Starting July 20, New York will ban Meta Ray-Bans and other smart glasses from all 1,240 state courts, even though the state already bans recording of any kind inside courthouses and doesn't extend that ban to phones, arguing the recording light on smart glasses is too easy to miss despite Meta already disabling the camera if that light gets covered or tampered with. Ironically, Mark Zuckerberg's own security team wore smart glasses into a Los Angeles courtroom that already banned recording devices, and the judge threatened contempt.
Anyone can slide a phone into a pocket with the camera running, and phones aren't banned. Smart glasses get banned for being less obvious to spot, which makes how suspicious a device looks the standard instead of what it does. There's no single law behind any of it. No federal statute and almost no state statute addresses smart glasses directly, so courts, cruise lines, and gyms are each writing their own rules. Royal Caribbean bans them in casinos, spas, and medical areas across its ships. A UK gym chain banned them outright after member complaints.
That patchwork erases real accessibility use, live captioning and translation for non-native speakers and people with hearing loss, transcripts for witnesses giving technical or emotional testimony, to stop a threat that barely shows up in the record.