Instagram is full of first-person videos of men harassing women in public. They follow a similar script: A man walks up to a woman or group of women in a store, sitting outside a cafe, or walking home from a bar, and delivers a pickup line. The women almost always nervously laugh, react with barely-veiled disgust, or say "fuck off" while he stalks her or refuses to walk away. The men recording these videos capture them with Meta's smart glasses, which are designed to discreetly capture interactions like these and upload the videos to Meta's platforms where the women in the videos are turned into content for "pickup artist" accounts.  

New research reveals this ecosystem works, and how pickup artists (PUA) influencers are using Meta's products, including its smart glasses and social media platforms, to perpetuate a culture of harassment against women.  

University of Sydney researchers Joanne Gray, Marcus Carter, and Ben Egliston watched hundreds of these videos to learn how pickup artist content creators use smart glasses, and what specific forms of gendered harms these recordings cause. They published their research paper, "Harm Through the '#RizzCam': Smart Glasses, Ambient Capture and Invisible Harassment," online this week as a preprint article.

The researchers compiled a dataset of 350 Instagram videos posted between September 2023 and March 2026. The videos fit specific criteria: they depicted real-world interactions involving unsolicited approaches to women in public or semi-public settings. "Unsolicited interactions were defined as approaches that appeared to be initiated without prior indication of mutual engagement," the researchers wrote in the paper. "We included videos that appeared to be staged, scripted, or comedic performance as it is often difficult to confidently determine intent in platform content, and such material may still contribute to the circulation and normalisation of these interactions." They found the videos by searching hashtags and keywords commonly used by pickup artist grifters.

The more surreptitious the filming seemed, the researchers found, the more serious the harassment. "The data reveals a clear correlation between the 'covertness' of the filming modality and the severity of the harassment," they wrote. "This combination of first-person perspective and device concealment confirms that the means of production remain largely clandestine, facilitating a condition of low awareness among subjects and reinforcing the deceptive nature of wearable-mediated capture."

When Meta announced its Ray-Ban Meta glasses in 2021, Egliston said, he and several of his colleagues, including those on the research team for this paper, wrote that the company’s safeguards were insufficient. "The company’s answer to covert recording was a light on the device and an expectation that users would somehow just behave responsibly. That has plainly not worked, and it leaves the burden on the people being filmed rather than on the company that built the device and owns the platforms the footage ends up on." Last year, 404 Media reported on the ways people are modding Meta's smart glasses to disable the recording light. Ray-Ban Metas have also been repeatedly spotted on immigration agents during raids.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri said last month that the platform would start removing harassing content. "If you're posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we've heard of and seen, then we're going to take the content down," Mosseri said. "We don't want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we're trying to fight that every way we can." As of writing— almost a month after that announcement — I easily found pages and pages of Reels by men approaching women while wearing smart glasses where the women being filmed either don't seem to know they're being recorded, or obviously don't want to be filmed and repeatedly tell the man recording them to stop. This isn't even counting the endless videos recommended to me by Instagram's algorithm showing people antagonizing and filming retail workers and shoppers in stores using smart glasses.

In the pickup artist world, this content is both entertaining and instructive, the researchers wrote. It's superpowered by the proliferation of smart glasses like Meta's. "As these devices move from niche curiosities to mainstream products, smart glasses intensify this asymmetry through ambient capture," they wrote. "By leveraging their unobtrusive design, PUAs create point-of-view (POV) recordings that place the digital audience in the literal position of the practitioner. This technical capability covertly embeds the act of filming within the social encounter, effectively weaponising the subject’s lack of awareness. The result is a novel mode of 'borderline' harassment that often evades the scrutiny of existing platform governance mechanisms, as it lacks the overt markers typically required for a policy violation." 

The harm doesn't end when the interaction ends, the researchers found. The long digital tail of these videos—which Instagram fails to properly moderate based on its own promises to crack down on this content—means the women in them are subjected to harassment long after they manage to get away from the man in real life. "Combined with the fact that 93.3% of these posts left comments open, subjects were frequently exposed to a digital afterlife of crude, abusive, and misogynistic commentary from the platform audience," the researchers wrote. "Comments frequently framed women’s rejection or discomfort as unnecessarily dismissive, including remarks such as 'she was acting rude' or suggestions that women should 'at least acknowledge' the men approaching them, while others minimised harassment by arguing that people who label such behaviour as harassment are contributing to declining birth rates." 

