Wetherspoon bans Meta smart glasses from 800 pubs over fears they enable "surreptitious surveillance"
The pub giant said it does not permit the recording of customers or employees without consent, and that “Meta glasses seem to breach this code, and common sense, by enabling surreptitious surveillance”.
It said that customers will be ordered to “turn off the cameras” if they intend to enter any of its 800+ venues.
The newest addition to Silicon Valley’s ever-evolving line of wearable tech hit the market in 2023 when Mark Zuckerberg’s company announced their collaboration with Ray-Ban.
A Wetherspoons spokesperson said on Thursday: “Like many hospitality companies, Wetherspoon has CCTV cameras for security reasons, but their use is strictly controlled by data legislation.
“Apart from that, the general code that applies in our pubs, and most pubs, is that you can’t film customers or employees without their permission.
“Meta glasses seem to breach this code, and common sense, by enabling surreptitious surveillance, so our instinct is to say turn off the cameras. This is akin to our efforts to stop audible playing of videos in our pubs, which also invades people’s space.”
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The glasses have sparked concerns around the safety of women and children in public, following a concerning rise in videos filmed using the glasses being posted online, prompting calls for them to be banned.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram - which is owned by Meta - recently reassured customers that the platform plans to remove such content from the platform, and that Meta would fight the trend “every way that we can”.
Meta also says it has a built-in failsafe against this - when the device is recording, a flashing white light appears.
Since releasing the glasses, Meta has devoted a concerted effort to shifting the conversation away from privacy and towards fashion. In an attempt to change the trajectory of the product, the company decided to collaborate with the titan of the female market: Kylie Jenner.
In July, the company announced its launch with the Kardashian Billionaire, who boasts almost 400 million followers on Instagram.
The high-tech specs boast features including audio speakers to make phone calls and listen to music, live translation for over 20 languages, visual recognition, as well as a custom-voiced Meta AI assistant voiced by Ms. Jenner herself. Prices for her collection start at £359.
‘Stalk, surveil and control’
Emma Pickering, Head of the Tech-Facilitated Abuse and Economic Empowerment Team at Refuge, said: “Refuge supports countless survivors subjected to tech-facilitated abuse every single day.
"Time and again, we see what happens when devices go to market without proper consideration of how they might be used to harm women and girls.
“It is currently far too easy for perpetrators to weaponise smart accessories, and our sector-leading Technology-Facilitated Abuse and Economic Empowerment Team is seeing the devastating consequences of this every day.
"Only recently, Refuge warned of an increase in emerging forms of abuse involving AI and wearable technology – including smart glasses – with this technology increasingly being misused by abusers to stalk, surveil and control survivors.
"It also threatens the safety of all women and girls in public, facilitating harassment, surveillance, and other abuse.
"As wearable technology becomes embedded in our lives, protections for survivors must keep pace.
"It is unacceptable for the safety and wellbeing of women and girls to be treated as an afterthought once technology has been developed and distributed. Their safety must be a foundational principle, shaping both the design of wearable technology – including features such as this one – and the regulatory frameworks that govern it.”
A Meta Spokesperson said: “People use our glasses because they’re genuinely helpful – from listening to music, to live translation or hands-free calls. For those wearing them and the people around them, trust matters. That’s why we built privacy into our AI glasses from the ground up.
“For example, every pair has a capture LED that blinks when you take a photo or video that you can save or share, it can’t be turned off, and if someone covers or damages the LED, the camera is disabled. We will keep strengthening our protections as our glasses become even more capable.”
When quizzed about what stops a Meta Glasses wearer from filming someone without their knowledge, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram at Meta, said in a previous interview: “AI glasses have cameras in them, and right here you can see that there’s a little light that lights up if someone is actually filming.
“So we can’t stop people from filming other people, but we can try to make sure that that light is on if they are filming. We now actually have the glasses basically stop working if you drill that light out, because we saw that people were trying to drill that light out.
“Plus, if you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we’ve heard of and seen, then we’re going to take the content down.
"We don’t want people to be surreptitiously taking videos of other people and harassing them and then posting them on our platform. So we’re trying to fight that every way we can.”
Politics Editor
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