Mark Zuckerberg spent Meta Connect talking about privacy in the abstract, not about the specific behavior making people uneasy.
On September 23, 2026, at Meta's annual Meta Connect conference, Zuckerberg largely avoided addressing the harassment problems tied to Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, even as scrutiny of the product has grown intense enough that Apple reportedly delayed its own glasses. Instead, he highlighted new privacy features: a "Muse Secure VM" that runs Meta's Muse AI assistant on a dedicated cloud computer, a promised future encrypted version that would block Meta itself from accessing user data, and "private processing" for select AI features on the glasses, starting with live translation. He did not mention reports of people using Ray-Bans to secretly film and harass strangers, a trend that pushed Instagram head Adam Mosseri to promise a crackdown on videos showing harassment.
The gap is telling. Zuckerberg is racing to position glasses as the successor to the smartphone, a bet he has repeated in earnings calls and blog posts, while rivals Google and Samsung prepare their own entries later this year. But the privacy fixes announced address data handling, not the part of this technology that let strangers film people without consent in public.
Meta has already sold millions of Ray-Bans, so the real test isn't the tech. It's whether encryption promises can outrun the reputation problem Meta built by putting a camera on people's faces.