Meta is stripping the camera from its next pair of smart glasses after a sustained backlash over creeps using them to secretly record women — but six always-on microphones and a built-in AI assistant mean the surveillance hardware isn't disappearing, it's just changing form.

The Information reports that Meta's new camera-free model, internally dubbed Luna, could debut as soon as next week at the company's Connect conference in Menlo Park, with shipments starting in October. The glasses come in two styles — Clubmaster and Burbank — and replace the camera with six microphones, ear-directed speakers, and a side button that activates Meta AI and the company's Muse AI agent. Dropping the camera also allows for slimmer temple arms, making Luna look closer to ordinary eyewear.

The pivot follows months of ugly press. Meta's camera-equipped Ray-Ban smart glasses earned the nickname "pervert glasses" after multiple incidents of men using them to secretly film women — including one case cited by CNET where a man recorded his airport conversation with a woman and posted it online despite her objection. Venues in the U.K. and clubs in New York City have moved to ban the devices outright.

Meta's existing glasses include a white LED that blinks during recording, but the safeguard proved weak. People found ways to remove or camouflage the light. Meta pushed a software update in late July that bricks the camera if the LED is tampered with, though CNET's Scott Stein noted the light is nearly impossible to spot in bright daylight and the smart frames look almost identical to standard Ray-Bans.

YouTube tech reviewer Austin Evans, who has nearly 6 million subscribers, told CNET he rarely wears the camera-equipped model anymore because of the stigma. "It probably would allow them to slim the glasses down a bit," Evans said of the camera-free version. "But most importantly it will be a really strong step toward removing the stigma around wearing them."

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth signaled interest in a cheaper, camera-free version as early as June, according to CNET — meaning this was already in the pipeline before the backlash peaked.

PetaPixel raised the point the other outlets largely glossed over: the microphones. Luna's six-mic array can capture audio while looking like ordinary eyewear, similar to the new Apple Watch Series 12. The camera is gone, but the capacity to record conversations remains — it just swaps one surveillance vector for another.

Meta is also expected to showcase a separate AR-focused glasses project at Connect, codenamed Phoenix, which can display virtual workspaces or movie screens. That hardware reportedly won't arrive until 2027.

The real issue isn't whether Meta's glasses have a camera. It's that Big Tech is determined to normalize always-on wearable hardware strapped to every American's face — hardware that records, transmits, and feeds data into AI systems the user doesn't control. Today they remove the lens to quiet the outcry. Tomorrow the microphones stay. The question is whether Americans will keep accepting the trade, or whether they'll recognize that the surveillance society doesn't need a camera when it has an open microphone and a cloud to send it to.