Smart glasses are clearly the next big thing in the world of tech. After Meta’s success with its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, almost every tech company is getting involved now. In fact, just this week, Google and Samsung announced their new pair of smart glasses that will debut this Fall. XREAL also has the Project Aura glasses running on the Android XR platform. So it only seems fitting that elected officials are unhappy with this new tech.
Specifically in Ireland. Olga Cronin, a senior policy officer for Enforce, which is a unit within the International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations (INCLO), said, “I will speak to the point about smart glasses. They are really creepy. The glasses are deeply problematic and intrusive.” Cronin is part of the unit that investigates human rights in the tech industry in Ireland.
A separate article from the Irish Examiner talks about how a local TikTok content creator was using Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses to record people without consent and harass businesses.
Ireland likely won’t be alone in wanting to investigate smart glasses
Surprisingly, this is only happening in Ireland right now. I would have fully expected the US Government to want to investigate Meta and other companies working on smart glasses, because the US doesn’t want anyone recording Americans without their consent, except for the US government.
Now, a big part of this is likely because it’s Meta that’s getting all the success with its smart glasses. And people know Meta for how much it tracks you already with Facebook, Instagram, and, to an extent, WhatsApp. If this were a smaller company having this sort of success, I don’t think governments would be looking into investigating them.
However, this is something that Samsung, Google, Warby Parker, Gucci, Gentle Monster, and others will need to combat in the future. Of course, these glasses all have an indicator to show they are filming or taking a photo. But outdoors in sunlight, that indicator is already pretty hard to see. So we’ll have to wait and see how this proceeds.
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