Do We Have a Right Not to Be Recorded in Public?

On August 11, 2026, it was reported that Meta smart glasses would not be permitted in courts in England and Wales. Unauthorized photography and filming are prohibited in court buildings. Smartphones may sometimes be brought inside on the condition that they are not used to record; smart glasses, by contrast, are to be left at the entrance and returned when the wearer leaves.

Four days earlier, the Australian government had asked its Privacy Commissioner to give priority to examining the privacy consequences of the spread of smart glasses. The Attorney-General explained that these devices can be used less conspicuously than conventional cameras, making it harder for people to realize that they are being recorded, with particular concern for women and children.

Smart glasses have clear benefits: translation, navigation, assistance for blind and low-vision users, and hands-free recording. A light illuminates during recording, and manufacturers have included mechanisms intended to prevent tampering. Why, then, are courts, restaurants, theatres, and event venues increasingly banning them?

The objection that smartphones already contain cameras, and that singling out glasses may be an overreaction to a new technology, is reasonable. People in public are already visible to many others. CCTV, dashcams, and news cameras are everywhere.

Yet smart glasses do more than make a camera smaller. They reduce the time available for the person being filmed to notice the recording, turn away, object, or leave.

The central claim of this essay is:

Entering public space means consenting to enter other people's fields of vision. It does not mean consenting to every stage of recording, storage, identification, search, and distribution.

I will call the structure in which only the camera wearer controls when recording begins, what is kept, how it is edited, and where it is published—while the subject may not even be able to tell whether recording is taking place—the asymmetry of the lens.

1. What happened—the target of the ban is not “glasses”

HM Courts & Tribunals Service, which administers courts in England and Wales, said Meta smart glasses would not be permitted because clear restrictions apply to taking photographs and video in courts and tribunals. According to news reports, courts in New York State have adopted a similar measure to prevent covert recording.

The point is not that an object becomes dangerous merely because it is shaped like a pair of glasses. Courts bring together witnesses, defendants, victims, jurors, and confidential material. A device whose recording status is difficult to recognize can threaten both procedural fairness and personal safety.

Restrictions have also spread to restaurants, pubs, and theatres in the United Kingdom. These venues do not ordinarily handle secrets as sensitive as those in a courtroom. Still, people enter them to eat, talk, or watch a performance—not to become raw footage for a stranger's video.

The Australian government's intervention likewise focuses less on the existence of a camera than on the low visibility of the recording act. The present dispute is therefore not simply whether cameras should be prohibited. It is how to preserve the subject's capacity to choose when a camera loses the social signals that used to announce it.

2. Is being seen by a person the same as being recorded by a machine?

The strongest defense of smart glasses is straightforward:

Anyone can look at anyone else in public. The camera in the glasses merely records that gaze.

But human vision and digital recording differ in at least four ways.

Persistence of memory

Human memory is incomplete. It fades and changes over time. Video can be replayed indefinitely. A fleeting expression, a drunken moment, or a conversation with one's child can outlast the period in which the person would want it remembered.

Reproducibility

A witness's memory usually remains inside that person. Data can be copied without practical limit. Once copies exist, even the original camera operator may be unable to stop their circulation.

Searchability and identifiability

Footage can be linked to time, location, voices, and faces. As facial recognition and search technology improve, “a stranger near the station” can become a named individual with an employer and social-media profiles.

The invisible audience

The person looking at us with ordinary eyes is usually present. The audience for a recording is not. It might be a friend several hours later, an employer, school, police agency, or millions of strangers years later.

The difference between seeing and recording is therefore not merely an emotional aversion to technology. It is a structural difference in the duration, range, linkability, and audience of information.

3. Is public space a place without privacy?

We often divide the home into private space and roads or stations into public space, then say that no one can expect privacy in public.

But that statement combines two different meanings.

The first is that in public we must accept the possibility of being seen by others. That is true. A person walking on a pavement cannot demand a right to remain outside every other person's field of vision.

The second is that anyone who goes outside has accepted every possible use of information about them. That conclusion does not follow.

Being seen playing with one's child in a park, being filmed, having one's name attached through facial recognition, being edited into a sexualized post, and being stored in an advertising database are not the same event.

Publicness is not a blank cheque for information use.

Public space may actually depend on strangers agreeing not to know everything about one another. We do not stare at the screen another passenger is reading. We do not record a nearby conversation simply because we can hear it. We do not automatically turn a person who trips and falls into content.

