"Pervert Glasses Aren’t About Surveillance": A Trans Designer On Being Filmed With Meta Glasses

What does it mean to be filmed without consent at a protest for your rights, only to watch that footage turn into a viral attack?

At Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, during a protest against India’s transgender bill that brought together queer voices demanding dignity and legal recognition, Shubnam sensed they were being recorded discreetly. What they didn’t imagine was how that footage would be used.

Shot using Meta AI-powered smart glasses by a content creator @parley, the video captured Shubnam among others in a space where visibility was carefully negotiated as not everyone was out in all parts of their lives. The glasses documented the protest; which was later edited and uploaded in a way that stripped people of that control.

“What I didn't imagine, was the objectifying ridicule and exploitative belittlement with which it was edited and uploaded, which is one of the reasons why it went viral,” Shubnam said.

What followed was a flood of memes and stickers—content that travelled far beyond its original context, mocking and targeting those in it. For many captured in the footage, the risks were not just reputational but deeply personal: being identified could mean being outed or exposed in parts of their lives where they are not open about their identity.

The technology made the breach harder to anticipate. Unlike a phone camera, Meta AI glasses record discreetly, with little to signal to those around them that they are being filmed. There was no moment of refusal, no chance to opt out—only the aftermath.

By the time Instagram took the video down on June 18, after over a month and 3 million views, the damage had already been done.

“All it took was one unconsented video to rewind two decades of progress that I made all on my own, and transport my mind back into that place of vulnerability,” Shubnam said.

A Delhi-based graphic designer and artist, Shubnam has spent over a decade teaching communication design before transitioning back into freelance work last year. They are transfeminine, and have long been careful about how and where they are visible—an effort undone, in a matter of hours, by a technology designed to see without being seen.

Here are the edited excerpts from the interview.

The people at the protest only realised this video existed after it was uploaded. Can you walk us through how you first came across the video, and what it felt like to discover you had been recorded without any real-time awareness or consent?

I had already figured that the person was recording me without my consent which is why I told him to get away from me. I realised it because of the manner of his questioning and then realising that he was a part of a group of men who had a familiar smirk pasted on their faces. Any cisman who is a genuine trans ally would never be present in trans spaces with that kind of a smirk on his face.

So I knew on the day itself that this video was coming in some form, but I didn't pay much attention to it. What I didn't imagine, was the objectifying, ridicule and exploitative belittlement with which it was edited and uploaded, which is one of the reasons why it went viral.

I was in the middle of moving houses and packing my things, when my friend texted me the link to the video. I have been teaching for ten years being exactly who I am, who I was in that video. And all these years, the respect, regard and affection that most of my students had treated me all along, actually managed to make me forget about the dysphoric trauma of the first fifteen years of my life, growing up as a clueless queer child.

All it took was one unconsented video to rewind two decades of progress that I made all on my own, and transport my mind back into that place of vulnerability. For a moment, it felt like, maybe this entire adult life that I had lived was just a long lucid dream, and that I was going to wake up any moment as that child again.

Before this incident, were you even aware that AI-powered recording glasses like these exist?

Yes. I have known about them for a while now. The first model was prototyped around 2021 if I am correct. Though I hadn't seen one in person. The pervert glasses he was wearing looked like regular, innocuous wayfarers at the time, which in reality look nothing like the shiny photoshopped images in its ads. My brain hadn't yet registered that somehow it is my job now to recognise tiny lenses hidden within black spectacle frames.

You’ve spoken about being very careful with your privacy. In that context, did this experience make you feel like individual efforts to protect one’s privacy are becoming irrelevant against increasingly seamless surveillance technologies?

Historically, the kind of culture and society we live in, privacy has always been a hard earned prerogative. A ciswoman wearing a pair of denims is granted no privacy. A muslim man wearing a kufi is granted no privacy. A transfeminine person wearing their femininity is granted no privacy. The idea that every individual must be entitled to their privacy has always been rendered irrelevant by majoritarian and intolerant societies.

And yes, technologies like these that work against this value system, only make that fight harder. But let's be clear about one thing. Pervert glasses are not about surveillance. Fundamentally, unethicality is grounded in the act of spying and recording people without their knowledge nor consent— an act which is inherently violative and malcontent in nature. Surveillance is only an offshoot of that act, when this technology becomes institutionalised.

The protest at Jantar Mantar was already a politically and socially sensitive space, where people made conscious choices about visibility. How does discreet recording through devices like Meta glasses alter that equation of consent, anonymity, and risk?

I don’t have the expertise to fully grasp how these glasses will change queer spaces, but I imagine the impact will be significant, and something we’ll only come to understand gradually.

However, I do personally believe that humans are definitely far more resilient and adaptive to emerging technologies than we give them credit for. Once the existence of these pervert glasses becomes common knowledge, people will learn how to identify them, they will develop methods of curbing such exploitative behaviour. Public spaces are collective spaces of shared ownerships. Any one individual does not get to own it for themself and do with it as they please. Just because you can afford a technology does not mean you are free to abuse collective ethos.

Especially in our cultural constructs, we have a history of strictly disapproving and punishing cismen recording ciswomen without their consent. And while trans people can't benefit out of those social constructs any time soon to come; I still hope, perhaps those protectionist constructs, however rudimentary in their current state, could perhaps be leaned upon to prevent men from walking around wearing these abominations with impunity.

Privacy is something generations of ciswomen have fought tooth and nail to protect; and I would propose that it is upon them to initiate this fight, because violation of consent disproportionately affects femininity first, regardless of its form.

Being unknowingly recorded can carry heightened social and political consequences for marginalised groups like queer, Dalit or Muslim, in India. From your perspective, what do those risks look like in practice?

I don't know if I'm qualified enough to speak on behalf of everyone. So just from my personal perspective, the fundamental nature of being a minority is a central experience of alienation. This sense of alienation is tied to a deep cognitive dissonance that we develop at a very young age, when we realise that this supposedly "shared" reality that we were birthed into was not conceived and constructed for people like us, nor with our "share" in mind.

The pie was already cut into pieces and distributed, before we even came around.

And it takes each one of us a long time to accept that dissonant truth as we develop our own methods of coping with it. One of those ways, which many of us commonly resort to, is solitude. Be it your household, your neighbourhood, your friends and family or your community—we create these little pockets and enclaves of safe spaces, where we get to live our versions of reality however different it may be.

The fundamental risk, I believe, is the loss of ownership over our own individual ways of existence. The loss of our solitude and the destruction of our ability to separate ourselves from a world that didn't want us to begin with. Every person belonging to any kind of minority identity, is entitled to an equal piece of that pie. And that entitlement must be demanded and fought for. But there are also people who do not have the capacity to fight, and that's okay. It is them who we must protect.

Their need to dissociate themselves from a state of cognitive trauma, find peace and joy within their pockets of solitude and their right to be left alone. For me, that is what is meant by privacy when we talk about marginalised communities. And the erasure of that meaning itself is what we risk.