Privacy is the one thing everyone can't stop talking about when it comes to smart glasses. Solos just gave the conversation a new talking point: a $79 accessory called the Privacy Kit, a physical clip that covers the cameras on glasses people already own.
You take the cover off to use the camera, then clip it back on when you're done. It's surprisingly manual and low-tech for such a high-tech piece of gear, but few would argue it's a step in the wrong direction.
Meta is currently facing a lawsuit alleging that contractors reviewed footage captured by Ray-Ban Meta glasses, including intimate content, despite marketing that promised the glasses were "built for your privacy." The ACLU led a coalition of 75 organizations in a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding the company scrap its reported plans to add facial recognition to Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, calling the feature "a red line society must not cross."
Lawmakers are starting to catch up too. California introduced a bill in February that would make it a crime to secretly record someone with a wearable device inside a business, but laws elsewhere are still in early stages. Casinos ban smart glasses on the gaming floor. Schools restrict them during exams. Employers are stuck trying to write policies for a device that can record everything around it, while also worrying about labor law protections and disability accommodations for employees who need the glasses for their vision. None of these rules were built with a camera this small and this hard to spot in mind, and they're all being figured out after the fact.
One privacy attorney told Fortune the bigger risk isn't the person wearing the glasses, it's everyone else caught in frame who never agreed to be recorded and has no legal protection built for that situation. Someone built an app just to detect when smart glasses are nearby, which says plenty about how much people trust the recording light to actually do its job.
Google Glass caused the same panic over a decade ago, right down to people worrying about cameras in bathrooms. The industry never solved that problem, it just got better at shipping products despite it.
A cover you can remove and forget to put back on gives Solos something to point to when people ask how they're handling privacy. If a $79 clip is the answer the industry has landed on after years of lawsuits, coalitions, and unresolved law, that says less about privacy tech getting better and more about how low the bar still is.