This restraint—seeing without extracting everything that can be extracted—sustains the anonymity of city life.

4. A history of privacy—new cameras have repeatedly broken old boundaries

One of the canonical texts on privacy is Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis's 1890 article “The Right to Privacy.” They were responding to instantaneous photography and mass newspaper circulation, which allowed private life to escape the control of the person living it.

The idea often summarized as a “right to be let alone” did not arrive fully formed before the camera. When recording technology outran existing social norms, law and philosophy had to articulate a boundary after it had already been disturbed.

The confusion surrounding smart glasses follows a similar pattern.

Smartphone photography involves gestures: raising a device, pointing it, and looking at the screen. These signals are imperfect, but they announce that recording may be about to begin. The subject can hide their face, speak up, or leave.

An eyeglass camera dissolves that gesture into ordinary looking. Even an indicator light may be hard to notice because of distance, lighting, or unfamiliarity with the device.

What technological development has taken away is not only privacy. It has taken away the opportunity to negotiate before a recording begins.

5. Sartre—the self who is seen is not mine alone to determine

In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre analyzes the experience of becoming an object for another person through that person's gaze.

When I act alone, I experience the world from my own center. When I become aware that someone is watching me, I also become an object situated in their world. I cannot fully control how I appear there.

That anxiety predates cameras. Smart glasses, however, add another layer.

Is the other person merely looking at me, or recording me? Will the image remain only on the device, be uploaded to the cloud, be analyzed by AI, or be shown to someone else? I do not know.

The anxiety of being seen becomes the anxiety of not knowing in whose world, and for how long, I am being made into an object.

A recording indicator is therefore more than etiquette. It is a condition that allows the other person to understand their situation and choose how to act.

6. Bentham and Foucault—the possibility of recording can change behavior

Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, a circular prison in which a central watchtower could observe every cell. Prisoners could not know the precise moments when they were being watched. They would therefore regulate themselves on the assumption that surveillance might be continuous.

Michel Foucault recast this structure as a model of power in modern society. The essential point is not that the observer watches at every moment. It is that people internalize the possibility of being watched and begin to supervise themselves.

Imagine a public sphere in which smart glasses are common and no one can tell who is recording.

• People avoid political discussion in cafés.
• A parent becomes excessively self-conscious when correcting a child, afraid that a short clip will strip away the context.
• Someone near a hospital or support center hides their face to avoid being recognized.
• Workers hesitate to attend a demonstration or union meeting.

Even when no recording is misused, the possibility of recording changes conduct. This chilling effect is difficult to capture if we count only completed, individual privacy violations.

Nor is the problem symmetrical. A citizen's recording of an authority can document police violence or corruption. An employer, stalker, or hate group can also use recording to follow someone in a vulnerable position. The same camera has a different meaning depending on who records whom and within what relation of power.

7. Nissenbaum—privacy is not secrecy but an appropriate flow of information

Philosopher Helen Nissenbaum does not define privacy simply as keeping information unknown. What matters is whether information flows in a way appropriate to its setting—what she calls contextual integrity.

A patient gives bodily information to a physician. A pupil submits work to a teacher. Family members reveal vulnerability to one another. Privacy does not vanish merely because information has been shared. Norms still govern who may receive it, for what purpose, and under what conditions.

The same idea applies in public space.

Being visible to other customers in a restaurant belongs to the context. Secretly recording their conversation, attaching names to faces, and publishing it for another purpose normally does not.

In a courtroom, observation may be allowed to preserve open justice while recording is restricted to protect witnesses and the integrity of proceedings. At a protest, we must distinguish the public value of journalistic documentation from the danger of automatically identifying participants for surveillance.

The strength of this theory is that it does not force every situation onto a single public/private line.

8. Kant—may we treat another person as nothing but material for a post?

Immanuel Kant argued that humanity should never be treated merely as a means, but always also as an end.

Recording someone does not invariably instrumentalize them. Family photographs, journalism, art, and evidence of wrongdoing can have legitimate purposes. The problem arises when we ignore the other person's will, the context, and foreseeable harm, and use them solely as material for views, laughter, sexual curiosity, or data collection.

The discomfort of covert filming is not caused only by the disclosure of a secret. It can also come from the experience of being treated not as a person with purposes of one's own, but as material that the camera operator may freely insert into theirs.

