Meta’s glasses now stop recording if you cover the LED

Meta has updated its smart glasses so the camera stops when someone covers the recording light, the second such fix in two months, and is running an ad campaign explaining what the LED means. European regulators have said the problem is not the light but the absence of any lawful basis for filming bystanders.

Meta has updated its smart glasses so the camera shuts off when someone covers the recording light. Alex Himel, who runs Meta’s wearables division, posted the change on Threads on 27 August.

The loophole it closes was not sophisticated. Start a recording, then put a finger or a strip of tape over the LED.

It is the second fix of the summer. An earlier update disabled the camera when users drilled the LED out of the frame entirely. Both arrived after the glasses were already on faces.

Himel is not promising this is the last one. Meta will “keep rolling out updates like this to make sure the capture LED can reliably alert bystanders when photos or videos are being captured“, he wrote.

There is an advertising campaign as well, built around explaining what the light means. Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth has separately suggested glasses with no camera at all, CNET reported.

None of which touches the argument being had in Europe. The complaint there was never that the light can be covered, but that a light is not consent.

France’s data protection regulator said as much in June. Technical notification devices “have only a limited range and therefore appear insufficient“, the CNIL wrote, adding that wearers must respect the privacy of the people they film and obtain their consent where appropriate.

The ad campaign runs the other way. It asks bystanders to learn a signal, when the obligation under European law sits with the person doing the recording.

Regulators have been moving on harder ground. Hamburg’s data protection commissioner has said the glasses may already breach German rules on concealed recording equipment, and the European Data Protection Board has a report coming on the category.

The timing is awkward. That report was due by the end of the summer, and Meta Connect opens on 23 September with new glasses expected.

Brussels has been asking questions for months. Two Italian MEPs wrote to the Irish regulator in March about reviewers in Kenya watching footage captured by the glasses.

So the LED is being engineered into something reliable, and that work is worth doing. It was never the thing standing between Meta and a GDPR finding.