// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
Here’s How Google Says It’s Making Its Smart Glasses More Private
Smart glasses have a public perception problem. People wearing Meta's popular Ray-Ban glasses have been labeled “Meta Creeps.” But it didn't start with Meta—when Google Glass launched in 2013, “Glasshole” was the word used to describe people wearing them.
It boils down to the fact that these smart glasses have cameras on them that let people record whatever’s in front of them with the push of a button. The cameras aren't easy to see, and while an indicator light activates when the glasses are recording, they're far less conspicuous than someone holding a smartphone up to record video or photos. It also doesn't help that people have tried to tamper with the LEDs and block them, and have recorded women without their consent.
But Google is on a mission to change the perception of smart glasses as socially intrusive tech. The first Android XR Intelligent Eyewear smart glasses—made in collaboration with Samsung, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster—are now available for preorder, with sales kicking off on December 10. You can read about how they work and what they can do in this separate story.
But you might be more interested in how Google is trying to separate its glasses from Meta's optics and positioning them as the more privacy-minded option to assuage public concerns.
“There's this whole feature set of AI privacy that we think is super important,” says Juston Payne, Google's senior director of product management for XR. “Ultimately, what we're trying to do here is say: Look, these are choices. These are, honestly, not hard technical problems. They're decisions. And we would like other companies to make different decisions, sort of like a bar-raising thing.”
All of the Intelligent Eyewear glasses have a power switch to turn them off completely, so you can wear them as regular glasses. They also have a recording light that illuminates when the glasses snap a photo or record a video, which is intentionally limited to 90 seconds for privacy purposes.
Here's a collection of the things Google says it's doing to make its smart glasses more private:
Payne hopes these policies and actions will encourage other companies to follow suit. “We hope that never again do glasses launch from some other company that doesn't have good algorithms built in,” he says. “That should not have happened; hopefully it doesn't happen again.”
Privacy experts I spoke with acknowledged that Google is trying not to repeat Meta's mistakes, but they point out that smart glasses are still vehicles for collecting sensitive data. Even with an indicator light, it's harder to tell when someone's recording you in public than if someone is holding out their smartphone.
Reem Suleiman, senior campaign director at the nonprofit digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, says camera-equipped glasses shouldn't be normalized in public because they are a precursor to mass surveillance and have the capacity to identify people. (This summer, Meta silently added a face-recognition code to its smart glasses and then subsequently deleted it after a WIRED report; in 2024, two Harvard students built a face-recognition tool for Meta's glasses.)