When wearable smart glasses were beta-launched more than a decade ago, the initial excitement soon turned into backlash. Even communities like San Francisco, which are pro-innovation, pushed back, feeling uncomfortable about being recorded without consent. The reaction was so strong that those wearing the devices acquired the unflattering nickname ‘Glassholes’. The devices were banned in many public places, such as restaurants and bars. They finally disappeared from public view, surviving instead in enterprise settings, where they found legitimate applications in precision manufacturing, logistics and healthcare.
Perhaps society was not ready for public capture- the normalisation of covert recording of ordinary people in public life. A decade later, however, public capture has quietly returned.
Smart glasses are once again making their way into everyday life. The Internet is full of stories of women and children being recorded without their knowledge. Many have been caught using such glasses covertly for videography within high-security perimeters, such as airports, ports and temples.
Since the technology is back, it’s worth asking whether we are ready for public capture now, given that CCTV cameras and social media have conditioned our society to it.
The concept of a public place is fluid, and courts have struggled to define it consistently. For some courts, a moving car is a private place, but a parked one is a public place. Privacy in public is also contextual. One cannot expect it to stand in front of a shop’s CCTV camera, but one can expect it inside that very shop’s changing room. Even on a single street, the expectation shifts. One must expect little privacy at a crowded intersection, considerably more in a quiet corner.
Although CCTV camera recording is allowed for matters related to public order, it can’t be used to profile you.
The common law doctrine of reasonable expectation of privacy is not a binary distinction between public and private spaces. Privacy is contextual, personal and interpersonal. It varies depending on where you are, who is observing you, and how your information is used. The right against public capture by smart glasses is protected by the constitutional right to privacy and by Indian data protection law.
While anyone can observe us in public, not every stranger has the right to create a permanent digital record of that public appearance. Seeing is transient, and observation disappears. Recording, by contrast, could be stored indefinitely, analysed using AI, searched years later, and combined with other data points to reconstruct a person’s likeness, movements, relationships and habits. Public capture fundamentally changes the nature of public life.
Many smart glasses OEMs seem to have ignored this context so far, or, rather, have placed this meaningful privacy decision in the user’s hands through a design choice. Many smart glasses have recording indicators that are easy to miss, especially in sunlight, and some even feature indicators that can be turned off. Many seem to have avoided audible recording signals. It is also possible to impose geofencing restrictions in locations where photography is prohibited. Contextual AI can even be used to distinguish between continuous recording and intentional voyeuristic capture in public places. By choosing not to do so, manufacturers have treated bystanders as externalities.
This reflects a broader tendency within certain parts of the technology industry. The very industry that celebrates itself for solving problems sometimes ends up creating entirely new ones that never existed before. To think about it, what problem, after all, is being solved by enabling strangers to secretly record unsuspecting members of the public, including women and children? The current version of smart glasses does not address any of the problems faced by those wearing spectacles or shades. It does not help you locate lost spectacles, dynamically adjust prescription lenses and colour shades, provide contextual information, improve accessibility for people with disabilities, or create useful augmented reality experiences.
While one could argue that these smart glasses do not invade privacy, people do. Product designs are not often ethically neutral. Privacy should be no different, and the next frontier of privacy by design cannot be confined to protecting device users. It must also protect every person who never chose to use that device, yet whose rights are nevertheless affected by it. Product design must therefore account for bystander privacy.
This is why cameras have prominent audio and visual cues, including shutter sounds and red lights. Speed governors and soft bumpers in automobiles, blurring of images in Google Street View etc, are design features intended to anticipate foreseeable misuse rather than to blame users after harm occurs.
History suggests that technology eventually reshapes social norms. What initially seems intrusive gradually becomes acceptable as people grow accustomed to it. The question is whether we will now push back against public capture.