"Smart" Glasses with Facial Recognition Are a Recipe for Disaster | #aclu #shorts #privacy | ACLU

Our Take

The ACLU's short, pointed warning about facial-recognition-enabled smart glasses lands on a problem we've been tracking from a different angle: surveillance infrastructure is multiplying faster than the public's ability to consent to it. Flock cameras bolted to poles already hoover up plate data across entire towns without a warrant. Now imagine that same dragnet logic strapped to someone's face, walking through a grocery store, a protest, or your neighborhood. Credit to the ACLU for putting this plainly — "eyewear, not spywear" is the kind of line that cuts through the tech-hype fog Meta and others rely on.

What makes this pairing dangerous isn't just the tech itself, it's the normalization. We've watched Flock and similar ALPR networks get sold to city councils as harmless "public safety tools," only to later become databases accessible to ICE, bounty hunters, and anyone with the right login. Wearable facial recognition is the next step down that same road, except there's no pole to point to, no public meeting to show up at, and no camera map to flag it on. It's surveillance you can't see coming because it's walking toward you with a smile.

If stationary ALPRs already worry you, this should worry you more. Check out our camera map to see how far the plate-reading network has already spread in your area, and don't sleep on pushing back now — before facial recognition on every face becomes just another background hum of American life. Our take-action page has tools to help you organize against both.