Dilara was on her lunch break in the London store where she works when a tall man walked up to her and said: “I swear red hair means you’ve just been heartbroken.”
The man continued the conversation as they both got in a lift, and he asked Dilara for her phone number.
What Dilara did not realise was that the man was secretly filming her on his smart glasses - which look like normal eyewear but have a tiny camera which can record video.
The footage was then posted to TikTok, where it received 1.3m views. “I just wanted to cry,” Dilara, 21, told the BBC.
The man who filmed her, it turned out, had posted dozens of secretly filmed videos to TikTok, giving men tips on how to approach women.
Dilara also found out that her phone number was visible in the video. She then faced a wave of messages and calls.
There are already phone apps that try to do this with WiFi/Bluetooth scanning, object detection, red “filters” and so on.
Theoretically, it’d be really cheap to make a tiny “detector” camera; maybe a Bluetooth earbud looking thing on one ear? Every existing tiny camera can pick up infrared if you just take off and change the filter, and your phone can run tiny object detection algos with almost no power.
The problem is mass adoption.