Meta ditches the camera on its newest smart glasses

Walking around Meta Connect 2026, everyone’s sporting smart glasses in all sorts of shapes, colors, and sizes. It’s a marked difference here, a tech bubble where “pervert glasses” are not a concern. Outside Connect, the public backlash against wearable surveillance tech — a catchall term that encompasses not just smart glasses, but also smartwatches and AI pendants — is gaining steam. So it’s incredibly curious timing that this year, the company is launching Ray-Ban Meta Audio Glasses: smart glasses infused with Meta AI, but with no camera for recording others. To hear Meta tell it, that’s a coincidence. Audio-only glasses have been years in the making. “Three years ago, it wasn’t clear if AI glasses were going to be a thing. Back then, every other company was backing out of the space,” says Alex Himel, Meta’s vice president of wearables. “Then two years ago, we saw that audio was the top use case, the biggest potential…