“At a certain point, I stopped working in the front of the restaurant,” he said. “It was really uncomfortable.”

To be in public is to risk being filmed.

And these days, there’s a good chance it’s happening surreptitiously with smart glasses.

Their wearers are filming in restaurants, cafes and bars, capturing warped, eye-level video of drive-thru pranks, Michelin-starred meals and work shifts at Texas Roadhouse.

Servers, owners and customers can end up as captive participants.

“There are people who are using them in slick ways,” said Madi Elder, a bartender at the Brooklyn Wine Cellar in downtown Brooklyn. “It can feel like harassment.”

In a recording of her interaction with a customer last month, Elder, 31, notices his Meta glasses and asks him to stop recording or leave.

The man states that he is filming a vlog. “I’m not turning it off,” he replies.

The video, which Elder was unaware of until a reporter contacted her for this story, has been viewed on Instagram nearly 200,000 times.

The smart glasses of yore, like Google Glass and Snap Spectacles, were clunky, conspicuous gadgets that bore passing resemblance to the zoom glasses from Spy Kids 2. Remember “glassholes?”

Sleekly styled newer models manufactured by Ray-Ban and Oakley blend right in.

A faint indicator light on the frames flashes when a picture is taken and blinks when video is recording, and an inner screen on the lenses is hardly visible to others.

They look like normal glasses.

Blending in appealed to Natasha Sonya Zhatko, a content creator in Long Beach, California, who records as she orders and eats at restaurants across Southern California.

The discreet point-of-view captures the more authentic — and mundane — moments of the dining experience and removes an intrusive third party: our phones.

“Going out with a camera in people’s faces was out of the question,” said Zhatko, 32. “When I have the glasses on, I’m free to completely be myself.”

The first time she recorded a meal with her glasses, at a Filipino restaurant in Victorville, California, Zhatko did not notify staff that she was recording as she sampled pig’s blood and pork adobo.

She reconsidered her approach after the video was viewed two million times, putting its servers and customers in the spotlight.

“I felt like I was being a spy,” Zhatko said. She now makes a point to tell employees that she is filming, and will edit them out if they like.

Early iterations of smart glasses were marketed to athletes and globetrotters, but more recent models are designed with content creators like Zhatko in mind.

Luis Flores, a 32-year-old food influencer in Manhattan, films restaurant reviews using a pair of Meta Ray-Ban glasses he purchased last year. “It feels like you’re there, ordering the food yourself,” he said. “There’s no way to fake it.”

Meta glasses offer voice-control and livestreaming capabilities and allow users to directly post to Instagram. Soon, they may be able to recognise faces.

Sales of products in the smart-glasses category nearly tripled in 2025 from a year earlier, according to Circana, the market research company.

Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, sold more than two million pairs of its smart glasses between the product’s introduction in 2023 and last February.

And it sold more than seven million last year, according to an earnings report released last week by EssilorLuxottica, a manufacturer of the glasses.

Last summer, Google unveiled its latest prototype, Android XR glasses, equipped with cameras, speakers and artificial intelligence. Apple is reportedly developing a similar product, as is OpenAI.

Videos filmed on smart glasses have elicited a range of reactions from service workers captured in them.

Wong of the Chubby Crab conceded that the clip has been great for business, despite his discomforts. “If they had asked, I would have said yes,” he said.

But the same customer who filmed Wong — an influencer who calls herself Elizabeth Eats — caused a stir at Nablus Sweets, a bakery in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a couple of months later.

An owner, Taiseer Hamoud, did not realise he was being recorded when the influencer asked him questions about the war in the Gaza Strip, because he did not see a phone.

“It was sneaky,” said Hamoud, 52, who noticed her glasses had a recording light only midway through their conversation.

“I don’t want a video like that. I don’t want to mess up the relationship with my customers.”

On TikTok, his daughter said the influencer’s video misrepresented his beliefs.

Elizabeth Eats deleted the original post and filmed a response several months later.

In a statement for this article, she declined to provide her real name but said: “I publicly posted a video showing that I clearly stated to the owner upon entering that I was recording to promote his Palestinian business. I create non-political content to celebrate cuisine and uplift all cultures.”

Filming in US public spaces is broadly protected by the US first amendment.

Some states, including California and Pennsylvania, have two-party consent laws that prohibit recording without express permission, but enforcing them hinges on whether someone has a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in a given setting, said Aaron Krowne, a New York City lawyer specialising in privacy and civil liberties.

Restaurants fall in a legal grey area: They are privately owned, but open to anyone who walks in.

Those protections haven’t been tested in cases involving smart glasses. “It has managed to stay out of the courts, which is quite shocking,” Krowne said. “I’m sure we’ll see more lawsuits soon.”

The responsibility of using these devices ethically falls largely on the wearer.

“Users are responsible for complying with all applicable laws and for using Ray-Ban Meta glasses in a safe, respectful manner,” a spokesperson for Meta said in a statement.

“As with any recording device, people shouldn’t use them for engaging in harmful activities like harassment, infringement on privacy rights or capturing sensitive information.”

Business owners can set their own rules. A restaurant can ask a customer to stop filming or leave or post signs forbidding the use of smart glasses, as some establishments did with Google Glass more than a decade ago.

Viveca Chow, a content creator based in Long Island City, Queens, isn’t waiting for that.

Chow, 31, shared a public service announcement to her TikTok in December about the warning signs of being recorded.

She pointed out the location of the camera on Meta Ray-Ban glasses and the status light, which can be concealed or missed.

“Most of the time I approach someone with glasses, they don’t realise what’s happening,” she said.

Even if they do notice the tiny white light to the right of her nose, there’s no guarantee they’ll connect the dots.

“Some people think it’s Bluetooth,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Luke Fortney

Photographs by: Stella Kalinina

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