Meta says it has deactivated the cameras of thousands of smart glasses that were found to have been hacked. 

Issues with the glasses, known as “pervert glasses,” have been plaguing the devices after some people began taking photos of others without their permission and posting the images online.

One of the indicators of the smart spectacles should be a white LED light that flares on to signal others that they are being recorded, but some people have figured out how to hide this light.

In July, Meta announced it would turn off the photo and video capabilities of any user who has blocked the recording light, and in a report for Semafor, the company says that thousands of glasses have now been bricked.

Meta’s vice president of augmented reality Alex Himel revealed in a Threads post last week that an update had beefed up protection from LED light tampering.

If the LED is covered, then the camera will not start recording; some people attempt to work around this by initiating a recording, then placing something over the LED. A fix for this is beginning to be rolled out; the camera will now stop working if the light is covered during a recording.

Meta did not disclose to Semafor the number of users who have been discovered to have tampered with the camera recording system, but less than 0.1% of users have been caught, according to Himel.

With the camera, the smart glasses are nothing more than a pair of expensive Bluetooth headphones.

“It has been a little bit of a cat-and-mouse game,” adds Himel. “Not done yet,” he says, “as far as I know, there are always new ways to get around the safeguards that we have. So we’ll keep monitoring and evolving the safeguards that we have.”

Not many days have passed since Meta announced its intention to tackle anti-social activity on the platform with its new “glasshole” policy, and it is hard to determine how many of those affected there are.

A Reddit post from four days ago by a person who claims to film people without consent says that he is “blown” by the recent update and asked if there were any other workarounds.

The Redditor has been rounded up in the comments for his creepy nature, but a handful of comments indicated that it’s still possible to record without the light.

However, that this new update is impacting bad guys is good news, after some horrific accounts have emerged of primarily young women being recorded without their consent by the so-called “pick up artists” and then being abused online once the video was made public.

The reaction has been strong: the popular New York nightclub, which was targeted last week, was threatening to ban anyone attempting to enter with the glasses, while even the low-cost chain of pubs in the U.K. has banned the glasses.