The Stop Smart Glasses campaign aims to halt the mass adoption of 'pervert glasses'
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As incidents of women being harassed by people wearing smart glasses were making headlines, London-based mum and tech founder Liz Hunter could not help but watch in horror as fashionable Ray-Ban Meta glasses multiplied across city streets.
She went online to sign a petition calling for a ban on the technology. To her disbelief, she couldn’t find a single petition that reflected the scale of the outrage she was seeing online. So she decided to take matters into her own hands.
"I didn't want to just stand on the sidelines wringing my hands, because everyone just complaining to each other on LinkedIn isn't going to do anything. I wanted to build something to make that voice a little bit louder," Hunter told TechRadar.
Hunter decided to team up with teacher and privacy campaigner Guy Holder — who was behind a parliamentary petition calling for a sales ban on Meta’s wearables — and build a grassroots movement.
Last Friday, the Stop Smart Glasses campaign was officially launched with a clear goal: to pressure retailers and lawmakers to act before the technology is normalized.
But how exactly does Stop Smart Glasses plan to achieve this? And can social pressure be the key to breaking a legislative roadblock?
The idea behind the Stop Smart Glasses initiative is simple: harness the growing wave of UK venue bans to turn privacy concerns into public action.
Major pub chains like Wetherspoons — alongside courtrooms, theaters, and cinemas — have already responded to public backlash by banning smart glasses on their premises. "So, I thought, let's borrow a bit of that attitude," Hunter told us.
With the help of basic AI tools, Hunter built the campaign platform in just a week, despite having no coding background.
The website includes several tools to help people take practical action. A store finder enables visitors to locate local retailers across the UK and Ireland by entering their postcode, town, or city, and email them asking to stop selling smart glasses.
Similarly, users can contact local sports facilities and other venues, urging them to implement private property bans. The site even makes it easy to swamp the customer support inboxes of major national retailers or contact local MPs.
"Then obviously you can sign [Holder's] petition. We really hope that we see the numbers starting to snowball soon," Hunter said.
While the campaign's primary target is Meta's line of wearables, Hunter says the problem is much bigger. A quick Google search reveals that dozens of companies are already making smart glasses.
