As smart glasses’ popularity grows, so too does the list of places where you’re not allowed to use them. There are courts, of course, including every single one in New York State, parts of cruise ships, and during tests like the SATs—and as significant those bans are, the U.K. is taking things a step further.
Smart glasses are now being partially or wholly banned in popular venues across the U.K., including by the owners of some pretty popular pubs and restaurants, according to The Guardian. Among them is the pub chain Wetherspoons, which has about 800 locations across England and Ireland.
Here’s what the founder of Wetherspoons, Tim Martin, told The Guardian about the decision:
“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.”
It’s a fairly tame explanation to be sure, and not adversarial, but it still speaks volumes. Phones, for instance, aren’t banned from Wetherspoon pubs even though they can obviously be used to secretly record people. The implication is that smart glasses aren’t just capable of recording people discreetly: they’re expressly made to do so. Martin doesn’t say that you won’t be able to walk in wearing smart glasses, but he does make it clear that if you use them, you’d be violating pub rules.
Wetherspoons isn’t alone in its aversion to smart glasses, either. As The Guardian reports, Jeremy King, who owns popular high-end restaurants in London, is also urging diners not to wear smart glasses in his establishments at all, whether they’re recording or not, telling the publication: “I would never knowingly allow any invasion of guest privacy other than with the eyes we were born with.”
On one hand, smart glasses bans in pubs and restaurants are more of what we’ve already been seeing, but they also feel like an escalation. It’s one thing to prohibit smart glasses during testing or in courts, which are more controlled and specific scenarios, where they could theoretically be used to cheat or, you know, subvert justice. But bars are restaurants? Those are pretty open situations where technically anyone is allowed to walk in, and generally speaking, places where people go a lot.
Whether these rules are enforceable is another question entirely, but the sentiment is pretty obvious, and it’s not a positive one. Plus, would you really want to be that guy at the pub?
