Smart glasses were being used to secretly film women 12 years ago

One of the advantages of having written about tech for as long as I have is that you start to notice when the same ideas come around decade after decade, in different shapes and sizes.

Especially the bad ones.

12 years ago Google invented something called Google Glass — a set of glasses complete with a camera so you could record what you were looking at — and it was so roundly hated by everyone that we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when they went away.

But now it's 2026 and smart glasses are back , powered by AI, and tied in with a world-famous fashion brand, but fundamentally they still have exactly the same problem, which still hasn't been fixed: they enable people to record other people without their consent.

The problem is that none of this should have come as a surprise.

The privacy risks of putting a camera on somebody's face weren't merely predictable — they were predicted.

Women were raising concerns about men using Google Glass to record them more than a decade ago.

And yet here we are again.

The curious case of Google Glass (Image credit: Shutterstock / Hattanas ) Let’s remind ourselves what happened the first time that smart glasses arrived.

Google Glass arrived in 2013.

It puts a small heads-up display and camera on the wearer's face, allowing them to take photos and record video from their point of view.

Almost immediately, privacy became one of the defining controversies around it.

By 2014, women were explicitly raising issues of abuse.

Wired reported that women were particularly interested in technology that could detect and block Glass because of concerns about men covertly recording them in nightclubs.