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The emergence of smart glasses, which feature largely concealed cameras, microphones and speakers, has turned into a major headache for those presiding over court proceedings.
When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg entered a courtroom in Los Angeles last month while wearing one of his company’s smart glasses, for instance, judge Carolyn Kuhl was not impressed, threatening to hold anybody in the room using them in “contempt of the court.”
“This is very serious,” she added at the time.
Another risk: that someone on the stand could receive communication from outside council — or even an AI chatbot — in real time.
It’s a clever scheme, at least until you get caught. As the BBC reports, a UK High Court judge noticed something was seriously off during a January case brought on by Laimonas Jakstys, the co-owner of a Lithuanian company, who was trying to get his firm off an insolvency list.
Judge Raquel Agnello KC instructed Jakstys to remove a pair of smart glasses after noticing that he “seemed to pause quite a bit” before answering during a cross examination.
After he took them off, it became pretty obvious the defendant had been cheating by using them to get real-time advice.
“In my judgment, the smart glasses were clearly connected to his mobile phone during his cross examination because no voice was heard out loud until his smart glasses were removed and disconnected from his glasses,” she wrote in her decision. “There was clearly someone on the mobile phone talking to Jakstys.”
Jakstys was later found to have made multiple phone calls to a mysterious caller listed as “abra kadabra” in his phone, who he claimed to be a “taxi driver.”
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