Smart glasses are having a privacy reckoning, and Meta is caught in the middle

The smart-glasses backlash has reached the courtroom. From 20 July, New York will ban recording eyewear from every one of its 1,240 courts. It is the first US state to go that far. An internal memo from the New York State Unified Court System sets out the rule, first reported by Syracuse.com.

The ban is broad. It covers any glasses or headwear that can record audio or video, including prescription frames with a camera. Anyone who arrives wearing them must hand them to court officers. Staff and attorneys are not exempt. The stated aim is to stop people secretly taping proceedings, which breaks New York’s civil rights law.

A backlash years in the making

New York is not acting alone. Courts in Philadelphia, Hawaii and Wisconsin have already restricted the devices. Some cruise lines bar them in public areas too. The trigger is Meta. Its Ray-Ban and own-brand glasses have become the face of the trend, and of the fear around it.

Critics call them “pervert glasses.” The nickname stuck after influencers used them to film women in public without consent. One so-called manfluencer with 1.8 million followers built a following by approaching strangers on camera. He has been punched more than once.

Meta’s patch for the recording light

Meta’s main defence is a small white LED. The “capture” light blinks whenever the glasses record, and it has no off switch. The trouble is that people worked around it. Some taped over it. Others paid for surgery to drill it out. One tech reporter found a whole cottage industry doing exactly that.

This week Meta pushed back. In a FAQ post, it said the glasses will now disable the camera entirely if the system detects the LED has been tampered with or destroyed. The update is mandatory and rolling out now, VP of wearables Alex Himel told The Verge. Meta also said it will pull ads and listings for tampering services, ban the accounts behind them, and pursue legal action.

The glasses that would switch the light off

Here is the twist. Even as Meta defends the recording light, it is testing glasses that would not use it. Meta has “super-sensing” prototypes that snap photos every few seconds, all day, according to the Financial Times. The idea is an always-on assistant that remembers where you left your keys or what someone told you.

The catch is stark. Executives are planning not to light the LED while super-sensing runs, the FT reported. Bystanders would have no signal they were being filmed. Inside Meta, opinion splits on whether to store that footage or use it to train AI. One option would keep only metadata rather than the images. Even that can carry precise locations and device details.

The feature could reach existing glasses through a software update. That matters, because the hardware is already on faces. Battery life is the main brake for now, since constant recording drains a small device fast.

The line Meta keeps crossing

The pattern worries privacy advocates. Meta has floated facial recognition for its glasses, a technology it has misused before. This lands as cheap cameras spread across public life. A report this year found that clips used to train Meta’s AI, some capturing private moments, were sent to human contractors for review.

Not everyone sees only risk. Meta runs a programme giving free glasses to every blind veteran in America, and disability advocates point to real gains. Rivals are hedging their bets. Even Realities sells camera-free frames, while Snap’s Specs chase augmented reality a different way. Google and Apple are close behind.

Why it matters

Smart glasses are becoming normal, and that is the problem. They no longer look like gadgets, so it is hard to tell who is recording.

Courts have picked the simplest fix and banned them at the door. Meta is trying to rebuild trust with a brighter, tamper-proof light. Yet its own roadmap points the other way, towards glasses that watch constantly and signal nothing.

The next fight over privacy may not be about a light at all. It may be about whether the camera should ever switch on.