Smart glasses broke the no-recording contract every public space depends on

Every public space trades on an implicit contract that no one in the room is secretly recording. Smart glasses broke that contract before any law caught up, and the doors are now closing one by one.

The courtrooms are the most visible exclusion and the smallest part of the pattern. His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service told The Guardian that Meta glasses are banned because courts already bar photography and video, and a device that records covertly from someone's face cannot be reconciled with that rule. New York's court system moved the same way days earlier, the first time a major device class has been excluded from two major court systems in the same news cycle.

Wetherspoons, members' clubs, theatres, music venues, and comic conventions have already drawn the same line for the same product, on the same logic HMCTS used: any space built on an explicit no-recording rule or an unspoken consent not to be filmed is now a candidate ban zone.

The cost is not evenly distributed. UK coverage has settled on a nickname, "pervert glasses," for a device that lets wearers capture people who never agreed to be filmed, and the documented harm falls disproportionately on women. When a device class collapses the gap between a hidden camera and a person, every consent-based space becomes a future exclusion, and the people shut out first are the people most often targeted by that gap.