Stop Smart Glasses is an independent UK and Ireland campaign calling for action on the mass-market sale and promotion of camera-equipped smart glasses.
The campaign has built the first UK and Ireland-wide database showing where Meta smart glasses are sold, giving people practical tools to turn concern about face-worn cameras into local, national and political action.
We support the use of smart glasses as assistive technology for disabled people. What we oppose is their mass-market normalisation as an everyday consumer product.
Open your eyes. Our right to privacy is being designed out.
This is about more than privacy
The question isn't simply whether smart glasses are useful, or whether every use of them is already unlawful.
The bigger question is:
What happens to society when cameras capable of discreetly recording the people around us become an ordinary part of what millions of people wear on their faces?
Existing protections were not designed for a world of ubiquitous, unobtrusive, networked cameras worn on people's faces. Meanwhile, increasingly sophisticated capabilities are developing faster than law, policy and social norms can adapt.
Technology shouldn't become socially normal before we've decided whether it's socially acceptable.
Once that normalisation happens, restricting the technology becomes considerably harder.
The window to act is shrinking.
A question of rights
Camera-equipped smart glasses raise questions that go far beyond the person wearing them.
- Privacy — people retain legitimate privacy interests outside their homes.
- Agency — the wearer chooses to capture. The bystander may have no meaningful choice at all.
- Control over your image — our faces and identities should not simply become raw material for other people's devices and corporate systems.
- Children's rights — children have particular privacy interests and less ability to understand or resist being recorded.
- Women and girls' safety — covert recording forms part of the wider problem of technology-facilitated abuse.
- Data protection — particularly when recordings enter corporate systems or are processed using AI.
- Biometric protection — increasingly important as wearable facial-recognition capabilities develop.
- Equality — the risks and consequences of these technologies will not necessarily be experienced equally.
- Freedom to participate in society — people should be able to attend protests, Pride, places of worship, clinics and other sensitive spaces without unreasonable fear of covert recording or identification.
- Safeguarding — particularly in environments involving children and adults at risk.
- Safety by design — foreseeable harms should be addressed before a technology becomes ubiquitous.
Privacy shouldn't end when you leave your front door.
A transfer of power
The wearer gets the technology. The company gets the profit. Everyone else loses control over when they're recorded and what happens to the footage.
That's not progress. That's a transfer of power — and we're paying for it with our privacy. Once surrendered, it will be very hard to claw back.
The campaign does not argue that every use of smart glasses is currently illegal. It argues that existing protections were not designed for a world in which millions of people may routinely wear networked cameras on their faces.
Cameras worn on faces raise questions technology companies shouldn't get to answer for society.
The government has a responsibility to protect privacy as technology changes.
Act before ubiquitous becomes inevitable
We've seen before what happens when society tries to deal with the consequences of transformative technology after mass adoption.
We waited too long with social media. We don't have to make the same mistake again.
Stop Smart Glasses exists to intervene while there is still an opportunity to decide where the boundaries should be.
Not after cameras worn on faces have become unremarkable.
Before.
The price of innovation shouldn't be your right to privacy.
Turn concern into action
The database shows where they're sold. The campaign gives people the tools to act.
Stop Smart Glasses also supports the UK Parliament petition created by Guy Holder, calling for an immediate ban on the sale and promotion of smart glasses with recording capability.
Sign the petition →Local action. National pressure. Political change.
Find where they're sold. Ask them to stop.
Take the campaign global
This starts in the UK and Ireland. But smart glasses are a global issue.
The website is open source — designed to be copied and adapted by anyone who wants to launch Stop Smart Glasses in their country.
Your face. Your image. Your identity. Your rights.
The technology should adapt to people — people should not be forced to adapt to surveillance.
Create your local site →