Meta Sells AI-Heavy Subscriptions as Zuckoff App Detects Smart Glasses

The wider subscription lineup starts at $2.99 a month for single-product plans, $7.99 for individual bundles and $14.99 for creator and business bundles, Slashdot reported. Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus let users keep stories up for 48 hours instead of 24, send animated super reactions and super hearts to stories, and preview stories without appearing as a viewer. WhatsApp Plus adds exclusive stickers, exclusive ringtones for contacts and the ability to pin up to 20 chats. Meta One Core and Premium include those features along with increased AI usage limits for images and videos, plus more access to tools such as Instagram's AI Restyle. Premium provides even more tokens, while the core Meta experience remains free. Meta says early testing showed real demand, and the company has framed subscriptions as a way to pay for computationally expensive generative features.

After Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced on Threads that the plans brought "more features and more AI across Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Meta AI," Hill's reply drew 13,300 likes. "That's sweet, so pay a fee, get more AI, pay nothing, get a little less AI. Can we work out a deal where you pay ME and I get no AI at all?" he wrote. The joke points to a distinction between choosing AI and receiving it: opening a chatbot for a task is active, while finding AI summaries above search results or AI buttons inside existing software is not. A Pew Research Center study last year reported that 59% of American adults felt they had little or no control over how AI was used in their lives, and 55% wanted more control. A Gartner survey this year found 50% of U.S. consumers would prefer to buy at businesses that do not use generative AI in consumer-facing content. In customer service, Gartner found half of customers said generative AI could make interactions easier, while 87% considered access to a human agent essential when companies used AI. Meta already sells ad-free subscriptions on Facebook and Instagram in the UK and Europe, introduced in response to regulatory requirements; in the UK, the web option costs £2.99 a month, and iOS and Android cost £3.99, though the option is not offered in the U.S. or Australia. Apple Intelligence can be switched off systemwide, and Microsoft lets Copilot users disable features including personalization and memory.

Separately, the New York Post reported that a new app called Zuckoff can detect when a user is near someone wearing Meta's AI-powered smart glasses, which have drawn criticism over the potential for wearers to record people without consent. Programmer Pawel Szydlowski told Business Insider he launched the app after accounts of people recording or harassing women. Zuckoff detects Bluetooth signatures broadcast by smart glasses and estimates their distance, and it has gained about 5,000 users since hitting Apple's App Store last month. It ranked No. 77 among best-selling utilities apps on the iPhone, and Szydlowski said European Union regulators had contacted him for more information. "We as a society have the right to at least know that someone is recording," he told the outlet. Earlier this month, Meta disabled thousands of glasses it found had been tampered with to keep a small recording-indicator light off.

TechCrunch, citing The Information, reported that Meta is preparing to sell a version of the glasses without a camera. The glasses include six built-in microphones for chatbot communication and a side button that activates the AI system. Meta's Reality Labs, which develops the smart glasses line, is still losing a large amount of money, according to the company's April earnings report, and Yahoo Finance reported that Meta stock is down 13% over the last 12 months. Slashdot reported that Meta announced the social app subscriptions on Tuesday as part of a push to drive additional revenue from the billions it is investing in AI data centers and model development.