Smart glasses from Half I am disguised camerasand as such they could fall under the German law which prohibits cameras hidden inside everyday objects. The definition is of Thomas FuchsCommissioner of the Data Protection Authority of Hamburgin an interview with the station on Friday ARD. The same authority is checking whether the indicator lights integrated into the mount are sufficient to signal to those around that a recording is in progress, and is also looking at the use of the data collected for training artificial intelligence models.
The German front hardened after the revelation of HateAiddigital rights organization: the police of Potsdam collected reports from some young women who claim to have been secretly filmed, in a public swimming pool, by unknown men wearing Meta’s glasses. Since then, calls for restrictions have increased, coming together from privacy enforcers and activists. The warning is that such devices enable covert filming and fuel digital abuse.
In the Netherlands the request to ban glasses comes from Bits of Freedoma national organization for digital civil rights, which asks them to apply the same restrictions already foreseen for apps that digitally strip people, for spyware and for stalkerware. The starting point is the size of the cameras, small enough to allow a recording without the interested party noticing. “Let’s imagine everyone walking around with glasses like this: on the street you would completely lose your privacy, and in every conversation you would have to ask yourself if you were being filmed,” the organization claims. “It would have serious consequences on the sense of security and on the interaction between people. It is something that we absolutely do not want.”
In France the alarm came to May from the CNILthe national commission for information technology and freedoms, which spoke of a significant risk of “almost invisible and omnipresent” surveillance, capable of “leading to a profound transformation of our societies”. For the French guarantor, this is something different from simple consumer electronics: the ability of these devices to “capture, process and interpret data in real time, without those around them necessarily knowing it”, weighs heavily. The question that crosses the three fronts is the same, and concerns the existence of a concrete way, for those who end up in the frame, to oppose the collection and use of their personal data as European rules require.
None of the three countries have so far banned glasses. The pressure comes from data protection authorities and digital civil rights organizations, and the tools evoked are those already in force: the European regulation on the processing of personal data and, in the German case, the national rule on covert filming. Several countries believe that a more rapid intervention is needed than the one being prepared at community level and are proceeding on their own.
The community passage is entrusted to European Data Protection Boardthe body that brings together the continent’s national guarantors. Its report on smart glasses examines privacy risks and measures that can be taken at European level. It is expected by the end of the summer.
