With Meta’s new range of smart glasses, Mark Zuckerberg is pitching a vision of the future that sci-fi authors have been warning about for decades — one where privacy is truly dead, and everyone is recording everyone else at all times.
This in itself is nothing new. Introduced at the company’s recent Meta Connect event, the glasses represent the tech industry’s second major attempt at normalizing ubiquitous wearable surveillance devices, more than a decade after Google’s failed entry into the space with Google Glass. Back then, people wearing the experimental (and stupid-looking) tech were mocked as “Glassholes” — reminiscent of characters from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, where despicable high-tech busybodies called “gargoyles” make a living by scanning and snitching on everyone around them for a Google-esque company called the Central Intelligence Corporation.
But unlike Google in 2012, Meta’s wearable ambitions seem to be on better footing — at least in terms of making products that don’t immediately compel people to shove you into a locker. The new devices have major brand partnerships and are far less conspicuous than previous iterations. Tiny cameras are located on either the nose bridge or the outer rim of the glasses frames, and a small pulsing LED serves as the only hint that the device is recording. The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses also include a built-in display, a voice-controlled “Live AI” feature that failed spectacularly on stage, and a wearable wristband that operates the device with hand gestures, meaning a quick flick of the wrist is all it takes for someone to start livestreaming their surroundings to the company’s servers.
Of course, it didn’t take long for the inevitable to happen. Photos have already emerged showing CBP and ICE agents wearing Meta smart glasses during immigration raids in Los Angeles and Chicago. And last week, the University of San Francisco’s Department of Public Safety sent an alert to students after a man wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses was seen recording and harassing women on campus. Given everything else going on right now — like the Trump administration cracking down on political speech and summoning National Guard troops to invade American cities — you’d be forgiven for thinking that people walking around with AI-powered cameras on their faces is an absolute nightmare.
Which raises the same question that comes up every time tech companies move fast and break things: How is any of this even legal — let alone ethical? Legal experts say that Meta’s smart glasses exist in the ever-widening chasm between what the law says and how it actually works in practice.
“Most [privacy] laws are inadequate to address this new technology,” Fred Jennings, an independent data privacy attorney based in New York, told The Verge. “The [legal] damages are too small, the enforcement process is too cumbersome, and they weren’t written with anything like this kind of ubiquitous private recording in mind.”
When it comes to internet-connected devices that capture audio and video, the conventional wisdom of the smartphone era has been that everything in public is “fair game.” But while this has proven mostly true for activists recording the police, legal experts say this idea that private citizens have absolutely no reasonable expectation of privacy in public has been distorted to extremes over the years. Today, many people have a kind of “privacy nihilism” driven by the ubiquitous presence of cameras and internet-connected devices. The assumption is that everyone is being recorded in public anyway, so what’s the big deal? This gets further complicated by body-worn devices that can instantly and surreptitiously record a person’s surroundings.
Historically, the rules around public recording and surveillance come from a patchwork of different laws and legal principles. One of them is something called the “plain view doctrine,” which was established in the 2001 case Kyllo v. United States. The case involved a police raid on an indoor cannabis farm in California that took place after cops had used thermal cameras to detect warmer temperatures inside the building. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that this violated the Fourth Amendment, because the thermal cameras augmented regular vision and allowed police to “explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion.” This meant that the evidence used to justify a search had to be in “plain view” — something that could be easily seen by the casual observer without enhancement tools.
Of course, none of this anticipated that internet-connected cameras would soon be on every street corner, let alone that average citizens would have wearable, AI-powered personal devices that can record and upload everything around them.
“Most people have a Law & Order SVU-level understanding of this doctrine, and took it to assume everything is fair game and therefore there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy in public,” said Jennings. “A lot of technology, these Meta glasses being a perfect example, get built off of this public mentality.”
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