Oliver Hooson said he lost a good 50 to 100 followers after posting Wetherspoons-style footage filmed with Meta’s smartglasses. The backlash came after he shared a video of himself making a flat white for a fellow cycling enthusiast during the Tour de France finale.
Comments under the post included “PERV” and “Out here pushing creep glasses.” Hooson said the response caught him off guard, even though he had used the glasses to show the things he enjoys doing.
Oliver Hooson and the backlash
Hooson said he received the glasses at a PR event. He said he intended them as a way of capturing a human POV of his morning coffee routine and his fast cycling descents.
He also said the criticism sits alongside a wider concern that the glasses are being used against women mainly being filmed against their knowledge. “People do not need any more of their privacy stripped away. I’m fully in support of that,” he said.
Meta campaign after Kylie Jenner
The glasses can record video footage while being worn, and they have faced backlash over surveillance concerns. This summer, Kylie Jenner collaborated with Meta to launch a pair of the glasses, while Rida Tharana, who has 1.6 million followers on Instagram, said she “took accountability” for taking part in a Meta campaign promoting them.
Tharana criticized men who misuse the glasses to “record and harass women.” Hooson said the label “pervert glasses” acts as “a defence mechanism,” and added, “If everybody gets round that they are pervert glasses, which evidently they have, then it’s a really easy way of limiting sales and the usage of them.”
Soho and the label
Hooson said the term reflects more than online name-calling. “It was intended as a simple way of capturing a human POV of my morning coffee routine or my fast cycling descents,” he said. “I think that’s vastly different from somebody going into the centre of Soho and asking somebody a divisive question and clipping them up for views without their knowledge.”
The immediate question is whether that label changes how people use the glasses in public. For Hooson, the answer already shows up in the follower count he lost after one post, and in the way creators now have to explain that a wearable camera can read as a privacy problem before it reads as a gadget.