Yet if consent were an absolute precondition, some public-interest recording would become impossible. A person documenting corruption, violence, discrimination, or danger cannot always wait for the subject's permission.

The Kantian question is therefore not only, “Did you obtain consent in advance?” It is also:

Is the purpose one that could be explained to the person being filmed? Were that person's rights and objections considered as far as circumstances allowed?

9. Mill—what kind of harm can justify limiting freedom to record?

Under John Stuart Mill's harm principle, the principal justification for coercively restricting individual liberty is the prevention of harm to others.

Recording implicates freedom of expression, journalism, art, and personal documentation. A broad ban on cameras in public space would weaken oversight of power and the preservation of history. Mere discomfort at being visible cannot justify prohibiting every camera.

But harm is not limited to bodily injury.

• A stalker discovers someone's location.
• A clip is sexualized or used for harassment.
• Medical treatment, religious practice, or political activity is exposed.
• Images of a child circulate for years.
• A recording influences testimony or a jury.
• Fear of constant recording chills speech and association.

Where these risks are high, freedom to record can be limited according to the place and the function involved.

Mill's framework points neither to complete freedom nor to complete prohibition. It requires us to compare the type, probability, and severity of harm with the freedoms a restriction would sacrifice.

10. We must not ignore the benefits of smart glasses

Convenience is not trivial when regulation is being designed.

A blind or low-vision user can receive a description of text and objects ahead. Foreign-language signs can be translated. A worker can consult instructions while keeping both hands free. A parent can record a child's fleeting moment. A victim can preserve evidence of violence or an accident immediately.

The eyeglass form itself can create accessibility and safety. A blanket ban burdens not only abusers but also people who depend on assistive functions.

It may also appear inconsistent to permit smartphones while prohibiting only glasses.

Regulation, however, should focus less on the device's shape than on the following factors:

1. Can others tell when recording begins?
2. Can recording be refused in that setting?
3. Where is the data sent?
4. How long is it kept?
5. Are faces or voices identified?
6. Is it distributed to third parties?

The special problem with smart glasses is that all these processes can occur behind an appearance indistinguishable from ordinary looking.

11. The problem is not a photograph but the entire “capture circuit”

We tend to debate whether a camera is on or off. Turning a person into data, however, occurs in stages.

Stage	Act	Central issue
1	Looking	Ordinary public perception
2	Recording	Can the subject notice?
3	Storing	Duration, location, and leakage
4	Analyzing	Inferring face, voice, emotion, or attributes
5	Linking	Connecting identity, location, and social accounts
6	Distributing	Context collapse and unlimited audiences
7	Reusing	Advertising, training data, policing, or another purpose

Call this the capture circuit.

A translation function processed only on the device and never stored is not ethically equivalent to a function that sends a face to the cloud, identifies it, and retains it permanently, even if both operate through the same pair of glasses.

Instead of granting or refusing permission to the device as a single block, regulation should ask where in this circuit a connection ought to be broken.

12. Is a “right not to be recorded” absolute?

It is difficult to defend an absolute right to refuse every appearance in every recording made in public.

News organizations document disasters and demonstrations. Citizens record police conduct. Shops use security cameras. A tourist photographs a street and happens to include passersby. If each act required prior permission from every visible person, important public activity could not function.

What we need, then, is not only a property-like rule under which I can veto every image that includes me.

A more realistic right would be a bundle that includes:

• the right to know that recording is taking place;
• the right to refuse recording in sensitive settings;
• the right to refuse facial recognition and personal identification;
• the right to restrict storage and secondary use;
• the right to request deletion or redress after harmful publication; and
• the right to an explanation of who holds which data.

This is less a right never to be photographed than a right to participate in setting the conditions under which a person is converted into data.

13. Seven tests for restoring the lost negotiation over recording

When deciding whether smart glasses should be allowed, we can ask seven questions.

1. Visibility

Can even someone unfamiliar with the device tell that it is recording? Can a light be supplemented by sound, a screen, or signs posted by the venue?

2. Refusability

Can the subject object or avoid the recording zone? Does refusing mean losing access to an essential service?

3. Contextual fit

Courts, hospitals, schools, changing rooms, restaurants, and streets have different expectations about information flow. Is recording necessary for the purpose of this place?

