Meta glasses: ordinary-looking frames, complex legal questions
Updated: 21 hours ago
Meta glasses look like ordinary glasses. However, the legal and privacy considerations around their use are anything but ordinary.
A camera, microphones and AI capabilities can now sit on someone's face throughout an ordinary conversation, meeting or walk down the street.
That is useful technology, but it also creates real concerns and questions around privacy, confidentiality and security.
These concerns have already prompted significant governmental, judicial and regulatory scrutiny, warnings and restrictions in several EU countries, the UK, Australia, the US and Brazil. The debate is therefore quickly progressing from hypothetical privacy concerns to practical restrictions on where and how the technology can be used.
The fundamentals
The first concern involves fundamental considerations such as whether recording is lawful, appropriate, overt and, where applicable, consensual.
There is no universal rule that recording another person is always lawful or unlawful. The particular facts and context matter enormously. Obviously, recording people in a public place is very different from recording inside someone's home, during a confidential meeting, in a workplace or somewhere where people reasonably expect privacy or, at least, expect to know that they are being recorded.
Meta's glasses can use their camera and microphones to interact with AI about what the wearer is seeing and hearing. Meta says a visible light indicates when photos or videos are being captured and that its technology is designed to disable the camera if that light is covered or tampered with.
However, there remains considerable uncertainty about the practical reliability of that safeguard and Meta has already had to introduce updates to address ways in which users could obscure the light while continuing to record.
In addition, some camera-assisted AI functions on newer glasses do not activate the light because they are processing information rather than creating a conventional photo or video.
Data security
The second concern is what happens to the information being captured or processed. Images, voices and surroundings may include:
confidential personal or business information;
documents and computer screens;
private conversations or images;
content featuring children; or
commercially sensitive material.
Depending on the feature being used, information may also move between the glasses, a connected phone and online services. So, privacy quickly becomes a data and security issue as well raising questions such as where is that data stored, how secure is it and who else can access it?
And it sits alongside the more fundamental questions of whether the recording or processing was lawful and whether consent was required and obtained.
Practical considerations
There is another practical problem particularly pertinent for businesses.
Many confidentiality, data protection and device policies were written around phones, laptops and cameras. They may say nothing about someone walking into a meeting wearing what appears to be an ordinary pair of glasses.
Organisations now need to consider whether their policies expressly cover smart glasses and other wearable recording or AI devices, including where and how they may be used and how confidential information should be protected.
The bottom line
The use of Meta glasses to record should be treated in the same way as a phone recording and, therefore, the same rules, restrictions and considerations should apply to both.
Meta glasses do not necessarily create completely new legal principles.
However, by making recording and AI processing less obvious and more continuous, they have real potential to materially undermine the effective application of existing rules around privacy, consent, confidentiality, data protection and security, making breaches of those rules considerably more difficult to detect and prevent.
If you have questions about privacy, confidentiality or the appropriate use of smart glasses and other wearable technology, Via Legalis can advise individuals and businesses on the legal and practical considerations.
The content published in this blog provides high-level legal information and insights only. It is necessarily general in nature and does not constitute legal advice, nor should it be relied upon as such. The law and regulatory position reflected in the content may change, and we do not undertake to keep blog content updated. Always obtain legal advice by reference to the specific facts and circumstances of your particular matter.