Despite a slightly flubbed live demo, when Mark Zuckerberg revealed Meta’s new Ray-Ban Display smart glasses last week, the tech world marveled at the spectacle. That’s because these pretty normal-looking specs, packing cameras, speakers, microphones, a connection to Meta’s AI systems, and a tiny display visible only to the wearer, might represent a long sought “next big thing” to succeed the smartphone: smart glasses.
But just as camera phones and then smartphones upended many workplace norms when they arrived, a new report notes that AI-capable smart glasses may represent a giant and possibly unexpected legal threat to many workplaces. If your company doesn’t have a policy about the use of wearable tech in the office, it’s high time to draft one.
Louis Rosenberg, a prominent computer scientist, former NASA researcher and founding expert in the fields of AI and virtual reality, said in an interview recently that he’s concerned about widespread, speedy adoption of this new tech. We can “easily imagine a world where people will be wearing these glasses because they’re going to bring an AI assistant with them into a meeting, any kind of meeting,” he said to Bloomberg Law.
Considering how quickly companies and key workers are already adopting AI tools, this makes perfect sense: glasses like Meta’s new ones represent an even more convenient interface to AI. If you could look at a page of financial figures with the glasses and simply ask the AI to, say, summarize the capital expenditure they represent, it could save you huge amounts of time.
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But this is exactly where compliance and legal issues enter the scene.
Careless workers are already haphazardly entering secretive company info into AI systems without considering the risk of sharing this information with a third party that may not look after it, or are using unapproved third-party AIs just to speed up daily tasks. AI smart glasses may simply make it easier for this to happen, and for sensitive data to leak out later on or be accessed by hackers.
Rosenberg also pointed out that as well as private company info, private personal information could be shared in uncomfortable, risky or maybe even illegal ways. Glasses wearers may be “capturing not just private information about the business, but we could be capturing views of people who could be customers, of people who could be outside the organization.” If your company was busy preparing to IPO, or has government contracts, for example, this kind of data could cause countless security issues.
Voices, images and videos of employees could also be captured by smart glasses. That carries a significant risk of privacy violations, and could make workers uncomfortable that their employers were tracking what they did or said during the average workday (if the devices were officially work-authorized).
The Meta Display devices have a tiny indicator that lets you know they’re watching and listening to you, and of course there’s nothing to stop a disgruntled or dishonest employee from whipping out their iPhone and snapping pictures of sensitive company financial data on a spreadsheet on their laptop screen. But as smart glasses become ubiquitous, people will become used to them, and the risk of workers accidentally (or maliciously) recording private information, or sending it off to a third-party AI will rise.
Why should you care about this niche bit of futuristic sounding technology?
Because Meta’s devices are going on sale this month, for a reasonable-sounding $800. Given the promise they have for many different types of office worker, and the fact that we’re all using AI to speed up mundane work processes, we can expect them to sell like hotcakes, and someone will just turn up in your office wearing them. Meta’s not the only company working on these things either: big tech names like Google and Apple are too.
Essentially it’s time to update your company guidelines on smart device use to address the threat from wearable tech and always-on AI. You should remind your staff of the risks of leaking out sensitive info, and you should draft a policy on where, how and if your staff are allowed to wear non-company-issued smart glasses.