4. Minimization

Does the purpose really require stored video? Could it be achieved through on-device or temporary processing, or automatic blurring?

5. Identification limits

Must the image be linked to a face, name, or location history? Can facial recognition be disabled by default?

6. Distribution control

Who can receive the recording, and how long will it be kept? Does the design protect people after capture—for example, by automatically blurring third-party faces before posting?

7. Redress

Do reporting, deletion, evidence-preservation, and appeal procedures actually work when someone is covertly filmed or harmed by a post?

Failure to satisfy all seven tests does not automatically require prohibition. They form a sliding scale: the more sensitive the place and the more serious the risk, the higher the standard should be.

14. What should design and institutions do?

Practical measures operate on three levels.

Product design

• Make the recording indicator physically difficult to cover.
• Stop recording if the indicator is obstructed or broken.
• Disable facial recognition by default.
• Prefer on-device processing and short retention.
• Before publication, detect third parties and children and prompt the user to blur them.

Rules for places

• Prohibit recording by default in courts, changing rooms, and examination rooms.
• Require restaurants and theatres to state their policy at the entrance.
• Provide reasonable accommodation for accessibility functions, including modes that do not preserve recordings.
• Create exceptions for journalism, whistleblowing, and evidence of violence.

Law and redress

• Clearly regulate covert sexual recording, stalking, and facial recognition.
• Distinguish responsibility for capture from responsibility for publication and distribution.
• Give victims a rapid procedure for requesting removal.
• Require companies to explain retention periods, human access, and use for model training.

The important thing is not to personify a technology as either a good tool or a bad one. We can preserve its benefits while severing the dangerous connections in the capture circuit.

15. Conclusion—who owns public space?

Public space belongs neither solely to the recorder nor solely to the person who wishes not to be recorded.

People need freedom to look, speak, and document in public. They also need freedom to talk, rest, make mistakes, and meet others without fearing that they are constantly being converted into searchable data.

Smart glasses force us to ask more than where privacy begins and ends.

Is public space a place where everyone may extract as much as possible from everyone else? Or is it a shared place made possible by strangers granting one another a degree of opacity?

No one has a right to be invisible to every other person in public. But neither does being seen impose an obligation to be permanently stored, identified, detached from context, and distributed.

Ordinary life has value precisely because much of it does not enter history, cannot be searched, and disappears where it happened.

The answer is not to extinguish every camera. It is to restore, through visible signals, rules for places, data minimization, and meaningful redress, the negotiation that technology has erased: “I am recording now.” “I object.” “For that purpose, I agree.”

FAQ

Is there legally no privacy at all in public space?

Not necessarily. The details differ across legal systems, but even in public, the method of filming, tracking, facial recognition, publication, defamation, and invasion of private life may all matter. Entering another person's sight is not equivalent to consenting to every use of one's data.

Smartphones also have cameras. Why single out smart glasses?

Smartphones are not inherently safe. Pointing and raising one, however, often signals that recording is taking place. With smart glasses, ordinary eye contact and recording are harder to distinguish, leaving the subject less time to respond.

Is a recording light sufficient?

It is important, but not sufficient. Its size, brightness, and resistance to obstruction matter, as do retention, cloud transmission, facial recognition, third-party access, and deletion procedures.

Would restrictions also prevent citizens from recording crime or police misconduct?

They should not do so indiscriminately. Recording authority and preserving evidence of harm have great public value. Rules should protect public-interest exceptions while minimizing identification and long-term storage of irrelevant third parties.

What about accessibility functions for blind and low-vision users?

A blanket ban may create serious disadvantages. Reasonable accommodation can combine accessibility with privacy through on-device processing that is not stored, modes permitting only specific functions, and verification by staff.

NOW IN QUESTION

When the person in front of you wears smart glasses, is the only thing you need to know whether the frame contains a camera?

Or can you stand as an equal in the same public space only when you also know whether it is recording now, who will see the result, when it will be deleted, and whether you may refuse?

References

• Meta glasses banned from courts in England and Wales (The Guardian, August 11, 2026)
• Albanese Government raises privacy concerns over ‘smart glasses’ (Attorney-General of Australia, August 7, 2026)
• Privacy settings for Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses (Meta)
• Privacy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Dignity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Helen Nissenbaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life, Stanford University Press, 2010.
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1943.
• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975.
• Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 1785.
• John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.