Consent needs someone to address

The social protocol for cameras has always been person to person. You catch someone's eye, you gesture at the lens, they lower it or they explain. Awkward, and it works often enough to have survived a century of portable cameras.

That protocol has one requirement. There has to be a decider present. When a wearer chooses to record, they can answer for it, and the bystander has somewhere to direct a request. Take the decision out of the wearer's hands and the request has nowhere to land, because the person standing in front of you did not make the choice you are objecting to and cannot reverse it on their own.

Delegation was designed for a room where everyone is on the payroll

Most of the serious design work on agentic systems has been done for enterprise settings. UX Magazine has published a good deal on it, including principles for designing autonomous agents, and that body of work is where the vocabulary for supervision and oversight is being built.

The gap shows up when the same patterns are worn on a face in public. In an operations console, everyone affected by the agent's decision has an account, a role and a way to escalate. On a sidewalk, the person most affected by an agent's choice to capture has no account, no role, no escalation path, and usually no idea a decision was made at all. Borrowing the patterns without noticing that difference is how a well-governed system produces an ungoverned outcome.

Supervision is the feature

We would put a hard requirement on any worn device that captures: a deliberate act by the wearer for each capture, and a record they can show on the spot. It is slower than continuous ambient capture and it is less impressive in a demo. It keeps a human answerable in the place where the answering has to happen.

The part that stays open is verification. A bystander cannot audit anything. They cannot confirm a record exists, cannot read it, cannot tell an honest wearer from a confident one. Every accountability mechanism proposed so far serves the wearer or the manufacturer, and the person with the strongest interest in it has no access.