Smart Glasses Are Coming to Every Face in India
— Can We Legislate the Colour of Their Frames Before That Happens?
Dear Shri Yadav,
Additional Director General of Police, Maharashtra Cyber
[ info.cbr-mh@mahapolice.gov.in ]
I read with interest that the Maharashtra Home Department has entrusted your
office with framing a Standard Operating Procedure for AI-powered smart
goggles, smart glasses and wearable cameras — see the Times of India report
here: Maharashtra govt appoints committee to frame rules for using AI smart
Barely a day later, BusinessLine carried a detailed piece on the same worry — a
Gujarat-based PR professional discovering she had been filmed without her
knowledge by someone wearing smart glasses, and experts flagging how hard
these devices are to police in practice. A syndicated version of that report is here:
As smartglasses go mainstream, privacy concerns grow.
One line from that report has stayed with me — a bystander quoted in it said that
while she can recognise when the glasses are recording, her grandmother or her
ten-year-old cousin probably wouldn't, because the little indicator light is so easy
to miss.
That, Sir, is exactly the gap I want to flag for your committee.
Sir , here's the problem in one line :
every wearable — glasses, watches, rings, pendants, and whatever comes next —
will soon carry a tiny camera, with or without a blinking red light to announce it. A
smartwatch or a pendant camera still has to be pointed at someone, the way a
phone does — so a wary person can at least notice the gesture. A smart glass
needs no pointing at all. The wearer only has to look, innocently, in your direction,
and there is no way for you to tell whether it is recording or simply seeing.
My suggestion, for the committee's consideration:
-
Mandatory colour-coding of the frame.
Any smart glass sold, manufactured, or gifted in India should be required to
have its visible front rim moulded in bright red plastic, and its side-arms (the
part resting on the ears) in bright yellow plastic. A camera-carrying wearable
should be recognisable at a glance, the way a police vehicle or an ambulance
is — not something a stranger has to squint at to spot a blinking LED.
-
Audio-visual recording alert, not just a light.
While a photo or video is being captured, the device should be required to
emit an audible chirp every three seconds, in addition to the blinking
indicator. A silent light can be missed in a crowd; a sound cannot.
-
Extend the same marking and alert rules to every other camera-carrying wearable
— smartwatches, rings, pendants — even though most of these will still need
to be pointed at a subject.
-
Cover AR/VR headsets under the same mandate, since they too are
migrating toward always-on cameras.
I confess I have no answer yet for smart contact lenses, which may arrive by 2030
and will defeat any frame-colour or blink-and-beep rule entirely — but that is a
problem for a later SOP.
Why this is urgent, not theoretical:
smart-glass prices are likely to fall from roughly ₹10,000 to ₹1,000 within two
years. At that price point, it is easy to foresee India's 500-odd TV news channels
each recruiting a lakh of "roving freelance citizen journalists" across a thousand
towns, handing them smart glasses, and having them walk the streets narrating
and uploading whatever they see. On the studio side, an AI-run central server
could then stitch the incoming feeds into continuous ten-second clips, splice in
advertising, and broadcast around the clock — with no human operator required.
Once that pipeline exists, the absence of an easy, physical way to tell a smart
glass is recording stops being a privacy footnote and becomes a mass-surveillance
default.
A visible colour code and an audible alert cannot stop bad actors determined to
defeat them — but they would let an ordinary citizen, including a grandmother or
a ten-year-old, know at a glance that they may be on camera, which is more than
today's tiny blinking LED offers anyone.
I would be glad to share this note more widely, and equally glad to be corrected by
your committee's technical assessment if any part of this is impractical to enforce.
With regards,
Hemen Parekh
hcp@RecruitGuru.com
Mumbai
References cited above (clickable):
- Times of India — Maharashtra govt appoints committee to frame rules for using AI smart goggles
- BusinessLine report (syndicated copy) — As smartglasses go mainstream, privacy concerns grow
- Free Press Journal — Maharashtra Forms Panel To Frame SOP For Use Of AI-Powered Smart Glasses, Wearable Devices
No comments:
Post a Comment