Please take off your smart glasses: On consent and the right to silence
I recently encountered smart glasses in real life for the first time.
Not in a shop, at a technology conference, or in a demonstration video.
Someone I was spending time with was wearing them.
I didn't know that at first.
We were walking through the city when, quite casually, they demonstrated what the glasses could do. There was nothing sinister about it. If anything, the ordinariness of the moment was what stayed with me. Here was a device with cameras, microphones and AI capabilities, sitting on someone's face and looking enough like normal glasses that I had not given them a second thought.
Since then, I've found myself returning to a surprisingly simple question.
Would I ask someone to take off their smart glasses when they came to my home for dinner?
I think I would. I'm also trying to understand why.
When looking and recording look the same
We have developed reasonably well understood social conventions around smartphones. Someone at dinner can record our conversation on their phone without permission. Someone walking beside me can photograph me. The technology to violate my privacy has been sitting in people's pockets for years.
Yet there is usually a visible transition between carrying a phone and using it to observe or record somebody. You take it out. You hold it up. You point it somewhere.
Smart glasses remove much of that transition.
Looking at me and pointing a camera at me can now look exactly the same.
AI makes the distinction murkier still. A device might potentially identify something, listen to something, process something, remember something or answer questions about something without the people around the wearer having much idea of what is happening.
What bothers me most is the uncertainty. Once I know someone is wearing smart glasses, I have to consider what those glasses might be doing.
The technology has changed my experience of the encounter simply by being there.
My home, my boundary
This is where I find myself taking a stronger position than I initially expected.
I think I want my home to be a smart-glasses-free space.
For me, it comes down to what kind of space I want my home to be.
If you come to my home for dinner, I don't want to have to wonder whether something I say, something another guest says, or simply what happens around the table can be captured or processed by a device I cannot meaningfully see operating.
I also don't think the responsibility should be mine to ask what your glasses are doing. I don't think consent should work that way.
The person introducing a technology capable of observing, recording or processing other people should carry the responsibility for making that clear. The people being observed should not have to discover the technology and then negotiate around it.
For now, at least, my answer to the dinner question is therefore fairly straightforward.
Yes. I think I would ask you to take them off.
What about accessibility?
I don't think accessibility changes the basic argument.
We already accommodate different needs so that people can participate. A guide dog is an obvious example. The dog's purpose is clear. If someone needs smart glasses as an assistive device, the same principle can apply.
The difference is that everyone knows why the device is there and what it is being used for.
The issue for me is the unannounced presence of a device that can potentially record or process the people around it.
From the dinner table to meeting for worship
My dinner-table question led me somewhere more difficult.
What about meeting for worship?
Imagine sitting in a meeting house with perhaps a dozen Friends.
Someone is wearing AI-enabled glasses.
Are they recording?
Probably not.
Can you know?
Perhaps.
Should you have to ask?
I don't think you should.
This matters because meeting for worship depends on a particular kind of shared space.
We sit together in silence. Someone may eventually stand and offer ministry. What they say may come from somewhere deeply personal and may never have been formulated before that moment.
Should a Friend giving ministry even have to think about whether their words are being recorded, transcribed, processed or stored by somebody else's glasses?
I don't think they should.
Even if nothing is actually being recorded, does wondering about it change the space?
I think it might.
Presence, equality and integrity
There are several Quaker ideas tangled up in this for me.
Presence is one, although I don't think technology itself prevents us from being present. We already bring phones, watches, hearing aids and other devices into meeting.
What feels different about smart glasses is that their capabilities extend beyond the wearer. They can potentially involve everyone the wearer looks at or listens to.
That raises questions of equality and power. The wearer knows what the device can see, hear or process. The person opposite them may not. That gives the wearer knowledge and power the other person doesn't have.
Integrity matters here too. Integrity, for me, means knowing what is happening when we meet one another.
If I am speaking to you, I want to know whether I am speaking only to you or potentially to a system that can listen, process and remember what I say.
I think I have a right to know.
What happens to silence when machines can listen?
This may be the question that troubles me most.
Quaker silence isn't an absence.
It is a shared space we deliberately create together. We sit. We listen. We wait.
Sometimes something emerges from it.
What happens when we introduce a machine into that silence that can potentially listen too?
To the technology, silence can become input, speech can become data, a face can potentially be recognised, and ministry can be transcribed, summarised, stored or retrieved.
None of this means that someone wearing smart glasses is actually doing any of those things. The possibility itself, though, changes the social relationship.
We may need to talk about this sooner than we think
I don't think Quakers need a grand theological declaration on smart glasses, but I do think meetings may eventually need to establish expectations around them, just as families, workplaces, restaurants, schools and other communities will.
For me, a reasonable starting principle is emerging:
Bringing technology that can quietly record or process other people into a shared private space requires their knowledge and consent.
That would make my home a smart-glasses-free space by default.
For meeting for worship, I think that means smart glasses should normally be removed, unless there is a specific reason for their use that the meeting understands and has accommodated.
Perhaps my position will change as the technology changes and our social conventions develop around it.
For now, though, I keep coming back to one detail from that first encounter. I had already spent quite some time with this person before I realised they were wearing smart glasses. I only knew because they chose to demonstrate them.
Next time, perhaps nobody will point it out.
What happens when we no longer expect them to?