Meta and Apple Fuel New Era of Wearable Surveillance

[madmax]

Population surveillance is moving beyond smartphones and cameras into a new frontier: wearables.

Meta’s Ray-Ban Smart Glasses are already in the wild, letting users stream, call, and record their daily lives hands-free. Apple is set to launch its own AI-powered smart glasses in 2026, promising “multimodal AI” and real-time environmental analysis. Together, these launches signal the dawn of what some experts call the “infinite panopticon” — constant data harvesting from devices we wear on our bodies.

Unlike traditional surveillance tools that tracked searches and movements, wearables dive deeper. They can interpret tone, emotion, and behavior, raising the stakes for privacy advocates.

Still, history suggests adoption will follow the same path as CCTV and social media tracking: resistance, debate, and eventual acceptance.

“Consumers will trade intimacy for convenience,” one analyst told TechNews. “The question is whether the data will be secured — or exploited.”

[jacson4]

Big tech’s dominance in wearables raises questions about data ownership and digital ethics.

[alex10]

Meta and Apple’s expansion into biometric data collection could redefine surveillance capitalism.