'I was secretly filmed with smart glasses and then trolled online'
The BBC report follows Oonagh, a woman in Brighton, who says she was approached on the seafront by a man wearing smart glasses and only later realised the glasses had been recording her without her knowledge or consent. She says the man asked personal questions and for her number, she declined, and weeks later she was sent a TikTok video showing the interaction from the man’s point of view, which is when she understood she had been filmed.
After the video was posted online, it drew around a million views and hundreds of comments that she describes as sexual and derogatory, leaving her distressed and more fearful about being in public. The story uses her experience to highlight wider concerns that camera equipped smart glasses can make covert filming easier, and that viral sharing can rapidly escalate into harassment and humiliation, especially for women.
The report also points to warnings from privacy and legal voices that regulation and enforcement often lag behind fast moving consumer tech, raising questions about consent, platform responsibility, and what protections people realistically have when they are recorded in public and then distributed online at scale.
