No country has yet banned smart glasses outright. But the list of places you can’t wear them is growing faster than the list of places you can, and the regulators watching from the sidelines are running out of patience.
In the past twelve months, courts, exam halls, military bases, conventions and entire US states have introduced restrictions on smart glasses. The European Union’s data protection watchdog is drafting a report that could lead to the most significant regulatory action yet. And in the UK, a public petition is calling for an outright ban on sales.
This is where things stand, country by country.
United States
Generally, smart glasses can be worn freely in the US. However, New York State has banned them from being used in any of its courts. Smart glasses with recording capabilities could be seen as an attempt to intimidate those involved in a case, and some cases contain sensitive private information where unauthorised recordings could impose serious risks.
New York is the most high-profile example but not an isolated one. Other states have introduced less widespread bans in courts — including Philadelphia, Hawaii and North Carolina.
The US military has also weighed in. The US Air Force includes in its rules for service members that they are “unauthorised to wear mirrored lenses or smart glasses with photo, video or artificial intelligence capabilities while in uniform.”
Outside official institutions, private organisations are moving independently. Attendees of major hacker conference DEF CON 34 have been barred from wearing Meta glasses or similar, with organizers arguing the recording light some glasses offer isn’t the most obvious indicator of recording.
United Kingdom
In the UK, courts don’t explicitly ban smart glasses, though after one person was coached by their glasses’ AI mid-trial, their usage is generally advised against. There are also recording restrictions in UK courts, so while glasses aren’t explicitly banned, using them to record would be against the rules — the same as it would be for using a phone or regular camera.
Companies like Monopoly Events have banned camera glasses from their Comic-Cons after secret filming complaints, and there’s a petition to the Government to ban the sale and promotion of smart glasses in the country. Whether that petition gains enough signatures to trigger a parliamentary debate remains to be seen, but it signals genuine public unease that legislators will find increasingly difficult to ignore.
European Union
The EU represents the most significant regulatory threat to the smart glasses industry. The European Data Protection Board is currently drafting a report on smart glasses, expected to land in the coming months. The EDPB’s recommendations carry weight across all 27 member states, and a finding that existing GDPR frameworks already cover camera-equipped glasses could trigger enforcement action without any new legislation being required.
Individual member states are already moving. Germany’s data protection authority commissioner has warned camera glasses could be banned under existing laws prohibiting recording devices hidden in everyday objects. The Netherlands’ digital rights activists have expressed frustration at smart glasses’ ability to record people without their knowledge, while France’s privacy regulator, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, has highlighted the privacy risks camera glasses pose.
The EU’s GDPR framework is the most powerful data protection legislation in the world, and Meta has already been fined billions under it for other practices. If the EDPB concludes that camera-equipped glasses constitute covert recording devices under existing law, the consequences for the smart glasses industry in Europe could be immediate and severe.
South Korea
South Korea has introduced a different kind of ban, specifically restricting smart glasses access in exam halls after cases of students being caught trying to cheat using intelligent eyewear. Given the extraordinary importance of South Korea’s College Scholastic Ability Test — where results determine university placement and, by extension, career trajectory — the ban is less about privacy than about academic integrity. But it illustrates that the concerns about smart glasses extend well beyond recording.
What would actually fix this
The bans and restrictions share a common thread: they are responses to a specific problem the hardware manufacturers have not yet solved. People around the person wearing the glasses don’t know when recording is happening, don’t know what is being done with footage, and have no way to opt out.
An obvious fix would be to make smart glasses much more obvious when recording — perhaps brighter camera lights, a loud audible camera sound when snapping a photo, some kind of audio indicator when video is being recorded. For users, better control over what is and isn’t accessed by smart glasses makers when using their tech, and more certainty about which images are shared.
Apple appears to have taken this seriously. Its forthcoming N50 glasses — confirmed for a WWDC 2027 reveal — are being built with privacy as “priority No. 1,” including tamper-proof recording indicators and a possible option to ship without recording capability at all.
Meta has moved more reactively. The company shipped a tamper-resistant recording LED on its Ray-Ban glasses this year after reports that users were covering the light to record covertly. Samsung has not yet published a camera data policy ahead of its Galaxy Glasses autumn launch.
Even Realities took the most direct approach: it removed the camera entirely. Its G2 smart glasses have no recording capability by design — a decision that allows them to go places Meta’s glasses cannot, and that is increasingly looking like a commercial advantage rather than a compromise.
The window is narrowing
The smart glasses industry is in a race between two timelines. The first is the timeline of consumer adoption — Samsung, Snap and Meta are all launching or expanding this autumn in the hope of driving the category into the mainstream. The second is the timeline of regulation — courts, governments and data protection authorities are moving toward restrictions that could fundamentally constrain where and how smart glasses can be used.
Which timeline wins will be determined largely by what the industry does in the next twelve months. The technology exists to make recording obvious, consent manageable and data handling transparent. Whether the companies building these devices choose to implement it before regulators force them to will define whether smart glasses become a mainstream technology or a contested one.
The bans are not the end of the story. They are a warning about how the story could end.