Meta says safeguards are in place to prevent surreptitious filming, but some UK venues now prohibit them from being worn at all
When Meta used superstar Kylie Jenner to promote its sleek new line of “spy glasses”, the social media company hoped the devices would reach the same broad acceptance that tablets and smartwatches have found before them.
But those plans have hit a snag in the UK, where venues from elite restaurants to popular pub chains have banned the £359 glasses in order to preserve the privacy of customers and staff.
Celebrated restaurateur Jeremy King, owner of London venues including Simpsons in the Strand, Arlington and The Park, said guests should not wear the recording glasses.
He told the Guardian: “I would never knowingly allow any invasion of guest privacy other than with the eyes we were born with.”
I expect these restaurants, pubs and theatres to have no CCTV, either, otherwise it’d quite a hypocritical take if they prohibited non-consensual surveillance glasses while keeping non-consensual surveillance cameras. The same way I feel unsafe before someone wearing Duckerberg’s glasses, I also feel unsafe before a surveillance camera whose footage Goddess-knows-who is getting access to (not to mention how most “modern” CCTV feeds their images to AI; wonder why most AI video generators get to generate, e.g., “doorbell camera footage” so easily?).
Also, IMHO, the prohibition on Meta glasses should be targeting the manufacturers (corporations such as Meta, but also Google and other companies developing similar aberrations) instead of just the users. Because, when users are the only ones to blame, society risks missing the forest for the trees, as the corps behind these aberrations would be left unbothered enough for them to work on “thinner frames for smartglasses” which would further pave the way for people like me, who have to wear high-myopia prescription glasses, to be lynched for my thin-framed dumbglasses just because human society would be so blinded by their (understandable) rage that they’d be judging me for the pair of glasses in front of my eyes I got no choice but to wear to live in said society (if I had to remove my prescription glasses in order to be allowed in, I wouldn’t be able to watch your theatre play or getting to read your damn beverage menu, for example).
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