This Kylie Jenner Ad Hides a Disturbing Secret: You Just Have to Stand in the Right Spot

Walk past a certain bus stop near Meta's London headquarters and you see a glossy campaign shot: Kylie Jenner in a pair of the company's smart glasses. Step to the side and the poster becomes a black-and-white X-ray of her face under the words "We're always watching."

The swap is deliberate. As Hyperallergic reported, the piece is a lenticular spoof ad installed by Everyone Hates Elon, a UK activist group that stages public interventions aimed at tech billionaires. The poster is printed so the image you see changes with your viewing angle, which is how one advertisement holds two opposite meanings at once. From straight on, it sells the glasses. From the side, it warns you about them.

The design leans on They Live, John Carpenter's 1988 film in which a drifter finds a pair of sunglasses that strip advertising down to its real commands and reveal who is actually running things. Reworking Jenner into a skeletal figure is the group's way of saying the sales pitch and the surveillance are the same product. The group did not hedge its language either. A spokesperson told Hyperallergic that Meta spent years tracking people online and now wants to track them in the physical world too, and framed the glasses as a tool that can be used to secretly record women and young people.

The timing lands hard because of what Meta is reportedly building next. Last month the company expanded beyond its Ray-Ban models with a new Meta-branded line developed with EssilorLuxottica. The range starts at $299 and includes a $399 model co-designed with Jenner. Meta's recent camera glasses can record clips of up to three minutes. But according to reporting from the Financial Times, picked up widely across tech press, Meta has also been testing a "super sensing" mode that would continuously capture audio and snap photos every few seconds so an AI could reconstruct your day for you. The detail that turned heads: executives were reportedly debating whether to light the recording LED at all while that mode ran. Nothing final has been announced, but the stakes are clear. For a stranger nearby, that small light may be the only immediate sign the glasses are capturing anything, and the poster's tagline reads very differently once you know it might not switch on.

What makes the stunt effective is that it does not need to exaggerate. Meta itself has been pushing the LED as its central privacy feature, even rolling out an update that disables the camera if the light is tampered with or blocked. Setting that safeguard next to a reported mode where the light might not come on at all is the contradiction the activists are pointing at, and they did not have to invent it. The concern has teeth beyond a clever poster, too. In 2024, two Harvard students demonstrated the risk by routing a livestream from Ray-Ban Meta glasses through outside facial-search and people-search tools, letting them identify some strangers and pull up information including addresses and phone numbers. The glasses had no facial recognition built in; the point was how easily an unremarkable pair of camera frames pairs with services that already exist. The technology is exposing gaps and inconsistencies in recording, privacy, and biometric-data law, and it is getting harder for anyone nearby to tell when they have been captured.

For working photographers, this is not an abstract debate about someone else's product. You already navigate consent, model releases, and the difference between shooting in public and violating a reasonable expectation of privacy. A camera that lives on a stranger's face, can be difficult for bystanders to notice when recording, and can be connected to facial-search and people-search services changes the baseline everyone operates under. It muddies the line the rest of the industry works hard to respect, and it does so at the exact moment the person being recorded has the least ability to object. The poster is a protest, but the question it raises is a practical one you will keep running into on the street.