The researchers wrote that they were inspired by the BBC's investigations into how women are targeted by Meta smart glasses wearers when they're trying to go about their daily lives. In one BBC report, a woman who was recorded and posted online by a man using Meta's smart glasses was harassed for weeks after the video went online, and said she was "bombarded" with phone calls because her phone number was posted with the video. "On one occasion, she says she picked up the phone and a man said to her: 'Do you know how stupid you are? Do you regret it? Do you know how easy that made you look?,'" the BBC reported. Men came to her workplace and repeated lines from the video and demanded her social media details, she told the BBC. 

“I’ve been surprised by how firmly the ‘pervert glasses’ label has stuck. There’s a widespread aversion here that doesn’t seem quite as present for other surveillance or data-intensive products," Egliston told 404 Media. "But public sentiment — while perhaps meaning people will be less likely to wear the glasses — is not a governance mechanism." 

Egliston said that Meta's content moderation record "doesn’t encourage confidence," but hopes to be proven wrong. "Our hope is that the current backlash, combined with emerging legislation imposing a duty of care on platforms, will force more substantive changes." 

The advertising industry is simultaneously everywhere and incredibly difficult to investigate. Ads can power all sorts of surveillance, from the relatively mundane like inferring someone’s age or gender, right up to harvesting their precise location data and selling this to the government. But researching that omnipresent surveillance is, ironically, an uphill struggle because the relevant data is spread across the web, nestled in obscure files that most people never look at or even know to look for, and can’t be searched all at once.

A new research tool called DecryptAds hopes to change that by bringing together a massive corpus of data. It can show what advertising brokers are operating on a particular website, and, more importantly, many other places those same brokers are operating. The tool cuts down on work that would ordinarily take much longer, and creates entirely new ways to explore the world of advertising and surveillance.

“For years I’ve personally worked on some of the biggest data privacy problems that have impacted the world, and I’m damn sick of people trying to guess how hundreds of data brokers are selling location data on people and a wide variety of other sensitive audience segments,” Zach Edwards, chief product and research at DecryptAds, told 404 Media. “We want to make it easy for anyone to look up a website or app and quickly understand the data sharing implications to risky ad tech companies and data brokers.” 

In a process called real-time bidding (RTB), advertising companies outbid one another to have their clients’ ads placed in the web browsing session or app of a particular type of person. A side effect of that process is that companies can harvest all sorts of sensitive information about peoples’ devices, in some cases including their location. 404 Media has covered this type of surveillance extensively, from an Israeli spy firm monitoring billions to uncovering thousands of specific apps that siphon location data, with middlemen then selling it to the U.S. government.

When 404 Media and other outlets have investigated this industry, it has typically been through sources, leaks and hacks, or technical analysis of certain apps. DecryptAds takes a different approach. The site brings together ads.txt and app-ads.txt files — which list the advertising systems plugged into websites or apps — and sellers.json files which advertising exchanges use to list the companies they work with. Ordinarily these files cannot be easily compared to one another or searched in aggregate. DecryptAds makes that possible.

“It’s my hope that a new generation of researchers and activists starts to step up and demand more from publishers we frequent and support. We built DecryptAds to empower people with information which is currently spread out across complex datasets and tough to parse, but we believe with the right data and tools, we can help people understand the complex web of programmatic advertising and its relationship to the global data broker ecosystem, and start to make a dent in the changes with these systems that will improve privacy, security and advertising outcomes for everyone,” Edwards said.

At the time of writing, a counter at the bottom of the site said DecryptAds’ database includes 284,250,766 ads.txt files, 183,939,277 app-ads.txt files, and 201,389,256 sellers.json files.

It’s possible to search the DecryptAds data by a specific app, advertising company, a relevant domain, IP address, and more. The tool is also monitoring for changes on the sellers.json files, which Edwards says may help “to identify suspicious publishers or app makers who could be quietly banned from multiple exchanges without any public notice or fanfare.”

