# Police fear smart glasses in everyone's hands but their own

Source: https://idevice.com/police-fear-smart-glasses-in-everyones-hands-but-their-own
Published: 2026-09-08

> The Department of Homeland Security raised the same worry about covert recording, then started building its own pair with facial recognition.

The New York Police Department's counterterrorism unit wrote down what it thinks of smart glasses. It does not like them.

The Guardian obtained that memo, and dozens more like it from police departments across the country. According to the New York document, the ability to record covertly inside a station or a jail “could result in a security risk if proprietary information about cell layouts, camera placements, or officer patrol/site protection routines are released.” Cell layouts. Camera placements. Patrol routines. The worry is not abstract, and it is a good description of what a camera on a stranger's face actually collects.

The Department of Homeland Security lodged the same complaint through a joint counter-terrorism assessment team. According to reporting by the journalist Ken Klippenstein, DHS is also developing smart glasses of its own. The plan is to add facial recognition that would check faces against a biometric database and identify people in real time. The agency has already been identified using smart glasses to record protests.

So one agency filed a warning about being recorded and started building the glasses that do the recording.

The safeguard everyone points to is the capture LED, the small light on the front of a pair of [Meta Ray-Ban](https://idevice.com/smart-glasses/meta-ray-ban/roadmap)s that blinks while the camera is running. The Guardian found that its record is patchy. People who notice the light frequently have no idea what it is telling them. That makes it a disclosure only for the small number of people who already know the product. Meta made that design decision years ago and has never had a strong reason to revisit it.

Apple is expected to use the same approach. Our own tracking of the unreleased [Apple Glasses](https://idevice.com/smart-glasses/apple-glasses/roadmap) has an LED lighting up whenever the cameras record, drawn from six separate reports. Apple is also testing privacy protections it does not currently ship on anything. Neither of those is a stronger answer than Meta's. They are the same answer, arriving later.

What is useful about the police memos is that they were not written by privacy advocates. They were written by the people best placed to know how easy discreet recording has become. They want that capability themselves, and they have thought carefully about what it can pull out of a room. Their reasoning transfers cleanly. A hospital, a school, a locker room and a therapist's office all have layouts and routines somebody would rather not have leave the building.

Hamburg reached the same conclusion from the opposite end this month and moved to keep smart glasses out of its swimming pools and off its public transit. A city government and a counterterrorism unit rarely agree on anything about cameras.

The hardware question is settled. Glasses that record without anyone noticing exist, they cost a few hundred dollars, and they are sold in ordinary stores. Everything left is about who is allowed to wear them where, and the first institutions to write rules are the ones already wearing them.