Actually useful AR needs cameras, of course, so the technology has legitimate use cases, but you'd have to be a real asshole to wear them to a bar, or a restaurant, etc. Maybe we mandate that the glasses have to have a base station dongle, and if they're more than 10 feet from the dongle, recording doesn't work without incredibly obvious annoying lights indicating that recording is on?
A cultural convention that lets people make honest mistakes, but turn it off when someone says "hey, you're recording" seems like a good solution. Just need to make it easily visible and obvious to others - you can run around in public with a big news camera on your shoulder or a tripod and you usually won't get hassled. It's just the idea of being covertly recorded, even while in public, that gets creepy.
Maybe if we weigh legitimate use cases against privacy and end up deciding that the privacy is more important, then we just don't accept those use cases?
That is: we invent new awesome life-changing technology and we just... don't use it?
Like we could have navigational AR-glasses. The wearer sees arrows on the floor where to walk. And we could choose to not let anyone wear them in public even though what they do is useful, and there aren't any real privacy issues. But people around the wearer don't know that. That's the privacy concern.
Part of it is civics. You have the right to record in public. Being in a public space means you are consenting to being recorded; it's in public. It's not always moral, classy, correct, or good, but the alternative is the erosion of the principles of free press, freedom of expression, etc.
The form factor of the camera doesn't matter. We do have different constraints, but those are pretty solidly filled out in case law. I don't believe making recording glasses illegal to wear in public would withstand constitutional scrutiny. Mandating a visible notification with a conventional color, signaling things like "on" "passive" and "recording" would be constitutional and wouldn't infringe. That said, surreptitious use would likely be legal, e.g. aftermarket modification to allow recording with no lights; first amendment issues have a high bar and all sorts of secret camera precedents being legal. This is how corrupt politicians and cops and officials get caught, all the time, and it's highly unlikely to be smart glasses that gets the people and courts to flip on 1A.
> Being in a public space means you are consenting to being recorded;
I think we all know the black/white of: you can record all you want. You can not use my face in a commercial. That idea has served us well for a century. The problem is never the recording, it's what happens to the recorded material. If you just keep it for personal use, use it for journalism? That was never a problem.
I'd argue that using the recording to send to a different continent which is then processed by humans and/or computers and this then affects me or others (E.g. changes which ad the person next to me on the train sees on their phone) is now straddling a line somewhere between the black and white of "being recorded" and "being used in a commercial". That recording wasn't just this person observing or recording in a public space. It wasn't just used for "personal use" or journalism. It's something else.
I think it's this gray area that just needs to be cleared up. What if "transmitting a recording of someone to a commercial entity that potentially does commercial things with it" was classed just as "putting my face in the TV ad"?
The GDPR (and similar) also might help (where applicable).
A cultural convention that lets people make honest mistakes, but turn it off when someone says "hey, you're recording" seems like a good solution. Just need to make it easily visible and obvious to others - you can run around in public with a big news camera on your shoulder or a tripod and you usually won't get hassled. It's just the idea of being covertly recorded, even while in public, that gets creepy.