US police fear Meta glasses could secretly record them

The surveillance panic switched sides.

The NYPD memo

US law enforcement is now worried that Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses could be used to secretly record officers. In January the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit circulated an internal memo calling the glasses a security and counterintelligence threat, Gizmodo reports, with orders to inspect any glasses left in detainees’ cells.

The Florida purchases

The concern runs one way, the procurement another. At least two Florida sheriff’s offices have quietly bought the same glasses for their own work, per the Miami New Times, one of them for undercover use it will not explain.

Why it matters

Privacy advocates have spent two years making exactly this covert-recording argument about the public, down to the easy-to-miss recording LED. The memo confirms the concern from the institution best positioned to evaluate it: police treat the glasses as a credible covert surveillance device when pointed at them, while some departments deploy the same capability outward. As camera glasses head toward mainstream adoption, the rules for where they can record, and who gets protected from them, are being set in practice rather than in law, and unevenly.