Is Meta using disabled people to promote its glasses?

In July, Meta published a press release saying that it would issue $2 million worth of grants to 30 organizations that would test ways its AI glasses could “help people work safer, learn faster, and live more independently.” The grantees include organizations that would develop workshops to help Blind people utilize the devices and assist people with intellectual disabilities prepare to enter the workforce.

“We want to ensure the future is for everyone—giving every person the tools to reach their full potential,” Meta wrote in the release. Meta also maintains a program to distribute its AI glasses to Blind veterans in the United States, which it has highlighted in recent advertising. The company, a viewer may conclude, is doing actual good. The full story is more complicated.

Meta first released its smart glasses, which include multiple cameras and speakers, in 2021; its latest version, launched in June, includes a raft of AI capabilities, which have drawn considerably more attention—and alarm.

As my colleague Anna Merlan recently wrote,

The company describes the glasses’ AI capabilities as “a helpful voice in your ear,” which is probably meant to be less chilling than it sounds. But the glasses, too, have been met with intense controversy over privacy and nonconsensual filming. They are unpopular in a rich variety of settings: UK cinemas are considering banning them entirely, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement has banned employees from wearing them at work. HateAid, a German digital advocacy group, has lodged a criminal complaint seeking to stop them from being sold in that country at all. 

New technology can be immensely helpful for disabled people navigating the world. Smart glasses, which are not exclusive to Meta, can have legitimate benefits for Blind people and others with low vision: hearing a dictated description of what’s in front of them, or having texts read aloud. For users with hearing loss, Meta glasses can be helpful with captioning. People with limited or no mobility in their arms can use the glasses to take photos of loved ones.

In a 2025 review of Meta glasses for the American Foundation for the Blind, vision rehabilitation therapist Steve Kelley weighed the pros and cons of the devices, writing that Meta glasses were affordable but “not instantaneous or accurate enough for something like street crossings” and cannot “replace tools like a white cane for orientation and mobility.”

Noah Currier, president and founder of the Oscar Mike Foundation, said that his team has been working with Meta in the development phase of newer versions of Meta glasses for about three years. “They brought veterans with disabilities, including people with spinal cord injuries, memory loss, and low vision, into the room early to shape how the hardware and features actually work,” Currier said.

Currier, who is quadriplegic, told me that his organization got in touch with Meta when the tech giant did outreach to disability organizations.

“I have really thought it was responsible,” Currier told me. I asked Currier about privacy concerns around Meta glasses; he told me he was not “real invested in knowing what any sort of policy or answer should be moving forward,” but feels the positives outweigh the negatives.

But disabled people, like anyone else, may not want to be filmed by strangers in their day-to-day lives—and are uniquely affected by surveillance in ways that predate smart glasses. Insurance companies have surveilled disability claimants through the use of private investigators. Disabled people seeking accommodations at work face stifling scrutiny; the rise of “bossware,” surveillance technology used to monitor employees, has an outsized impact on disabled people.

Experts I spoke with raised similar concerns that the spread of ubiquitous surveillance harms disabled people overall. Some advocate bans on smart glasses in medical settings, arguing that they may inadvertently capture HIPAA-protected personal health information or simply “change behavior, increase anxiety, and undermine trust.”

Posters on social media have reported pharmacy workers wearing smart glasses, nursing professionals wearing them on the job, or themselves using smart glasses to subtly photograph private health documents left visible at a doctor’s office. One law firm has documented an array of concerns around smart wearables in nursing homes, particularly that people with cognitive disabilities “may not fully understand that footage could be uploaded or shared, that the glasses contain a camera and microphones, when recording has started, what will happen to the recording [or] who might eventually see it.”

Meta has faced other criticism around its record on disability and health generally. In 2023, the mental health app BetterHelp faced federal fines for sharing protected health data with platforms including Meta. In 2025, a California jury held Meta liable for violating California privacy laws by improperly collecting reproductive health data from users of FloHealth, a period tracking app. And an ongoing class-action lawsuit alleges that Meta’s Pixel tracking software “allowed Facebook to receive data about users’ medical conditions, doctors searched, and appointments booked, all without patients’ knowledge or HIPAA-compliant authorization.”

