TALKING POINT

Allan Juma, Lead Cyber Security Engineer, ESET, tells us why wearable AI devices are creating new risks around covert recording, facial recognition and data exploitation, and why South Africa has an opportunity to lead the way in regulating next-generation smart technologies.

The sales of these intelligent wearables increased almost threefold from 2023 and moved the category to mainstream. In 2023, global smart glasses shipments increased by 210 % yearon-year, and ABI Research has predicted that shipments will grow from 5.9 million in 2024 to 114.1 million by 2030. The technology is moving faster than awareness, regulation or governance, and South Africa is sitting closer to the edge of privacy and regulatory controversy than most people realise.

This controversy has already affected East Africa. In early 2026, Kenyan and Ghanaian authorities identified Vladislav Luilkov as the Russian vlogger who travelled through Kenya and Ghana wearing the 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 covertly filmed at a beach, with the footage receiving around one million views online. By May 2026, a second victim was also reported by the BBC. She was told that the footage would only be removed as a paid service, which was effectively extortion.

Smart glasses with discreet cameras extend patterns already seen with smartphones – they make it easier to capture and distribute images or video of women in public and private spaces without their knowledge, in a society where harassment, exploitation and violations of privacy remain widespread.

Wearers can potentially discover a person’ s identity, address and other personal details and share these, along with video footage, with anyone they want, on any platform they want, and this creates significant security and privacy risks. Two Harvard students recently showed how the footage streamed through these glasses could be linked to external AI facial recognition tools allowing strangers to be

Allan Juma, Lead Cyber Security Engineer, ESET

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 with connected hardware running software that can be targeted in the same way any connected device can. Research by ESET has found that specific attack vectors such as unpatched firmware vulnerabilities, compromised companion apps and malicious Wi-Fi hotspots are gaining in momentum and capability. These threats can compromise the glasses or the device they are paired with, and the attacker gains access to everything the wearer sees.

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 normalised. Under POPIA, biometric information is categorised as‘ special personal information’ with processing generally prohibited unless authorised.

South Africa has both the constitutional foundation and the legislative framework through POPIA to lead African wearable AI governance. •

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