Europe's smart glasses crackdown takes shape

In the European context, there is a clear legal basis to this pushback.

And that is, of course, the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR, Europe's big privacy law, which was instituted eight years ago now, I think.

And the core of the GDPR is the concept of personal data, personal data being any kind of information which can be linked to an identifiable person.

And that includes, of course, imagery of the person.

I'm going to quote here, and again, this is auto-translated from the Dutch this time.

I'm going to quote a board member of the AP privacy regulator, Katja Muur-Germans.

And she said, people must be able to walk the streets freely without having to fear that someone's filming them without their knowledge and subsequently sharing the images or posting them on the internet.

People who create images in which others are recognizable cannot do whatever they want with them.

The GDPR specifically protects the people who appear in the footage without their consent.

A lot of the first bans to be brought in of this kind were actually in courtrooms around the world because, well, in many courtrooms people are not allowed to film proceedings for various reasons.

New York banned the use of these camera glasses in its courtrooms back at the beginning of July because they break the ban on surreptitious filming.

That's actually a violation of New York state civil rights law.

When the British courts followed suit in August, a spokesperson said that there are clear restrictions on taking images or videos within courts and tribunals, which is why the use of meta glasses is prohibited.

Outside of the courtrooms, the British pub chain Weatherspoons also instituted a blanket ban on these devices in August.

CEO Tim Martin said in a statement, quote, the general code that applies in our pubs and most pubs, is that you can't film customers or employees without their permission.

Metaglasses seem to breach this code and common sense by enabling surreptitious surveillance.

So our instinct is to say, turn off the cameras.

Meanwhile, also in August, the German NGO HateAid made a criminal complaint against Meta and SLO Luxottica, the maker of Ray-Bans, so it's a big manufacturing partner there, and a bunch of glasses and electronics retailers, saying that these smart glasses are, again, illegal because they enable covert filming.

And under German federal law, it's illegal for somebody to sell a device, a communications device, that has been designed to allow covert filming.

Now, I'm not sure that that particular case is going to go anywhere, because as Meta constantly argues, and as indeed the German Federal Network Agency seems to have accepted, these devices do have a light, and that light is there to tell people when recording is taking place.

It's a white LED that blinks, and that, according to some, is enough to make sure that there is no privacy violation taking place.

But in the real world, that doesn't really work.

That's because a small LED light is not going to be visible to everyone, even if it is blinking to indicate that there is recording taking place.

And here I'm going to quote somebody again.

This time it's the Hamburg Data Protection Authority.