Meta’s camera-equipped glasses are attracting bans in public places over the privacy risks and creepy behavior. It’s not stopping anytime soon, it seems. There's a troubling pattern emerging around Meta's smart glasses, which teen boys are apparently using to target and harass girls at school in ways that feel new and hard to counter precisely because the technology is so unobtrusive. Another tech giant, Amazon, wants to make drone deliveries the next e-commerce norm, with plans of expansion in 500 cities. Back to Meta, chief Mark Zuckerberg is now talking a lot about the power of open-source AI. Experts, on the other hand, are laughing at the situation.

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Teenage boys at middle and high schools across the United States are using Meta's Ray-Ban AI smart glasses to film classmates, teachers, and staff without their knowledge, and a review of TikTok and Instagram posts shows the harassment is overwhelmingly directed at girls. Students have been recorded in hallways, cafeterias, and classrooms, with boys following girls who ask to be left alone, mocking their appearance, and deploying tactics lifted directly from viral pickup-artist content, all while the built-in camera captures footage for social media audiences. One prolific teen with more than 64,000 combined followers has posted dozens of videos ranging from pranks to explicit bullying, including clips in which girls grow visibly distressed and beg him to stop recording. In at least one case, the situation escalated to the point where another student approached him holding a metal stool before an adult stepped in.

The behavior raises serious legal questions on top of the obvious safety concerns. Andy Liddell, a principal at the Austin-based EdTech Law Center, told Futurism that classrooms carry a greater expectation of privacy than public streets, and that recording without consent in states with one-party consent laws could result in felony charges. Meta, after being contacted about the story, took down the flagged videos and noted that its glasses include a built-in LED indicator light that cannot be disabled without also disabling the camera, though students can obscure the light with stickers or other low-tech workarounds. TikTok also removed the content that was flagged. Many school districts have already moved to ban smart glasses outright, citing not only the harassment and privacy problems but also the potential for cheating and in-class distraction.

Mark Zuckerberg published a letter on August 10 titled "The Future for Everyone," laying out his vision for how superintelligence could broaden human capability and distribute the benefits of artificial intelligence more equitably across countries and companies. Meta has positioned the letter as a kind of manifesto for a positive AI future, with Zuckerberg advocating for wider access as the central mechanism for getting there. Rest of World asked six AI researchers, policy experts, and civil society leaders from around the world to assess those claims, and their responses cut against the optimism with considerable force.

The critics raise distinct but overlapping concerns. Chinasa T. Okolo of Technecultura argues that Meta has grossly overstated the economic benefits of its data center investments in Africa, where labor gains are concentrated in construction phases and environmental risks are compounded by weak regulatory frameworks. Sagar Vishnoi of Future Shift Labs points out that Zuckerberg's definition of "everyone" structurally excludes speakers of low-resource languages, communities with intermittent connectivity, and shared-device households. The experts broadly agree that meaningful AI access requires investment in local language infrastructure, reliable electricity, affordable devices, and genuine accountability mechanisms, conditions the letter gestures toward without seriously addressing.

Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery service is expanding to nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026, a sixfold increase from its current footprint of 11 sites across seven states. The rollout will add major metros including Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, Syracuse, and Boise, and the company says it has already completed hundreds of thousands of deliveries in 2026, with thousands happening daily. Vice President David Carbon told staff earlier this year that Prime Air expects to reach 1 million total deliveries in 2025, which Amazon describes as the highest-demand drone delivery service in the industry. For anyone who has been waiting to try it, the service is straightforward. Deliveries arrive in as little as 30 minutes, though the typical window is closer to an hour.

Prime members pay nothing on orders over $50, $2.99 on smaller orders, and non-members pay $4.99. Drones are limited to packages weighing 5 pounds or less, but Amazon notes that covers more than 60 percent of its most frequently ordered items, from groceries and electronics to cosmetics and medications. The expansion does come with some baggage: Amazon's drones struck a crane in Arizona and severed an internet cable in Texas last fall, both incidents prompting federal investigations, and a separate inquiry followed a crash in the United Kingdom. The competitive pressure behind this push is real. Google's Wing has already surpassed 1 million deliveries, and Zipline has completed 2 million across four continents, meaning Amazon's aggressive timeline is as much about closing a gap as it is about staking out new ground.

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