Pervert glasses......

DuckDuckGo mercilessly dunks on big tech's AI-powered 'pervert' glasses

The company's 'Normal Fucking Sunglasses' reportedly already sold out

By Ariana Bindman

DuckDuckGo, the free, independent web browser with the quaint logo of a waterfowl wearing a bow tie, just took a swing at big tech through a satirical stunt marketing campaign directly targeting AI-powered smart glasses.  

Last week, the company announced the release of its state-of-the-art “anti-surveillance sunglasses” — also known as, well, “Normal Fucking Sunglasses.” The simple $35 shades, which feature infinite battery life, no cameras, no notification system and a “seamless offline mode,” apparently sold out in under a week. DuckDuckGo representatives told CNET that, overall, the campaign is meant to criticize the tech world’s ruthless deployment of invasive smart glasses and call them into question.

“We’re obsessed with innovation. So when Big Tech started putting cameras in smart glasses, we asked ourselves a radical question: what if we just didn’t do that?” a July 30 social media post from DuckDuckGo said. “These are the first smart glasses guaranteed to never record nude videos of you and send them to random people. I never thought I’d have to guarantee that, but here we are.” 

Meanwhile, Meta’s been struggling to get the public to trust its AI-powered Ray-Bans, which are now referred to by some as “pervert” glasses — and not without reason.  

Though the company sold about 7 million pairs of its smart glasses in 2025, in February of this year, Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet published an investigation alleging that Kenyan subcontractors could view intimate footage of people changing, having sex and using bank cards. Subsequently, Meta was served a federal lawsuit accusing it of fraud, false advertising and breach of contract. Per the investigation, even though users were promised full privacy, thousands of flesh-and-blood workers, called data annotators, used the footage to train AI. 

“Consumers purchased these Glasses believing Meta’s privacy assurances,” the complaint said. “They did not, and could not reasonably, understand that their bedrooms, bathrooms, families, bodies, and more would be exposed to strangers around the world.”

In 2025, the University of San Francisco issued an advisory stating that a man had reportedly been wearing the glasses on campus while bombarding female students with “unwanted comments and inappropriate dating questions.” The year before, Texas settled a $1.4 billion lawsuit with Meta after alleging that the company captured millions of residents’ biometric data without legal authorization, and in 2021, Meta shelled out $650 million to settle a similar federal class action suit over the same biometrics feature. 

So far, on DuckDuckGo’s website, there’s just one testimonial about its anti-surveillance glasses, but it’s enough to sway just about any potential customer: “Nobody at the beach asked if I was recording them.” 

The sunglasses are currently available for pre-order and are estimated to ship out between Nov. 19 and 30.