Violence against Women and Girls: Smart Glasses

Anna Sabine Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2026 Westminster Hall

[Anna Sabine (Frome and East Somerset) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered smart glasses and violence against women and girls.

A few months ago I was delighted, with the support of many women in the urban design industry and the Minister for Housing and Planning, to get women and girls mentioned in the national planning policy framework. Across the UK, 86% of women and girls aged 18 to 24 have experienced harassment in public spaces, and it seemed crazy to me that they were not going to be at the forefront of how we design those spaces and places.

Having won that victory just before the summer, I was horrified to see stories about AI glasses appearing all over the press. Adverts for smart glasses appeared across London. Online, celebrities sold them as a device to “stay in the moment” and enjoy “effortless connection”. A key selling point was that the glasses could be used to film discreetly. To me, that did not look like a fantastic new innovation; it looked like a device for filming women and girls without their knowledge in the very spaces we have been campaigning to make them feel welcome in. Planning policy had finally accepted that women’s safety matters in the spaces we build, but at the same moment technology was eroding women’s privacy and safety in those same spaces.

Sales of smart glasses are now soaring, and already my fears about their use are being realised. Women are reporting waking up after nights out to find that videos of them, filmed without their knowledge or consent by men wearing smart glasses, have gone viral online. The only indication anyone has that they are being filmed is a small LED in the corner of the glasses, but that is quickly disappearing, with “ghost Meta” shops offering to remove the light entirely so that no one in a public space knows they are being filmed. To me these devices not only have the potential to erode safety and privacy in public spaces, but raise really important questions about consent.

A few weeks ago, I met the campaign group Stop Smart Glasses. One of its campaigners is a secondary school teacher, and he told me that as part of his job he stands in front of teenagers and teaches them that consent must be sought proactively—that yes means yes and no means no. But increasingly those same children go home, pick up their phones and scroll on social media, where they see videos of girls who were filmed without even being asked or knowing. He pointed out the irony that if one of his female students is filmed by AI glasses in public, the onus is on her to approach the man doing the filming and ask him to stop. What are we teaching young people—that consent is something we learn in the classroom and abandon on the street?

Covert filming is not new, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) has done excellent work on tackling the problem in nightclubs and other public spaces, but smart glasses make it easier, and harder to detect and challenge. In Australia, one solution has been to ban the use of smart glasses in certain areas, such as swimming pools, but I feel that sends a message to women that they are safe only in certain places. Surely, we do not want that to become the case.

Waking up to a video of yourself online undermines perceptions of safety, but it is also a breach of privacy and raises real data protection concerns. According to Meta’s smart glasses terms of use, content captured by the glasses can be used to train Meta AI. The burden of consent allowing Meta to do that is placed on the person wearing the glasses. That means that if someone is filmed without their knowledge or permission, Meta can still use that content to train its AI, because the wearer has given de facto consent. I do not see how that squares with data protection law. GDPR says that companies need a proper reason to use our personal data, and an individual walking past someone wearing smart glasses in the street has not agreed to anything. Small discreet cameras make secret filming easier, and women and girls will be disproportionately impacted by that. More broadly, in the age of wearable tech, all of us, male or female, are losing a bit of our privacy every time we step outside. Despite that, I have heard nothing from the Government about how smart glasses should be regulated.

When I raise this topic in public, one main argument comes back as a justification for smart glasses: they provide huge benefits for people with accessibility requirements, including blind and partially sighted people. I completely understand that point of view. I met the Royal National Institute of Blind People a few weeks ago to hear from it directly. It was very clear that although technology can offer huge benefits to its community, it does not want to become a fig leaf for Meta to justify poor practice and surveillance technology, and that its members have the same concerns about the technology as everyone else. Furthermore, Meta glasses have not been made with blind people in mind. If they had, they would be vastly better at accommodating the range of needs that those with disabilities might have.

These glasses pose a threat to everyone’s safety and privacy in public spaces. Meta and other developers are breaching everyone’s right to privacy, while failing to be transparent about what they are doing with the data they have collected. As in so many other areas of life, this modern technology will undoubtedly have a heightened impact on violence against women and girls.

On Monday, I sat in this room for a debate on the social media ban, and it struck me how long all Governments of whatever flavour have put off acting on social media, even though the evidence of harm has been there for years. I do not want smart glasses to go the same way, where we only regulate once it is too late. We are only 50 days from Christmas, and we can expect these glasses to be sold everywhere in numbers. How can we put the genie back in the bottle once they are being worn everywhere? We have called for them to be banned on the parliamentary estate, but frankly, everyone deserves the same privacy that we should enjoy in this place.

