Move over, pervert glasses – the latest toxic trend is robogroping

Whenever a new technology is created, it will, without exception, immediately be used to harass girls and women

Y ou may be familiar with rule 34 of the internet, which states that if something exists or can be imagined, there will almost certainly be online porn of it. Now let me introduce my rule 35: whenever a new technology is created, it will, without exception, immediately be used to harass girls and women.

See, for example, Meta’s “ pervert glasses ”. As anyone could have foreseen, putting a tiny camera and microphone into smartglasses would immediately lead to people using them to record and harass women. Lo and behold, that is exactly what happened. So-called manfluencers have filmed themselves trying to flirt with women in public spaces and then uploaded the footage to TikTok. The women in these videos are often not aware they’ve been recorded until their identities are shared online and they are harassed by strangers. And what’s Meta doing about this? It’s instituted a few bans and made some privacy updates, but doesn’t seem to have an appetite to properly solve the problem. Indeed, at the Meta Connect 2026 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg did not feel the need to apologize to the women whose lives have been upended by his technology.

Then there is the Flock license plate tracking system, which has been abused by an extraordinary number of law enforcement officers to track the locations of their exes or other women they are sexually interested in. And, of course, there are the AI image generators, which have been used to create deepfake pornography of women and girls. According to a 2023 report , “deepfake pornography made up 98 per cent of all deepfake videos online, and 99 per cent depicted women”.

Now, there’s a new toxic tech trend to worry about: livestreamed robogroping. Police in Cologne, Germany, are currently investigating an incident in which a humanoid robot controlled by two teenage males touched a 16-year-old girl’s buttocks and made sexually suggestive gestures toward her. Footage of the groping robot, which was wearing human clothes and a fake mustache, was reportedly livestreamed by the two males online.

The robot in question has now been confiscated by the local police, who seem a little befuddled by the whole thing. “We have not been aware of this phenomenon so far,” a police spokesperson told the Associated Press, adding it was “new territory for us”.

It may be new territory but I can guarantee you that this won’t be the last time we hear about an incident like this. Getting your hands on an AI-powered humanoid robot is still a lot more expensive than buying a pair of smartglasses, but the technology is rapidly becoming a lot more accessible. Earlier this year, a school in New York made headlines after announcing its new teaching assistant would be a humanoid robot called Sally, made by a company that makes realistic sex dolls. Outrage over the announcement forced the school district to halt its plans , but it’s only a matter of time before we see humanoid robots in schools.