Meta’s AI ‘Perv Glasses’ Now Come With Stupid Comcast-esque Usage Restrictions

from the accelerated-enshittification dept

Despite a lot of pretense, Meta, permanently deadbolted to Mark Zuckerberg’s outsized ego, simply isn’t an interesting, ethical, competent, or innovative company. They’re mostly an ad monopoly pretending to be Apple. They poured untold billions of dollars into their soggy and broadly uninteresting metaverse gambit, now they’re pouring untold billions of dollars into their fourth-place (and that’s probably being generous) AI ambitions and data center expansions.

Most of their AI integration is lazy cack nobody asked for, like frequently incorrect AI synopses duct-taped to the bottom of Facebook stories. Perhaps their most successful AI-tethered gambit has been their overlarge AI “smart glasses,” which people are apparently buying a lot of, despite the fact I somehow never see anybody actually wearing them in tech-centric Seattle.

The privacy-invasive nature of the glasses have started to tarnish the push; particularly the growing usage of the glasses by sleazy dudebros to video women without their consent. Now, with people starting to realize that AI may never be profitable resulting in companies in the AI space absurdly jacking up the cost of usage, enshittification appears to have fully come knocking as Meta tries to recoup its costs.

The Verge notes that Meta has started to introduce Comcast-esque “rate limits” to smart glasses usage, with the company now forcing glasses owners to pay for a $19.99 Meta One Premium subscription if they don’t want their glasses’ “conversation focus” functionality (which amplifies the voice of people you’re speaking to in loud environments) limited to three hours of use per month.

The thing is: just like Comcast’s bullshit broadband usage caps, the new surcharge push doesn’t appear tethered to any real world technical realities or costs for Meta, because the “conversation focus” stuff occurs entirely on-device hardware.

So, mirroring some of the dumb and greedy choices we’ve seen in the auto industry (like BMW trying to make heated seats a monthly subscription), Meta decided to start charging its glasses users extra money just to use the hardware they already own:

“Problem is, Meta’s rate limit is ridiculous. The Conversation Focus feature, which amplifies the voice of the person you’re speaking to so you can hear better in noisy environments, is not something that should plausibly be rate-limited, because it doesn’t use Meta’s servers. It runs on-device, using the chips inside the glasses that you’ve already purchased. I turned off my internet, and it kept working.”

According to Meta’s explanation, conversation focus “uses your AI glasses’ open-ear speakers, beamforming technology, and real-time spatial processing to dynamically amplify the voice of the person you’re talking to.” But The Verge tested things out and found that again, all of this occurs on-device hardware with no usage of Meta cloud servers. It doesn’t even require an internet connection.

Just like Comcast, when pressed to explain why they’re suddenly imposing arbitrary and technically unnecessary limits that drive up costs for users, Meta tried to insist that it’s no big deal because most people won’t run into them:

“Most people will use Conversation Focus without hitting the monthly limit. The subscription is for power users who want expanded access and additional benefits like premium device support.”

Very typical enshittification by a wildly unremarkable company.

I started out as a telecom beat reporter, so I was always under the impression that you’re supposed to destroy all competitors, lobby the government to help you capture a market, then start socking your captive customers with annoying surcharges to goose quarterly earnings as captured U.S. regulators look on with a dumb look on their face.

A lot of these tech companies, now swimming in debt from a massive data center push that cash-strapped consumers don’t want to pay for, are skipping some steps as they try to get out ahead of a likely AI and data center investment bubble.

At the same time, with Mark Zuckerberg squarely lodged up the colon of the Trump administration, people have grown nervous about the glasses’ use for domestic surveillance. Meta was recently not very happy when Wired revealed that (for now disabled) facial recognition code has popped up in the glasses. All while terms like “perv glasses” and “Ray Ban Meta creep” are also souring the brand.

It’s all very Zuckerberg. And as we’ve seen countless times before on every story about privacy-abusive surveillance or pointless usage fees, once the door is opened to privacy abuses and surcharge fee enshittification, things pretty consistently only go in one direction to goose quarterly earnings.

Filed Under: ai, automation, conversation focus, enshittification, ray bans, smart glasses, subscription, sunglasses, usage caps

Companies: meta