Payne hopes these policies and actions will encourage other companies to follow suit. “We hope that never again do glasses launch from some other company that doesn’t have good algorithms built in,” he says. “That should not have happened; hopefully it doesn’t happen again.”
Privacy experts I spoke with acknowledged that Google is trying not to repeat Meta’s mistakes, but they point out that smart glasses are still vehicles for collecting sensitive data. Even with an indicator light, it’s harder to tell when someone’s recording you in public than if someone is holding out their smartphone.
Reem Suleiman, senior campaign director at the nonprofit digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, says camera-equipped glasses shouldn’t be normalized in public because they are a precursor to mass surveillance and have the capacity to identify people. (This summer, Meta silently added a face-recognition code to its smart glasses and then subsequently deleted it after a WIRED report; in 2024, two Harvard students built a face-recognition tool for Meta’s glasses.)
“People find ways around it,” Suleiman says. “There’s no actual aspect of consent.”
Janusz Swierczynski, who researches human interactions with emerging tech at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, tells WIRED these privacy measures are meaningful. However, they still largely address privacy at an individual level rather than thinking about people affected by them. That’s partly because the technology is advancing faster than policy and research.
“A lot of privacy is managed by social norms, by what we think is acceptable to record, and that prevents people from recording anything and everything,” Swierczynski says. “Normalizing recording does have unintended consequences, which is why it’s important to focus on bystander privacy.”
Intriguingly, Payne highlighted that tech companies like Google need to make clear, declarative statements about what the glasses are doing.
“Ambiguity is not your friend here,” Payne says. “I think that a lot of that concern came from some trust being broken. So there is a rebuilding thing happening right now … You can hopefully have your cake and eat it too, which is cool glasses that everybody’s excited about—that you’re comfortable with.”
