Essilor Luxottica and Meta sold more than seven million Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses in 2025, with sales nearly tripling since 2023. The surge has pushed the category firmly into the mainstream.
In 2023, global smart glasses shipments increased by 210% year-on-year, and ABI Research predicts that shipments will increase from 5.9 million in 2024 to 114.1 million by 2030. Technology is advancing faster than awareness, regulation or governance, and South Africa sits closer to the edge of privacy and regulatory controversy than most people.
This dispute has already affected East Africa. In early 2026, Kenyan and Ghanaian authorities identified Vladislav Luilkov as the Russian vlogger who traveled to Kenya and Ghana wearing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, recording intimate encounters with women without their knowledge and posting the footage online for profit.
In the UK, a BBC investigation documented how a woman was secretly filmed on a beach, with the footage being viewed almost a million times online. By May 2026, a second victim was also reported by the BBC. He was told that the footage would only be removed as a paid service, which was effectively extortion.
Smart glasses with inconspicuous cameras extend patterns already seen with smartphones – they make it easier to capture and distribute images or videos of women without their knowledge in public and private spaces, in a society where harassment, exploitation and privacy violations are widespread.
Wearables can potentially discover a person's identity, address and other personal details and share these, along with video footage, with anyone, on any platform, and this poses significant security and privacy risks.
Two Harvard students recently demonstrated how footage streamed through these glasses could be linked to external AI facial recognition tools, allowing strangers to be identified in real time with names, home addresses, and personal information pulled from the Internet.
Smart glasses are also an Internet of Things (IoT) device consisting of connected hardware running software that can be targeted just like any connected device.
ESET's research finds that specific attack vectors such as unpatched firmware vulnerabilities, compromised companion apps, and malicious Wi-Fi hotspots are gaining momentum and capacity. These threats can compromise the glasses or the device they are paired with, and the attacker gains access to everything the wearer sees.
SA's potential to lead African wearable AI governance
South Africa has begun to adapt its legal framework to digital abuse, including the Cybercrime Act, the Protection from Harassment Act, the Domestic Violence Amendment Act and the Film and Publications Act. These all apply to online harassment, harmful content and image-based abuse. Smart glasses are already changing the boundaries of privacy.
These devices represent high-risk AI systems that capture biometric data in public spaces without meaningful consent mechanisms, process footage through offshore contractors beyond South African data protection oversight, and directly challenge POPIA's consent framework, designed before invisible, wearable surveillance became normalized.
Under POPIA, biometric information is classified as 'special personal information', with processing generally prohibited unless authorised.
South Africa has both the constitutional basis and legislative architecture through PoPIA to lead African wearable AI governance.
As Africa's most technologically advanced economy with BRICS ties and a mature data-protection framework, the country is uniquely positioned to do for African wearables regulation what the GDPR did for Europe and set a high-water mark that neighboring jurisdictions can copy. And now it's time to get it right.