I look forward to the debate, and I am thankful to everyone who has attended. I hope to hear from Members across the House who are concerned about the use of smart glasses and from the Minister, to understand what the Government intend to do about this potentially dangerous new technology.

--- Later in debate ---

[Shockat Adam]

I absolutely agree. We must ensure that they are tamper-proof. Somebody will always create something to supersede technology, which I will come to. A woman cannot move away from a camera if she cannot see it.

I also want to consider what these glasses could do in school changing rooms. We know children can be cruel. It could be devastating to record a child—girl or boy—in their insecure period, upload the footage and threaten them with blackmail.

Harm does not stop at the wearer. It was reported earlier this year that workers paid to label footage for AI training were viewing intimate recordings captured by these devices, including people using the toilet. The people in the footage had not consented and were not aware that it was being used for training purposes.

The National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection told us last month that at least one in five flagged online VAWG crimes are image-based abuse, with almost 75% of the victims being female. Every digital form of this abuse is rising, yet when we ask how many arrests have been made for covert filming, the answer is that the information is not held centrally, so we are legislating in the dark. I would like a response from the Minister on that point.

This abuse is not restricted to cameras, because hearing technology is now arriving in spectacle frames. Hearing glasses with directional microphones are already in our practices, and the patients starting to lose their hearing are often the same patients who are fitted with varifocal glasses. Again, I welcome that because live captions, conversation boosting and real-time translations are incredible. I tried the technology and even though I was in a noisy room, it did not just help me hear the conversation I was having—I was able to hear somebody else’s conversation on the other side of the table. If we take all that into account, we have facial recognition, which manufacturers are reportedly exploring, and a device that can know who we are, where we are and what we say without us even knowing it is there. The wearer knows they are using the device; people around them do not.

What is the law doing about that? Filming in public is generally lawful and data protection laws do not apply to individuals acting in a personal capacity, but the Information Commissioner has said that doxxing is largely outside their remit, wearables are not regulated in any particular category and the Government’s own violence against women and girls strategy does not mention smart glasses. As Doughty Street Chambers put it,

“English law was not written with this technology in mind”.

The industry already knows what is good. At this year’s 100% Optical, EssilorLuxottica, which makes the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, told practitioners that devices should show people nearby that they are in use, that encryption is

“not nice to have, but an absolute must”,

and that only necessary data should be collected.

[Anna Sabine]

While I welcome the suggestion that nearby users should be notified if the devices are in use, the point still stands around consent. It should not be on me as an individual to have to challenge people using them; they should have to seek my consent before they start filming me.

[Shockat Adam]

I agree wholeheartedly with that. We cannot leave this issue to good will; it belongs in the law. I do not believe in a blanket ban, as it would punish the disabled people who benefit most. The RNIB is right that blind and partially sighted wearers already fear hostility from people who cannot tell they have sight loss. However, no ban should not mean no action.

I ask the Minister to consider the following: putting a statutory duty on manufacturers to provide a clear, tamper-proof recording indicator and making it an offence to turn that off or sell products designed to defeat it. Secondly, we need to close the gap in the criminal law so that covert sexualised filming and posting it for whatever reason is clearly an offence, and bring the intimate image provisions of the Crime and Policing Act 2026 fully into force without delay. Thirdly, we must give survivors a fast and affordable route to redress, as the Women and Equalities Committee recommended. Fourthly, we must protect accessibility for those who need to use the technology for assistive purposes, as they should not be penalised. Fifthly, if we are not already, we need to collect national data on covert filming offences and include smart glasses and other sensing wearables in the violence against women and girls action plan. My profession has a part to play, too.

We are told that the harms of social media were unforeseeable; these harms are not. They are right in front of us—quite literally at our eye level. Let us act on this issue before it is too late.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anna Sabine]

I will not rehash everything that everyone has said, but I genuinely think that this has been a really useful discussion. I appreciate the way that everyone has been so generous with their time; it has made the debate much more conversational and useful.

The Liberal Democrats and I are not calling for a total ban on this technology; I just worry that we are sleepwalking into finding that it is out of control before we have managed to do anything about it. MPs can feel rather exposed when we are out and about in public spaces; we wonder who is looking at us and clocking what we are doing. Once a number of MPs have been covertly filmed by this tech, I wonder whether we will suddenly find that it is shoved up the political agenda, but I would like it not to get to that point. I welcome the cross-party consensus on this issue and the Minister’s desire to work across parties—we would certainly like to do that.

I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Edward Morello) will pass on our thanks to Isabella for sharing her story. It is only when people like her and her mother share their stories that the issue becomes personalised and we can effect change. [Interruption.] I have just seen a mouse running behind my hon. Friend, so I will draw my remarks to a close and exit the Chamber as quickly as possible.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered smart glasses and violence against women and girls.