Back in 2013, Google developed a controversial piece of gear that has long lived in infamy, Google Glass. This was an interesting proto-AR wearable device that contained a camera, earphones, a touchpad, and a small display that was heralded as the start of the augmented reality revolution. The device had been announced a year earlier, and it was made available to developers, and then to the public in 2014, but it never really took off. A combination of clunky design and privacy concerns tainted the launch from the start, the glasses looked dorky and unwieldy, the display was too small, and many people complained about being filmed all the time. People wearing Google Glasses were called “Glass-holes”, and the device never recovered from that moniker. The writing was on the wall when venues in San Francisco announced that they would ban anyone wearing the glasses from entering the premise. Google Glass was dead before it had a chance to shine.
Fast forward thirteen years, and augmented reality glasses are back in the consumer market, but this time without the almost universal backlash (although some push-back remains). Smart glasses are here, they’re cheaper, better, lighter, and perhaps even more terrifying than the Google Glass counterpart. And we are not ready for what is about to be unleashed.
Smart glasses
Let’s first start with some definitions. Smart glasses are wearable devices that combine ordinary eyewear with digital technology, allowing users to access information, capture images or video, receive notifications, use voice assistants, and sometimes view augmented reality content directly in their field of vision. Depending on their design, they may include cameras, microphones, speakers, sensors, displays, and wireless connectivity, turning glasses into a hands-free interface for communication, navigation, productivity, accessibility, and entertainment.
So it may be easy to see why they could become popular, and a lot has changed since the Google Glass fiasco. Firstly, the technology has seriously improved, cameras have become smaller, and the display and sound capabilities of many devices has also been upgraded. There is also a wider range of choices, with cheap devices all the way to very expensive ones. And then there’s the brand tie-in, Meta has been particularly good at this first partnering with Ray-Ban and now with Oakley to produce a wide range of glasses that actually look good. Most Meta glasses are only a camera and speakers, but these are included in a wider range of fashionable-looking glasses. Sure, there are the big monstrosities such as the Snapchat Spectacles, but a lot of devices now look cool.
Secondly, Google Glass came at a time in which smartphones had only been recently introduced, the iPhone was barely 5 years old, so we were just getting used to the always-on surveillance device. We’ve now had over a decade and a half of carrying around cameras and microphones with us everywhere, so I think that the shock and horror of having cameras everywhere has dissipated, precisely because we have cameras everywhere.
Finally, influencer and streaming cultures are more developed since 2013, and the glasses that allow you to stream constantly has a built-in audience that did not exist in those days, or at least didn’t have the same level of reach. Streaming was a thing, but current influencers have considerably more incentives to be constantly producing content, and smart glasses give them the capacity of being always online. One could also argue that privacy in general is less of a hot topic in an environment that favours and encourages over-sharing, the threshold of what people find objectionable sharing has shifted.
All of this means that the smart glass revolution may be here to stay. Meta is starting to market these things heavily, even making it into the Arsenal Premier League celebration parade… only for the glasses being thrown to the crowd by Ben White, like the legend he is, but I digress.
Welcome to the summer of AR.
Augmented reality
Some of these smart glasses are offering augmented reality displays, and this could also be one of the features that propels the rise of the smart glass. I have been intrigued by augmented reality for years, mostly thanks to its depiction in several sci-fi novels such as Rainbows End, Halting State, and Dream Park. Augmented reality usually refers to a wearable device that can display digital content superimposed with reality, hence the name. The main distinction with virtual reality is that the display is transparent, which is the reason it is mostly applied to glasses, as opposed to opaque display designed to immerse the user in an entirely different environment, as is the case with VR.
The appeal should be evident, having real-time data interaction with the real world, directions, map overlays, object recognition, search capabilities, etc. There are also some fun possibilities, adding layers to reality, such as converting people to their social media or gaming avatars, allowing gaming capabilities that could enhance LARPing and other game modes, we remember how wildly popular Pokémon Go was (and still is).
And yet, unlike VR, the privacy implications of AR are also potentially huge. Having real-time data and recognition could mean that you would be able to search people as soon as you meet them. AR requires camera access, which also makes the privacy implications potentially more concerning.
Despite these concerns, AR could be an amazing technology, and it seemed that the only stumbling block was that the technology was nowhere near the potential, most displays were too large, or too underwhelming. We may have arrived to the point where the technology finally is ready for widespread consumption, which has very important privacy implications.
Always-on surveillance
The main feature of smart glasses, whether they have display capabilities or not, is the presence of front-facing cameras. For a long time, these were very prominent and difficult to miss, a feature that doomed Google Glass as we discussed. But newer models have cameras that are easy to miss, and it may not always be clear if you are being recorded.
