“The hardware is improving, but the country’s weak understanding of consent gives an invisible camera far more room to cause harm,” he says. Simply being in a public place is often treated as implicit consent to be photographed or filmed. He says the help line has been seeing an uptick in cases involving covert recording and nonconsensual footage.
“Violations of this access have increased significantly and are expected to rise further in India,” he says. People are recorded in medical settings, during private encounters, and in public spaces. Those with less power to object are particularly vulnerable, he adds.
“It’s either trolling or it’s playing pranks on them and then recording them” he says. Abusers “do target people who are a little more unaware or susceptible to how this technology-facilitated harm works.”
The law in India has not caught up with this new kind of harm, says Apar Gupta, a lawyer and founder-director of the Internet Freedom Foundation. “India’s laws against voyeurism and the sharing of intimate images were designed largely around more recognizable forms of abuse,” he says, citing offenses such as secretly filming someone undressing, using a toilet, or engaged in a sexual act. “[The laws] offer limited protection when someone is secretly filmed in an ordinary public setting and the footage is then used to humiliate them,” he says.
Social media platforms’ rules do offer another route to removing harmful content filmed with smart glasses, but it’s not an immediate remedy. “Under India’s current rules, platforms can have up to 36 hours to act on certain complaints—a window that can be long enough for a video to be downloaded, copied, and circulated elsewhere,” he says.
The problem of filming without consent seems set to grow. According to the Financial Times, some internal prototypes of new Meta glasses include AI features that continuously photograph and listen to the wearer’s surroundings, enabling the glasses to later recall what they saw or heard. These functions wouldn’t activate the external recording indicator, making it impossible for bystanders to know when information about them is being collected.
Meta told us it intends to keep the LED for active capture, such as taking photos or recording video, but not for AI features that interpret the wearer’s surroundings. Its argument is that a constantly blinking light could eventually become so commonplace that people stop noticing it.
But that logic risks putting society in a perpetual game of catch-up, says Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law at Boston University. “Tech companies have an incredible ability to push these tools out faster than society can meaningfully acclimate to the threat,” he says. “By the time society catches up, there’s already a degree of normalization.”
For Shubnam, the danger is not just that people may become accustomed to being recorded. It is that they will become accustomed to seeing versions of themselves that they never chose to put out into the world.
“Being comprehended along the lines of a narrative that I didn’t compose or consent to—that imposed recognition makes you feel like you’re powerless in how people know you,” they say.
