Hamburg's parliament voted to keep smart glasses off the city's public transit and out of its public pools. The motion began as a proposal in July, after residents were filmed without being asked. One of them was a woman near Alster Lake who had no idea it was happening. A representative for Hamburg's Green Party said that video went onto social media and was watched thousands of times. The account of the vote is Euractiv's, and it is the only one.
Bans on these glasses aren't new. New York State barred them from its entire court system, and restaurants and pubs in the UK have put up their own signs. Every one of those is a room somebody controls, with a door and usually a person standing at it. A tram is not that. Hamburg has taken a rule written for buildings you are let into and applied it to the ones you pass through on the way to work.
The second half of the motion reaches further than the city. Hamburg is asking Berlin for rules covering all of Germany, and the thing it wants stopped by name is face recognition running on a pair of glasses. Nothing on sale does that today. In June, Wired found unreleased face recognition code sitting inside Meta's AI app, which is the thing German lawmakers now want ruled out before it ships.
Hamburg isn't alone in looking at this. Norway is weighing its own limits on face recognition in glasses, and in Germany campaigners have already lodged a criminal complaint over the same devices. Meta is separately defending a class action in the United States over using people's videos to train its AI. A class action is a lawsuit brought on behalf of a group. Some of those videos went to human contractors to watch.
The same day the motion passed, HTC put its Vive Eagle glasses on sale in Europe.
Say "stop filming" near a pair and the recording stops. They won't record at all unless somebody is wearing them, and HTC says it has gone to some trouble to stop the recording light being switched off. That is a company writing the objection into the hardware on the morning a city wrote it into the transit rules.
What Hamburg has not done is take anything off shelves. The glasses stay legal to buy and legal to own, and the line falls on where you are allowed to wear them. A woman at a lake got a city to draw it.