This has already been causing some problems, the most obvious concern is that people are being filmed without their knowledge or consent. A BBC investigation in January found dozens of male influencers using Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses to covertly film women for that odious genre of “approach a stranger and rizz her up” content that infests some sectors of social media. One of them, a 21-year-old woman on her lunch break, ended up in a TikTok video with 1.3 million views that also displayed her phone number, and she had no idea any of it was happening. Most glasses have a tiny LED that is supposed to indicate recording, but in a busy street or a bright day it is trivially easy to miss, which is precisely the design feature that distinguishes them from conspicuous earlier iterations of smart glasses. The LEDs can also be covered-up on purpose. The whole point is that you cannot tell if you’re being recorded.
But the most alarming revelation came earlier this year, when a Swedish newspaper published an investigation into Meta’s AI training pipeline. It turns out that footage captured by the glasses was being shipped off to human contractors in Nairobi to be labelled and reviewed, and these workers described seeing pretty much everything: people in bathrooms, undressing, having sex, bank cards held up to the light, intimate moments captured by glasses left absent-mindedly on a bedside table. “We see everything, from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker said. Meta insists it blurs faces automatically, except the annotators reported that the blurring doesn’t always work. This has, predictably, resulted in a UK ICO investigation and a class action lawsuit in California, the central allegation being that a company which plastered “designed for privacy” all over its marketing was quietly doing the opposite. And remember, this is all before anyone has switched on facial recognition. There is the example of a couple of Harvard students who wired a pair of these glasses to a face search engine back in 2024, doxxing strangers in real time just by looking at them.
Legal responses
So we’re going to have to sort this out sooner rather than later, particularly if the technology really takes off, which I strongly believe it can.
In Europe and the UK I would generally trust that the worst elements of always-on surveillance falls under existing legislation (a big caveat, I’m not a privacy of data protection lawyer, so I will be happy for colleagues to correct me). The wearer filming strangers in the street is a data controller under data protection law, and therefore subject to the regime. There are exceptions for household use, but in Ryneš (C-212/13), the CJEU made clear that recording which captures a public space or third parties falls outside the purely personal or domestic sphere. It would therefore be easy to extend that to smart glasses, the moment your camera captures someone who isn’t you, you have acquired a full set of obligations under the GDPR, including a lawful basis and a transparency duty.
There are also several voyeurism offences on the books which should cover some of the most egregious uses of the technology for that purpose. There are also biometric data under Article 9. The Meta contractor scandal is the clearest illustration of this: the ICO opened an investigation and a class action followed, all under existing law.
Facial recognition is where people understandably will get more concerned, but I also think that some of it is already covered under some legislation. The AI Act‘s prohibition on the un-targeted scraping of facial images to build or expand recognition databases reads almost as if it were written with the Harvard experiment in mind, and the GDPR’s treatment of biometric data covers most other cases. The problem will be one of enforcement, and specifically the practical impossibility of exercising your rights against a data controller you cannot identify, attached to a recording you cannot perceive.
We may need some regulation of the way devices advertise active recording, perhaps requiring more prominent displays, or maybe we will have to come up with new technical standards. Whatever the solution, we may need to start thinking about it quickly. But I will point out an interesting difference between the current reaction to smart glasses, and the Google Glass reaction. Back then, the public reacted negatively to the technology, which doomed it from the start. This time, the reaction comes mostly from regulators and journalists, while the public doesn’t seem too concerned.
Concluding
Back in 2013 I wrote about always-on surveillance, prompted in part by the development of Google Glass, but also because of the emergence of the smartphone. Back then, I theorised that we would have to come up with some technical standards that considered privacy as a design feature. Some of the ideas were inspired by the excellent sci-fi novel The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. The book describes a world in which both quantum computing and nanotechnology have managed to produce perfect surveillance where every event is recorded at the molecular level. In this world, society had to come up with privacy standards that were built-in at all levels, so there were spaces where all surveillance was open and expected, while there would be personal spaces with no surveillance, and other privacy filters for individuals that would stop all recording.
I have been thinking about this book again, and I think that if we want augmented reality and smart glasses, developers will have to consider some form of privacy control. I like the idea of a personal device that acts like an opt-out, much as the gevulot described in the book, which acts as some form of negotiable privacy. Devices around you are designed to respect your personal level of privacy. This would have the advantage of allowing those with no desire to keep their lives private and be influencers to continue to do so, while allowing the rest of us to continue living our lives in peace.
I still like the idea of augmented reality cool, and I hope that we can solve the privacy issues. If public avatars become a thing, next time you meet me I could be a llama in real life.
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