EU Privacy Rules May Soon Require Smart Glasses To Announce Themselves
New guidance calls for lights and audio alerts, prompting fears that discreet recording may become impossible to miss.
BRUSSELS, European privacy regulators have recommended that smart-glasses makers fit their products with transparency measures, including flashing lights and audio alerts, so people nearby know when recording has begun. The idea has pleased anyone who dislikes being filmed without warning, along with those who feel lunch benefits from the distant approach of a small emergency vehicle.
Under the emerging system, anyone wearing recording glasses would need to signal before filming the world around them. A light would flash. An alert would sound. The wearer would then become the café, train carriage or sandwich queue’s most visibly accountable person, if only for a moment.
“The key principle is that nobody should be surprised by a camera,” said Mirella Voss, deputy coordinator of the European Office for Preventive Beeping. “They should instead experience a brief, unmistakable moment of technological theatre.”
“At last, technology will announce its intentions loudly and shine a light at the witnesses.”
That leaves the manufacturers with the delicate matter of deciding how much warning counts as warning. One prototype reportedly uses a tiny blue lamp. Another has been imagined with a rotating amber beacon and the phrase “Recording may commence after the area has been emotionally prepared.” A third offers a soft chime for ordinary filming, then a brass band when the person being recorded has previously said they value privacy.
The effect would reach well beyond the hardware. Someone trying to take a discreet photograph of a pastry would first have to notify the pastry, the shop assistant and three nearby strangers. Those caught on camera would have time to arrange their faces, ask for the legal basis of the image, and consider whether European law still recognises their left side as the good one.
Pieter Klem, senior adviser to the Committee for Sensible Headwear, called the recommendations the start of a new era in personal recording. “At last, technology will be able to do what people have been doing for centuries,” he said. “Announce its intentions loudly, shine a light at the witnesses and proceed anyway.”
There are limits, apparently. The guidance does not require every pair of smart glasses to resemble a miniature airport runway tomorrow morning. Still, the quiet, uncertain moment when nobody can tell whether they are being recorded will be harder to preserve, especially if a warning siren can be made compatible with noise-cancelling headphones.
For now, bystanders can expect clearer information and louder cafés. A person adjusting their spectacles may soon prompt a coordinated response from the next table. The European dream remains privacy, provided enough notification has been issued for everybody to hear about it.