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Facial recognition software is everywhere. It’s the most annoying way to unlock your iPhone. It’s at the TSA gate of every airport in the country. It’s a feature of grocery stores, people’s front porches, and sporting arenas, watching you sit down as you grip your basket of chicken tenders, fountain soda, and wallet and attempt to keep from spilling it all over yourself. That data is saved somewhere and stored forever, whether or not you want it to be.

Proponents argue that this software lowers wait times, reduces crime, and will catapult us into a technological utopia where Jeff Bezos can seamlessly drone-strike an Amazon package to our front door during the Netflix ad break we’re watching from the back of the Waymo while simultaneously scrolling Polymarket. There’s a trade-off: We experience a little emotional discomfort by being constantly surveilled, but we are rewarded with the more physical comforts of safety and efficiency. How about if the panopticon had Uber Eats and a never-ending feed?

So there has been understandable backlash when rich celebrities have shown that they are, in fact, exempt from this rule. A Wired investigation found that for Taylor Swift’s comically tacky, star-spangled Americapalooza wedding, held over the Fourth of July weekend, Madison Square Garden temporarily shut down its facial recognition surveillance system, tech that owner James Dolan has sworn up and down is “very, very, very useful” for security and instrumental in keeping the arena “the most secure venue in the country.” The week was then bookended with the announcement of Kylie Jenner’s collaboration with Meta’s A.I.-powered pervert glasses, a pair of oval cat-eye sunnies with a built-in Kylie Jenner voice and a tortoiseshell colorway, allowing wearers a fashion statement and the ability to talk to Jenner while they film their loved ones. This followed interviews in which Jenner had spoken about her struggles with constantly being photographed in public. Both stories sparked immediate outcry: Why the fuck does my biometric data have to get farmed? It’s a highly visible display of a painful truth: Not only is privacy no longer a right in an age of surveillance; it’s also very much for sale, bought and sold by the same pool of people who sit in the tax bracket for the richest of the rich.

Celebrity lives at a strange crossroads, one that has always been familiar with surveillance. It inherently asks us to consume these people and needs us to in order to make money, but sometimes consumers want to unhinge their jaws and eat these stars whole, a frightening and unsettling behavior. It’s a moral issue that many regular people can empathize with, in part because we are too always being watched now. But a celebrity must continue to sell, and that tension can breed incredibly adverse effects for everyone involved.

Both of these famous women have long fought to be humanized while also marketing an obscene amount of stuff to us. Jenner has often spoken about the pain of all this attention and her desire to step back to protect her children. The reality is, however, she can’t and won’t; at some point, the bell rings and she must put on her coveralls and shake the pail of lip liners in front of us. Swift has similarly opened up about the decades of harassment and assault she has experienced as a pop star, but inviting an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center contractor to your wedding and secretly surveilling your fans at a live show make the very real concerns about privacy invasion feel a little one-sided (a critique she has faced before). Jenner and Swift want us to know that they struggle just like the rest of us, except for when they don’t.

After all, for how much “we love a tech moment,” Jenner is rarely seen actually wearing the glasses. At a Knicks–Pacers game, she took photos of everything on a digital camera, and she wore nonrecording oval cat-eye sunglasses on her Citi Bike date with Timothée Chalamet. However, she did post pictures in her Meta glasses collaboration while promoting another collaboration, with Frankies Bikinis. Which makes sense, of course, because I, too, am always scrolling my iPad in bed, wearing a leopard-print string bikini and A.I. glasses.

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The phenomenon of celebrities promoting products they don’t use isn’t new—I seriously doubt that Justin Bieber really has his money locked up in Bored Ape NFTs—but this is a unique problem emblematic of a more dangerous trend in tech. The problem here is a classic one: You cannot insist that you are more approximate to the average worker only to align yourself with tech billionaires who have been explicit about wanting to exploit the aforementioned everyone else for profit. Jenner hates the paparazzi for invading her privacy but sees no moral quandary in collecting a check from Mark Zuckerberg, who wants to invade everyone’s privacy. Swift’s team deployed facial recognition tracking on concertgoers but turned it off for some of the wealthiest and most renowned names at her Madison Square Garden rehearsal dinner. This shows that the technology is neither as safe nor as necessary as someone like Dolan might want you to believe, and that in fact multiple parties stand to gain from your participation.

Celebrity participation is just one way to make all of this seem more normal, but it’s not. Even if Spider-Man: Brand New Day claims that it’s chill to surveil everyone in New York City because Tom Holland is endearing when he’s sad, even if Kylie Jenner made recording glasses chic, and even if Taylor Swift gets to opt out because she personally has had it rough, it doesn’t make the dissonance around this feel any less uncomfortable.

Because, frankly, the issues that civilians face from panopticontent are not the same as a global star’s, and they’re only getting worse. Facial recognition has been used to arrest innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit, harass marginalized communities, and assist in the mass deportation of immigrants. Meta glasses in particular have been a hotbed for controversy: They’ve been used by men to record women without their consent, used by ICE agents to video and photograph civilians, and used by adults to covertly surveil children. I should note that Meta has attempted to push back against the “pervert glasses” reputation by banning nonconsensual content from its platforms and creators that violate its policy. The device features a privacy recording light to notify wearers when it’s recording, but modifications available all over the internet allow users to sidestep it.


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Moreover, this is not even close to the tech’s final form. Apple has plans to release its own competitor wearable, although the rollout is being put on ice given the controversy around Meta’s glasses. More police forces are adopting A.I. facial scanners; the tech is being piloted in schools, buses, and stores as well. Meta is developing on a pair of glasses that would record all the time; it’s also been quietly experimenting with facial recognition: NameTag, a software designed to identify people via biometric data stored on users’ phones, was quietly embedded into an update for the Meta glasses back in June. CTO Andrew Bosworth says the tech will allay the awkward “cocktail-party problem” of forgetting someone’s name, a solution that might be helpful if it weren’t worsened by the issue of storing a stranger’s biometric data in your own glasses.

In a world where celebrities can hold ballooning levels of social and economic capital, Jenner and Swift are once again serving as temperature checks for how much we, as consumers, are willing to put up with when it comes to being surveilled. As much as we might wish otherwise, Kylie Jenner and Taylor Swift are not like us, and we cannot measure their autonomy and power on the same scale as ours. Either you want compassion or you want to avoid harm. But you can’t have it both ways.

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