in the interest of our customers to do devices that people feel comfortable with.”

Meta didn’t immediately respond to request for comment about whether it would consider using facial obfuscation in future products.

Forrester Principal Analyst Kate Winick said she could imagine Meta eventually adopting facial obfuscation as one way to answer privacy concerns. But, she added, “To maintain the full utility of the product, they will have to make it optional, and as we’ve seen with other Meta safety features that are available on an opt-in basis, utilization is much lower than features which are core to the product or even opt-out.”

Trust issues remain potent

Ultimately, if facial obfuscation remains optional, or it’s only deployed in a handful of products, the more widespread trust issues will remain.

As Jijiashvili pointed out, if someone is wearing a camera with glasses, “How do other people around the user know that they are using this fancy AI technology that can obfuscate their face?”

Companies tend to focus on smart glasses from the wearer’s perspective – and that includes Qualcomm. “If people have concerns, they don’t buy the device,” said Asghar.

But this ignores the wider social context in which they’re designed to be used, not to mention the social contract, which feels like it’s being renegotiated in real time.

People’s privacy has already been violated by smart glasses, and trust in the safeguards is already low. “It’s unlikely that people will find [facial obfuscation] to be much of a consolation without some kind of indicator that the feature was on and assurance that it was impossible to reverse,” said Winick.

It’s not necessarily too late for companies to course correct in establishing trust, said Jijiashvili, but it is going to be difficult in the face of all the negativity.

It also helps that Qualcomm and others are focusing on on-device processing, which prevents data from being unnecessarily sent to the cloud and keeps it locked down as much as possible. Apple is particularly hot on this, Jijiashvili added, with the company limiting the new Audio Intelligence capabilities, such as Live Rewind, on its latest Apple Watches to capturing short snippets rather than endlessly recording conversations.

But whether it be on-device data processing, time-limited content capture, LED lights or facial obfuscation, technology solutions may still fail to convince many people that wearable cameras aren’t an invasion of their privacy.

The burden of establishing trust falls upon the technology companies making these products, even though what stands in their way is largely a subset of people who may always find ways to abuse these tools, regardless of so-called safeguards.

“Given the types of videos we’ve seen that have caused so much of this backlash, it must be said that anonymization doesn’t eliminate the harm of the violation,” said Winick. “If using this technology allows perpetrators to avoid consequences for hurting the human behind the blur, it is not necessarily to the benefit of the people it is supposed to protect.”

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