Paris Prosecutors Open a Criminal Probe Into Smart Glasses Used to Film Women

What Paris prosecutors are investigating is the recording: at least one criminal probe is open into suspected sexual harassment over smart glasses used to film women in public without consent. That is the whole of what has been reported so far: a city, a device, and a charge. Consent is now the centre of a criminal file, not the gadget that captured her.

One city’s prosecutors settle nothing outside their jurisdiction, and a file like this runs for months before anything is decided. The direction still counts, even from a single city’s office. Until a lens could hide in a spectacle frame, walking down a pavement meant going unobserved, and that assumption has now failed for everyone at once. Naming that failure as harm is what a court will eventually have to test.

For anyone who builds or sells face-worn cameras, the reading is blunt: consent is the whole product, and the fine print is how a stranger finds out that a lens is running. A wearer who cannot say who is being recorded, and a passer-by who cannot tell that they are, is a design failure with a legal bill attached.

Skip it if you have no part in building, selling, or regulating them. I want no camera in my own frames, and a pair I wore would need an indicator a stranger could read from across a table. For everyone else, the next pair of camera glasses on a table gets one test before any money moves: make the seller point at the light a passer-by would see.