Even the World’s Biggest Surveillance State Thinks Smart Glasses Need Oversight

Source Domain: gizmodo.com

It’s not every day that you get to see China lead the way on privacy, but smart glasses have had a funny way of resetting our expectations. In a surprising move, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology issued a nationwide company code of conduct that sets standards for how and when smart glasses should be used as well as what privacy measures should be built into hardware.

According to the South China Morning Post, the code aims to guide user behavior as well as how companies design hardware. Manufacturers of smart glasses are being urged by China’s government to obtain explicit consent from anyone they record. That suggestion, it should be noted, follows a scandal involving the smart glasses maker, Rokid, in which flight attendants were recorded, and videos were posted to Rokid’s own community platform.

Additionally, the code aims to standardize LED recording indicators that light up to notify bystanders when a photo or video is being taken. Those indicators are already commonplace in pairs of smart glasses sold in China and in the U.S., but there’s currently no legal requirement to include one in either country.

The code also outlines a “minimum data collection approach” to smart glasses, which compels companies to collect and store as little sensitive information as possible. As evidenced by a scandal involving Meta and its Ray-Ban smart glasses earlier this year, photos and videos are sometimes collected, stored, and eventually reviewed by humans tasked with helping train Meta’s AI. That content, as it turns out, might contain things that most people would prefer to keep private, like people having sex, using the bathroom, or even sensitive banking information.

China’s stance on smart glasses is a surprising move, not just because of its top-down precedence—regulations in the U.S. have trickled in only at the state level so far—but because it’s not necessarily known…

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