Stop Smart Glasses Is Betting It Isn't Too Late Yet

The campaign was founded by Liz Hunter, a non-technical founder who built the site and its central tool, a UK and Ireland-wide database of retailers selling camera-equipped smart glasses, using AI-assisted tools rather than a development team. That detail matters more than it sounds. The database covers opticians and national chains including Vision Express and Boots, searchable by postcode in the UK or by town and city in Ireland, and it exists specifically so a member of the public can find out where the devices are sold near them and ask the retailer to stop.

The theory of change is not a single ask. The site lays out five entry points: write to a local optician, write to a national retailer, write to an MP, write to a venue asking it to restrict face-worn cameras on its premises, and sign a UK Parliament petition. The petition itself, created separately by Guy Holder and backed by the campaign, calls for an immediate ban on the sale and promotion of smart glasses with recording capability. As of this writing it has just under 5,400 signatures against a 10,000 threshold, and closes on 9 December 2026. The campaign also points to a YouGov poll from March 2026 finding 49 percent of Britons support a public-space ban, evidence that the position is not a fringe one even before the petition closes.

Stop Smart Glasses explicitly supports assistive use of smart glasses by blind and partially sighted people, citing the RNIB's own recommendation of wearable technology for people with little or no vision, and UK government research funding aimed at improving independence for people with sight loss. Its stated position draws a line between a disability-related use and mass-market normalisation, and says the mechanism for protecting the first while restricting the second needs to be built with disabled people and accessibility organisations, not decided without them.

We should say plainly that this line is not new to us. A recent piece on this site about the trouble with verifying who qualifies for an accessibility exemption drew directly on this campaign's stated position, which frames the same tension we have been working through: protect the function, not the person, and do not let accessibility become the argument that blocks every other privacy protection, or the protection that gets sacrificed to win a fight against normalisation.

The campaign's own case rests on a comparison it makes explicitly: social media, which regulators, parents and platforms tried to fix only after a generation had already been shaped by it. Whether or not that comparison holds up in every particular, the structural point is one this entire site has been making from a different angle for months. Every week a device ships without a fix is a week that becomes harder to undo later, because the baseline people get used to keeps resetting.

What makes Stop Smart Glasses worth naming here, rather than only tools like ours, is that it treats the political and commercial pressure points, retailers, MPs, venues, as the lever, where NearLens treats detection as the lever. Neither is sufficient alone. A retailer who stops stocking a product and a bystander who can tell one is nearby are solving different parts of the same gap, and the campaign's decision to build a full retailer database before writing a single line of persuasive copy suggests it understands that distinction.

The site is also released open source, explicitly for anyone who wants to run the same campaign, database and all, in another country. That is a rarer thing to see in this space than another op-ed, and it is the part of the project most worth watching.