UK Courts Bar Meta's Camera Smart Glasses Over Covert-Recording Fears

UK Courts Bar Meta's Camera Smart Glasses Over Covert-Recording Fears

You can carry a smartphone into an English courtroom. You cannot, as of this week, carry a pair of Meta's camera glasses. That distinction — a phone in your pocket is fine, but a camera on your face is not — captures how a wave of cheap, wearable AI is forcing institutions to rewrite rules that were built for a device you have to hold up and point.

His Majesty's Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS), the body responsible for every criminal, civil and family court in England and Wales, confirmed on August 11 that camera-equipped smart glasses will be confiscated from anyone entering a court building and returned when they leave. The move, first reported by The Guardian, singles out Meta's Ray-Ban glasses by name but applies to any eyewear capable of recording.

"There are clear restrictions on taking images or videos within courts and tribunals which is why the use of Meta glasses is prohibited," a court spokesperson told The Guardian.

An old rule, a new enforcement problem

Filming inside a court building without permission is not merely against the rules in England and Wales — it is a crime, prosecutable as contempt of court. That prohibition has stood for years, comfortably enforced against the obvious act of raising a phone or camera. HMCTS already carves out an exception for smartphones: you may bring one in, provided you do not use it to record anything. The behaviour is self-policing because it is visible. A person filming a witness has to hold a device up and point it, and everyone in the room can see them do it.

Smart glasses collapse that visibility. Meta's cameras sit in the frame, activated by a tap or a voice command, and can capture an entire proceeding while the wearer appears to be doing nothing at all. There is no arm raised, no screen glowing, no telltale posture. That is precisely why HMCTS declined to extend the smartphone courtesy to glasses: a promise not to record is meaningless when no one can tell whether you are recording. As one commentator put it, you cannot surreptitiously strap a phone to your face.

The concern is not hypothetical for British courts. Earlier this year, a claimant in a High Court dispute over the directorship of a property development company was ordered to remove his smart glasses after the judge grew suspicious of long pauses before his answers and interference audible from the witness stand. The court concluded he had been "assisted or coached in his replies to questions put to him during cross examination" — allegedly fed answers through the glasses' speakers and a linked phone. The claimant denied it. The camera was never the issue in that case, but it hardened judicial wariness about what the devices can do inside a courtroom.

A device selling faster than the rules can follow

Meta has an answer to the covert-recording charge. The glasses display a visible white LED whenever the camera is active, and the company has built in anti-tampering measures meant to stop users from covering or disabling the indicator. Meta declined to comment to The Guardian on the court ban specifically.

The trouble is scale and subtlety. Essilor Luxottica, Meta's manufacturing partner, sold roughly 7 million pairs of the glasses in 2025, and a pinprick LED does little to reassure people across a courtroom, a pub or a train carriage. In the UK the backlash has spread well beyond the judiciary: the pub chain Wetherspoons, along with high-end restaurants, members' clubs, theatres, music venues and comic conventions, have moved to restrict the glasses, which some critics have taken to calling "pervert glasses." A University of Sydney study cited in coverage this week found hundreds of Instagram videos in which male "pick-up artist" creators had secretly filmed women; around 60 percent depicted behaviour the researchers classified as potential harassment, with some victims identified and doxxed.

England and Wales are not acting alone. New York's state court system recently banned smart glasses from court buildings for the same reason — to stop undetectable recording — and US federal districts including Arizona and Philadelphia have issued comparable orders. The pattern is a set of institutions arriving at the same conclusion within months of one another.

Analysis: rules built for phones meet a camera you wear

The court ban is a small policy with an outsized signal. For a decade, privacy rules in public and semi-public spaces have assumed a friction that no longer exists. Consent, in practice, was enforced by conspicuousness: you knew you might be filmed because you could see the person filming. Facial recognition, always-on capture and now AI-assisted glasses erode that assumption not by making surveillance legal but by making it invisible. The law against filming in court has not changed. What changed is that the technology defeats the social cue the law quietly relied on.

That is why HMCTS reached for a blunt instrument — confiscation at the door — rather than a nuanced use-policy. When you cannot observe compliance, the only reliable control is to keep the device out of the room entirely. Expect that logic to propagate. The venues already restricting glasses are improvising with signage and cloakroom rules, but they lack the statutory backing courts enjoy. The harder questions sit one layer up: how does a jurisdiction regulate a wearable that also functions as a prescription lens, a hearing aid or an accessibility tool, without a workable way to distinguish the camera model from the innocuous one at a glance?

What to watch next

Watch whether HMCTS publishes formal, uniform guidance rather than leaving enforcement to individual court staff — inconsistent door checks are the obvious weak point. Watch, too, whether Meta responds with a hardware or software "venue mode" that verifiably disables the camera, the kind of concession that could let banned devices back through the door. And watch the regulators: the UK's Information Commissioner's Office and equivalent bodies elsewhere have so far said little about wearable capture in public space. If glasses of this kind keep selling by the millions, the courtroom confiscation bin may look less like an outlier and more like a preview of how consent gets enforced everywhere the AI camera goes.