The interesting thing about smart glasses is that the more popular they get, the more unpopular they get at the same time. Case in point: Philadelphia’s recent decision to ban smart glasses outright in court.
As reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania announced that starting next week, all forms of AI glasses or glasses with cameras will be banned in court. A court representative tells the paper, “Since these glasses are difficult to detect in courtrooms, it was determined they should be banned from the building.”
According to the Inquirer’s report, a motivating reason behind the ban has to do specifically with witness intimidation. Since smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses have cameras on them, they could theoretically be used to record jurors and identify them out of court, though, to my knowledge, there are no confirmed cases of that happening yet.
To put it mildly, not allowing smart glasses in court just makes sense. There are loads of ways smart glasses could influence the judicial process, and if recent accounts are any indication, they already have. Just this month, a man in a London court was caught wearing a pair, which he was using to have answers fed to him in real time during cross-examination—well, semi-real time at least. According to the judge, the man appeared to “pause quite a bit,” which was apparently a giveaway that something was amiss.
Just because courts are an obvious place where smart glasses should not be allowed doesn’t mean it’ll actually prevent people from wearing them, though. As the Inquirer reports, there are no current plans to screen people as they enter court to determine whether the glasses they’re wearing are indeed equipped with a camera, a display, or some form of AI.
And even if there were, you’d need to instruct court security on what to look for in the first place. While some pairs are obviously tech-equipped, like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, which have visible cameras on them, others, like Even Realities’ Even G2 glasses, have a display but no speakers or cameras. And what if you concealed the camera with a sticker or some other kind of cover, but are still able to look at a screen or receive audio discreetly? What I’m trying to say is that it’s more complicated than you might initially assume.
While the ban in Philadelphia isn’t the first of its kind—Hawaii and Wisconsin have their own, and Colorado is considering one—it’s just one way that scrutiny is being raised on smart glasses in sensitive environments, including academia and places like cruise liners, where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. And with even more scrutiny coming from some of the highest levels of public office, I wouldn’t bet on seeing policies or laws around smart glasses getting more permissive.
So, if you planned on wearing smart glasses to your next court appearance, whether to gain an edge or because you really want to listen to some tunes while stuff gets litigated in front of your eyes, I would suggest, um… not. To no one’s surprise, Mark Zuckerberg’s entourage may not have been the best example of how to compose yourself during a legal proceeding.
