All-Seeing AI: Wearables boom brings a fresh privacy risk
All-Seeing AI: Wearables boom brings a fresh privacy risk
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2026/0531/1575986-wearable-ai-glasses/
Publish Date: 2026-05-31 02:00:00
Source Domain: www.rte.ie
For a time, the tech term ‘wearable’ was largely referring to smart watches and fitness trackers.
These were the devices that you could strap onto your wrist to monitor the likes of your movement, workouts and sleep – while most would also feed you notifications from your phone.
But in a short space of time, the wearable market has exploded into a whole universe of different products.
There are smart rings that can monitor your vitals and movement. There are continuous glucose monitors (adapted from what some people with diabetes use to monitor their blood sugars) that track your energy intake through the day. There are smart glasses like the Meta Ray Bans which use cameras to “see” what’s around you. There are AI smart pins that can clip onto your clothes, ready for your questions and commands.
Many Bluetooth headphones are now classed as ‘wearables’ because of how much more they do beyond playing music – like handling relaying information and tracking your activity.
If you’re so inclined, you can even spend $600 on smart socks that, apparently, track your stride and how your foot lands when you run.
Well-worn tech
This explosion in wearables options, unsurprisingly, comes alongside a boom in sales in the category.
It’s always hard to pin down a figure like this – and it depends in part on how broad of a definition you want to give to the term ‘wearable’ – but numerous projections put the value of sales anywhere between $100 billion and $200 billion this year alone.
When you look at specific companies, that seems entirely plausible.
Last year Apple’s wearables division alone had sales of more than $36.5 billion (that would cover the Apple Watch and its AirPods headphones, though it would also cover a handful of other products like its smart speaker and some accessories).
In revenue terms, wearables are now bigger for Apple than iPads and Macs.
It’s of growing importance to Meta too – they sold seven million…
