Rokid, the Hangzhou-based augmented reality startup that has staked its identity on putting a display screen in front of users’ eyes, is facing a public relations crisis that strikes at the heart of that very proposition. On June 8, a video was uploaded to Rokid’s official community platform showing a user wearing Rokid Glasses aboard a Spring Airlines flight, filming cabin crew without their knowledge or consent. The footage spread rapidly online, triggering a wave of public outrage over the privacy implications of camera-integrated smart glasses, according to a report by KR Asia and TMTPost.
The backlash arrived at a particularly sensitive moment. According to people familiar with the matter cited by the South China Morning Post, Rokid is targeting July for its Hong Kong initial public offering, a listing that would mark the culmination of more than a decade of development and position the company as the global leader in AI glasses with integrated display technology.
A Two-Yuan Sticker Defeats the Safeguard
Rokid’s glasses feature an indicator light embedded in the frame that illuminates whenever the camera is recording. The company has stated that covering the light disables the camera. However, reporting by Jemian News found that e-commerce platforms were selling “Rokid light-blocker stickers” for as little as 2 to 10 yuan, with product listings claiming the stickers allow recording to continue without triggering the indicator. Some stores had sold more than 5,000 stickers.
A reporter from Southern Metropolis Daily who entered the Rokid AI community the day after the incident found large volumes of similar unauthorized footage: subway passengers, people in parks and shopping centers, and faces captured clearly, without any indication that the subjects had been informed. The scale of the content suggested the June 8 incident was not an isolated case but a symptom of a systemic problem.
On the evening of June 8, Rokid issued a statement pledging to clean up the community, report the sticker products to e-commerce platforms for removal, and upgrade its protection algorithms in future products. But when the Southern Metropolis Daily reporter returned the following day, unauthorized content remained visible in the community.
A Company at a Critical Juncture
The controversy arises as Rokid is in the final stages of its IPO preparations. On February 26, China’s securities regulator disclosed that Rokid had received approval for an overseas listing, with plans to issue up to 312 million shares on the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. On March 6, the company completed its corporate restructuring from a limited liability company to a joint-stock company. A cohort of supply chain partners, including Conant Optical (which invested 180 million yuan), battery maker Hopson Tech, chip supplier Awinic, communications module provider Fibocom, and assembler Lens Technology, have become strategic shareholders, binding the supply chain to the listing narrative.
Rokid’s commercial momentum had been strong heading into the IPO. According to Omdia’s 2025 global AI glasses market report, Rokid ranked first globally in the display-integrated AI glasses segment, second globally across all categories, and first in China. Its Rokid Glasses sold more than 300,000 units in 2025, three times the company’s original target.
The company was founded in 2014 by Zhu Mingming, a Zhejiang University graduate and UC Berkeley PhD who had previously led Alibaba’s secretive M Studio. Zhu’s conviction, that information should appear directly in front of users’ eyes, not on a screen held in their hands — drove Rokid’s decade-long focus on display technology at a time when the broader market was skeptical. That conviction was vindicated by the market in 2025. The June 8 incident has now put it under a different kind of scrutiny.
The Structural Privacy Risk
The privacy problem Rokid faces is not merely reputational, it is architectural. The camera and the display share the same optical system. The image capture pipeline that feeds translation subtitles and navigation arrows into the user’s field of vision also records everything in that field. The more powerful the display integration, the greater the potential for misuse. And because the natural direction of a user’s gaze is also the direction of the camera, bystanders have almost no way to detect that they are being filmed.
This dynamic is not unique to China. When Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses launched in the US in 2023, Harvard students demonstrated how the device could be used with facial recognition software to identify strangers on the street. But Meta’s glasses operate in markets with relatively clear legal frameworks for wearable data capture under GDPR and US state privacy laws. China’s regulatory framework for first-person wearable recording remains a work in progress, and that gap is precisely the window that the June 8 incident exposed.
The Competitive and Regulatory Backdrop
The controversy also lands in an increasingly crowded market. IDC data shows that China’s smart glasses market shipped 2.46 million units in 2025, up 87.1 percent year-on-year. Xiaomi’s AI glasses are priced at 1,999 yuan, Leabird’s V3 at 1,799 yuan, and Alibaba’s Qianwen AI glasses are deeply integrated with the Alibaba ecosystem, including Alipay, Gaode Maps, and Taobao. The market is sliding toward a price war, and Rokid’s differentiation through display technology is under pressure from multiple fronts.
The Alibaba dimension adds a further layer of complexity. Alibaba CEO Wu Yongming was Rokid founder Zhu Mingming’s former boss and early angel investor, backing the company from its seed round through Series B. But Wu now personally leads Alibaba’s AI glasses initiative, which competes directly with Rokid in the same market. That relationship, former mentor, early investor, current competitor — is the kind of disclosure that will require careful handling in Rokid’s prospectus.
For Rokid, the path to a successful IPO now runs through the privacy controversy. The company must demonstrate to institutional investors that it can address the structural vulnerability in its product design, not just through statements and community cleanups, but through hardware and software changes that make unauthorized recording genuinely difficult. The broader regulatory trajectory in China suggests that dedicated guidelines for wearable AI cameras are coming. Whether Rokid gets ahead of that regulation or is caught by it will shape both its public market debut and its long-term commercial prospects.