Meta’s smart glasses are the company’s surprise success, fashionable and selling in the millions. They are also, more and more, unwelcome. A run of British venues has started telling guests to take them off, and Europe’s privacy regulators are circling.
The London restaurateur Jeremy King told The Guardian that diners should not wear the recording glasses inside his venues. Soho House says its filming ban now covers them, so it may ask members to take them off. Wetherspoons has drawn a narrower line, barring customers from recording staff or other drinkers without consent.
ATG Theatres will ask audiences to remove them during shows.
The glasshole era, again
Anyone who lived through Google Glass will find this familiar. Seattle restaurants started turning away Google’s headset in 2013. The fear was the same: that a stranger might be filming you. A decade on, the objection has not changed, only the product. This time the backlash is landing on a device people actually bought.
Meta has tried to answer it in hardware. The glasses flash a capture light when they record. The camera now shuts off if someone covers or tampers with the indicator. It has not been enough. People still report being filmed unawares, sometimes with the clips posted online. Instagram now pulls smart-glasses videos that harass the people in them.
Now the regulators are circling
Bans were already creeping in around the edges. US courts in New York and other states bar them. The DEF CON hacker conference turns them away, and South Korea keeps them out of exam halls to stop cheating. What is new is that national regulators are getting involved.
The European Data Protection Board is writing a report on smart glasses, due within months. Some members are not waiting for it. Germany’s data-protection commissioner says camera glasses may already break laws against hidden recording devices. France’s privacy watchdog has flagged the risks, and Dutch campaigners want action. In the UK, a petition asks Parliament to ban the sale of smart specs outright.
No country has actually outlawed them, and that matters. This is pressure, not yet prohibition. But the direction is clear, and it points at the camera. The obvious fixes are louder ones: a brighter light, an audible shutter, a clear signal when video is rolling.
That leaves Meta and its rivals with a familiar choice. Apple is still weighing whether to put a camera on its own glasses at all. Meta once pulled a facial-recognition feature under pressure. The technology is popular. The problem is everyone in front of it who never agreed to be on camera.
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