DecryptAds adds context to the collected data in various ways. One of those is by giving ad systems a “geo risk” score. This includes those who are linked to sanctioned countries (such as Russia, Belarus, and Iran); determined as U.S. adversaries under Executive Order 14117 (like China and Hong Kong); and “financial-secrecy havens” (including Cyprus and the British Virgin Islands). 

Having one of these flags does not necessarily mean any single exchange is harvesting data for nefarious purposes, but it can be a strong lead for journalists or researchers to look into. “If the ad tech company has ties to Russia or China, expect shenanigans. If a company is based in Cypress or another jurisdiction for shell companies, expect them to be connected to numerous other suspicious companies, probably hide their beneficial owners, and potentially be the type of company who has poor KYC [know your customer] and partner standards and is more likely to be the source of a malvertising attack,” Edwards said.

Last month, advertising company Adform discovered hackers had targeted it. It found the hackers implanted code that would replace cryptocurrency wallet addresses displayed in a web browser. In other words, these hackers attempted to use the advertising ecosystem as a way into peoples’ active browsing sessions, and then potentially use that access to steal peoples’ funds.

Using data in DecryptAds, it is possible to see nearly 20,000 websites that declare Adform in their ads.txt or app-ads.txt. That includes 404 Media; we removed Adform from our ads.txt after finding this. 

“Our goal is to continue working to layer context onto the programmatic advertising ecosystem so that people can understand the data sharing implications of consenting to ads on these sites, and so that security and ad tech companies can understand the complex publisher ecosystem and opportunities to reduce the risks from working with unscrupulous publishers and their partners,” Edwards added.

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The only thing more overrated than truth is beauty.

Floor-to-ceiling glazing set flush with the ground does something a conventional window cannot. The floor plane appears to continue past the wall and out into the planting, and the room gives up its identity as a container. This was the brief the owners handed Evoke International Design when they moved back to Vancouver from Calgary and took on a secondary dwelling standing on the grounds of a 1912 Shaughnessy estate.

Photography by Ema Peter

Bringing the glass all the way down to ground level creates the illusion of an almost seamless transition, but achieving that effect required careful construction. Working with builder Linden Construction, Evoke incorporated drainage and a subtly sloped bluestone terrace to direct rainwater away from the threshold. Senior designer Mauricio Marcantonio specified steel rather than aluminum for the frames, accepting its lower thermal performance in exchange for sightlines slim enough that the mullions read more like drawn lines than structural interruptions.

Photography by Ema Peter

Black metal frames also let the addition speak to its neighbor without imitation. Thomas Hooper’s 1912 house for Lieutenant Governor Eric Hamber, built next door in a Tudor and Gothic Revival hybrid with Arts and Crafts influences, carries leaded casements whose dark lines divide the light into a grid and make the structure of the opening visible. The new glazing performs the same operation at a different scale. Divided light, dark lines, an honest grid. The addition can be fully contemporary in its detailing and still register as a relative.

Photography by Ema Peter

The interiors, designed in collaboration between Evoke, James McIntyre Interior Design, and the homeowners, include soft whites, warm grays, oak floors, and Calacatta counters. The neutral palette lets the garden supply the color. A white sculptural staircase, threaded into the existing structure without compromising it, brings a more expressive gesture to the restrained interior. Furniture by Pierre Paulin, Joe Colombo, Vladimir Kagan, and Paul Evans sits against a Serra over the living room fireplace.

Photography by Ema Peter

Tasha Sangha at Paul Sangha Creative designed the exterior half of the composition to be experienced through the glass, with Fossil Landscape Construction executing the landscaping. Sangha and her team retained the mature canopy and layered a pastel understory beneath it, while pleached Portuguese laurels form a green wall against bluestone in the South Courtyard. Wisteria continues to train over the perimeter, and a cast bronze torso by Al Stinson sits within the landscape. Fixtures from Inverlight, Flos, and Bocci cast a low glow across the planting after dark, keeping the glass from turning into a black mirror and allowing the garden to remain part of the interior experience after sunset.

Photography by Ema Peter