Smart glasses arrived in courtrooms before the law was ready for them. New York has now decided it has seen enough.
On July 20, 2026, the New York State Unified Court System banned all smart glasses from its facilities — covering more than 1,240 state, county, city, town and village courts across 62 counties. New York is the first US state to impose a blanket smart-glasses ban across its entire court system.
The ban applies to everyone entering a courthouse — litigants, attorneys, witnesses, family members, court employees and members of the public alike. Anyone with smart glasses must hand them over to uniformed court officers for safekeeping before entering. Even prescription smart glasses are included, with signs at courthouse doors advising people to bring a regular pair instead.
Why courts specifically
The official reason is straightforward. The ban is intended to prevent the surreptitious recording of court proceedings in violation of the New York State Civil Rights Law. Courtrooms handle some of the most sensitive proceedings in public life — sexual assault cases, child victims, witness testimony, jury deliberations — and the ability to record anyone present without their knowledge, using something that looks like an ordinary pair of glasses, is a threat to that environment that courts have decided they cannot manage case by case.
Jane Manning, director of Women’s Equal Justice, said: “Courthouses are home to all types of cases with sometimes very sensitive witnesses such as sexual assault survivors, child victims, and witnesses who not only their privacy might be compromised, but whose safety might be compromised.”
A pattern forming across the US
New York is the highest-profile example but not an isolated one. Other states have also banned smart glasses, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Philadelphia’s First Judicial District banned all smart and AI-integrated eyewear from its buildings in March 2026, with criminal contempt possible for violations. A federal court in Hawaii banned smart glasses from all courthouse areas in June 2025. The direction is clear: where courts lead on recording technology, broader restrictions tend to follow.
The Meta dimension
The bans are happening in the context of a wider privacy debate focused heavily on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, which hold roughly 69% of the smart glasses market. The ACLU and 75 other organisations wrote an open letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in April 2026, urging the company to halt its plans to deploy facial recognition features on its smart glasses, calling the technology “a serious threat to privacy and civil liberties.”
Meta has not published a data policy governing its camera use, and neither has Samsung ahead of its Galaxy Glasses fall launch. That gap is increasingly difficult to defend as regulators and institutions start filling it themselves.
The timing is pointed
Samsung’s Galaxy Glasses were officially unveiled at Unpacked in London on July 22 — just two days after New York’s ban took effect. The glasses include a built-in camera and open-ear audio, and Samsung has not yet published a camera-specific data policy. The juxtaposition was not lost on observers covering the event.
The court bans will not stop smart glasses from shipping this autumn. What they signal is that the industry’s window for self-regulation is narrowing. Every courthouse that posts a sign on its door is evidence that the question of what these devices record, and who knows about it, has moved from a tech ethics debate to a practical public policy problem. That shift tends to accelerate.