And in July, the company was sued under allegations that it used artificial intelligence to target people who took medical leave. One former employee with a serious health condition alleged in the lawsuit that he was told by his management that taking leave “would result in his selection for the anticipated reduction in force”; in a statement to my colleague Alex Nguyen, a spokesperson said that “workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI.” Right before the start of the second Trump administration, Meta killed its major DEI programs, another blow to disabled employees.

It’s not the first time that Meta, which has faced waves of criticism around privacy, surveillance, data mining, and its handling of user information, has met pushback in trying to provide what the company sees as a vital service. More than a decade ago, Mark Zuckerberg personally headed up a push to provide a form of free internet access to millions of people in India, only to be rebuffed by regulators.

From Meta’s point of view, the potential benefits of the glasses should again put skeptics on the back foot. Why question its motivations for partnering with disability groups? Surely Meta is already subjected to enough critique around the placement of its data centers, alleged efforts to secure preferential treatment from government officials, high-dollar lobbying against regulation, and the effects of its products on young people, scrutiny that led to a landmark settlement in August, with Meta paying some $18 billion to resolve claims that it knew its products were addictive, underregulated, and harmful to youth.

In a statement to Mother Jones, Meta spokesperson Dana Still said that the company “builds for everyone and has a long history of working with partners like the Blinded Veterans Association, Lighthouse Guild, and Oscar Mike. As part of this work, we gather feedback and create capabilities and programs to build products and technology that better serve people.” The firm did not respond to privacy concerns directly in its statement. A spokesperson for Meta previously told CBS News Texas in May that “privacy and data protection are core to every product we build at Meta,” including its glasses.

“Certain companies have used accessibility and disability rights as a Trojan horse for a tool that poses significant privacy and security threats,” Center for Democracy and Technology disability lead Ariana Aboulafia told me, “and to be clear, the privacy concerns affect disabled people too.” 

While critical of Meta’s corporate record, My Tech for All founder Mark Friedman understands why disability organizations would work with the company—in part because of its resources. Many disability groups, Friedman points out, are “cash-strapped.” 

“This stuff is going to benefit people greatly, and it’s going to harm people” as an inevitable product of widespread opportunities for instantaneous filming of the general public—including disabled people—in day-to-day life. “I don’t think [the disability organizations] are being bought out. To the extent that they become knowledgeable, they’ll be able to raise the flag to say, ‘Wait a second,’” around privacy.

Virginia Tech science, technology, and society professor Ashley Shew, author of Against Technoableism, expressed serious concerns about the tension between Meta’s profit motive and its ostensibly public-interest partnerships. Disabled people, she argued, can be viewed as a particularly promising market for a product that urgently needs one—and one that reflects well on the firms who sell to them. Shew thinks the benefits to firms like Meta are relatively clear—including the obvious benefits, beyond raw sales, of buyers who rely on a product rather than approaching it as a fun gadget.

Rebecca Monteleone, a University of Toledo disability studies professor and author of The Double Bind of Disability: How Medical Technology Shapes Bodily Authority, raised a related concern: that Meta could be using its efforts with disabled people to build a case for its technology more widely. This could render products like smart glasses a more challenging case for regulators and politicians.

“We’re seeing the systematic deconstruction of disability rights in the United States,” Monteleone said. “A company like Meta can justify the development of this technology based on all of these assumptions that there must be a social good here” in a moment when wins for disabled people are depressingly rare.

That speaks to a wider problem, Monteleone told me:

“Disabled people have to operate within this commercial system,” she said. “So often, the better product or the more useful product is a product that either is ridiculously expensive and unable to be obtained, or you have to go through a million different hoops through your insurance.”

Shew is also concerned that for-profit firms, and in particular giants like Meta—among the largest companies in the world—will crowd out opportunities for disability organizations and other advocates to find alternatives that are easier to trust. Backlash to smart glasses has reportedly already made some users hesitant to wear them in public.

“I worry that it will prevent better technology,” Shew told me, whether on the part of “companies that could do so more responsibly, or by disabled people themselves who make and hack and trade for themselves.” 

Issues regarding Meta AI glasses speak to larger issues on privacy and data collection that Friedman, who remains skeptical, doesn’t believe will be addressed under the Trump administration—despite cross-the-political-aisle backlash to a wide range of AI and data center development. 

“The real issue,” Friedman said, “is the public can accept” their privacy being undermined—whether or not the glasses are ultimately worth that tradeoff.