Smart Glasses and the Death of the Reasonable Expectation

I’ve been reading about London’s pushback against smart glasses this week, pubs and shops putting up “cameras off” signs, staff getting fed up with punters wandering in wearing Ray-Ban Metas recording everything for content. It’s a small story on the surface. Underneath it, there’s something that’s been bugging me for a while: we’ve quietly lost the ability to know when we’re being recorded, and nobody voted for that.

CCTV, for all its faults, came with a deal attached. There’s a sign on the door, the footage goes to a hard drive in a back room, and if something happens, the servo owner or the council pulls the tape. It’s a closed loop. You know the terms even if you never read the fine print. Smart glasses blow that deal up. No sign, no way to tell they’re recording unless you’re looking closely for a tiny LED, and the footage doesn’t stay local, it goes off to a company whose entire business model is knowing everything about everyone. One of the more useful comments I saw on this put it plainly: CCTV is a closed system you can reason about, glasses are an open pipe to a company you never agreed to deal with.

And then there’s the other side of it, the stuff that’s actually criminal rather than just annoying, doctors and other professionals getting caught secretly filming patients with these things. That’s not a slippery slope argument, that’s already happened. The tech didn’t create the impulse, obviously, sleazy people existed before Meta shipped a camera into a pair of sunnies. But it lowered the cost of acting on that impulse to basically zero, and made the evidence harder to spot. That’s the pattern with a lot of this stuff: the technology doesn’t invent the worst behaviour, it just removes the friction that used to keep it rare.

I think about this every time I’m at Chadstone or on a train into the city. Not because I assume everyone with glasses is up to no good, most people buying these things want a hands-free camera for their kid’s soccer game, fair enough. But I’ve noticed I’ve started glancing at people’s faces a beat longer than I used to, checking for that little light. That’s a genuinely new kind of social friction, and it’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it yet. We didn’t used to have to run that calculation walking into a café.

The regulation question is the hard part, and I don’t have a tidy answer. Banning the glasses outright feels like whack-a-mole, this exact hardware sits inside phones already and nobody’s suggesting we ban phones. Mandating a visible recording light is a reasonable start, and some manufacturers already do it, poorly, with an LED you can cover with a bit of tape in about four seconds. Requiring venues to post their own signs, “no recording glasses past this point,” puts the burden back on business owners who already have enough on their plate. None of these solve it cleanly. What I keep coming back to is that the law has always lagged the hardware by about a decade, and in that gap it’s individual venues and individual people who end up doing the enforcing, one annoyed bartender at a time.

What actually cheers me up a little is that pushback exists at all. Bar staff getting fed up and saying no is a functioning immune response, even if it’s a slow and grudging one. I’d rather live in a place where people are annoyed enough to put up a sign than one where everyone’s shrugged and decided this is just how things are now. The regulation will come eventually, it always does, usually a few scandals late and shaped more by lawsuits than foresight. In the meantime, I’ll keep glancing at faces on the train, and I’ll keep thinking that a tiny LED you can tape over is a genuinely underwhelming answer to a genuinely big problem.