The Glasses Were Never the Problem

Speaking to UC Today in August, Jakub Zientala, founder of the EU public affairs consultancy Ungovern, made a case worth centring rather than footnoting. An outright ban, he argued, is unlikely to be practical. The workable path is regulators and manufacturers building stronger protection directly into the device, not a blanket verdict on the category.

We agree with that, fully, and we think it changes where suspicion should point. A default recording length, whether capture continues once an indicator is blocked, how fast footage reaches a reviewer, whether audio runs by default. Every one of those is a decision a company made at a desk, long before anyone put the glasses on. The wearer did not design the indicator. The wearer did not choose the retention policy. Treating someone wearing the product as though they personally authored its defaults gets the responsibility backwards.

It is also worth saying, because it is true and because we have not said it enough: a phone has been the more common source of unwanted recording for most people, for most of the last fifteen years. Glasses did not invent covert capture. They changed the choreography around it, and that change deserves real scrutiny. But scrutiny of a behaviour is different from suspicion of a category, and a lot of the public reaction to this product has collapsed the two.

That matters for what a tool like ours is actually for. NearLens tells you a compatible device is broadcasting nearby. It was never built to let anyone single out the person wearing it, confront them, or decide anything about their character from that alone. A pair of glasses in a room tells you exactly as much about the person wearing them as a phone in someone's pocket, which is to say, nothing, until they do something with it.

Not fewer smart glasses. Better defaults. An indicator that survives being covered instead of failing quietly. A published account of what leaves the device and when. A physical, verifiable off state that does not depend on trusting firmware nobody outside the company can inspect. Every one of those asks falls on the company that shipped the product, and none of them requires treating an ordinary person wearing one like a suspect.

The people using this technology for exactly what it is built for, reading a menu hands-free, getting directions without looking down, having a screen read out loud, vastly outnumber the cases that make headlines. That was true before we started this series and it is still true now. We would rather spend our energy asking the companies who set the defaults to set better ones than asking the public to treat each other with more suspicion in the meantime.