Anna Sabine

I beg to move, That this House has considered smart glasses and violence against women and girls. A few months ago I was delighted, with the support of many women in the urban design industry and the Minister for Housing and Planning, to get women and girls mentioned in the national planning policy framework. Across the UK, 86% of women and girls aged 18 to 24 have experienced harassment in public spaces, and it seemed crazy to me that they were not going to be at the forefront of how we design those spaces and places. Having won that victory just before the summer, I was horrified to see stories about AI glasses appearing all over the press. Adverts for smart glasses appeared across London. Online, celebrities sold them as a device to “stay in the moment” and enjoy “effortless connection”. A key selling point was that the glasses could be used to film discreetly. To me, that did not look like a fantastic new innovation; it looked like a device for filming women and girls without their knowledge in the very spaces we have been campaigning to make them feel welcome in. Planning policy had finally accepted that women’s safety matters in the spaces we build, but at the same moment technology was eroding women’s privacy and safety in those same spaces. Sales of smart glasses are now soaring, and already my fears about their use are being realised. Women are reporting waking up after nights out to find that videos of them, filmed without their knowledge or consent by men wearing smart glasses, have gone viral online. The only indication anyone has that they are being filmed is a small LED in the corner of the glasses, but that is quickly disappearing, with “ghost Meta” shops offering to remove the light entirely so that no one in a public space knows they are being filmed. To me these devices not only have the potential to erode safety and privacy in public spaces, but raise really important questions about consent. A few weeks ago, I met the campaign group Stop Smart Glasses. One of its campaigners is a secondary school teacher, and he told me that as part of his job he stands in front of teenagers and teaches them that consent must be sought proactively—that yes means yes and no means no. But increasingly those same children go home, pick up their phones and scroll on social media, where they see videos of girls who were filmed without even being asked or knowing. He pointed out the irony that if one of his female students is filmed by AI glasses in public, the onus is on her to approach the man doing the filming and ask him to stop. What are we teaching young people—that consent is something we learn in the classroom and abandon on the street? Covert filming is not new, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) has done excellent work on tackling the problem in nightclubs and other public spaces, but smart glasses make it easier, and harder to detect and challenge. In Australia, one solution has been to ban the use of smart glasses in certain areas, such as swimming pools, but I feel that sends a message to women that they are safe only in certain places. Surely, we do not want that to become the case. Waking up to a video of yourself online undermines perceptions of safety, but it is also a breach of privacy and raises real data protection concerns. According to Meta’s smart glasses terms of use, content captured by the glasses can be used to train Meta AI. The burden of consent allowing Meta to do that is placed on the person wearing the glasses. That means that if someone is filmed without their knowledge or permission, Meta can still use that content to train its AI, because the wearer has given de facto consent. I do not see how that squares with data protection law. GDPR says that companies need a proper reason to use our personal data, and an individual walking past someone wearing smart glasses in the street has not agreed to anything. Small discreet cameras make secret filming easier, and women and girls will be disproportionately impacted by that. More broadly, in the age of wearable tech, all of us, male or female, are losing a bit of our privacy every time we step outside. Despite that, I have heard nothing from the Government about how smart glasses should be regulated. When I raise this topic in public, one main argument comes back as a justification for smart glasses: they provide huge benefits for people with accessibility requirements, including blind and partially sighted people. I completely understand that point of view. I met the Royal National Institute of Blind People a few weeks ago to hear from it directly. It was very clear that although technology can offer huge benefits to its community, it does not want to become a fig leaf for Meta to justify poor practice and surveillance technology, and that its members have the same concerns about the technology as everyone else. Furthermore, Meta glasses have not been made with blind people in mind. If they had, they would be vastly better at accommodating the range of needs that those with disabilities might have. These glasses pose a threat to everyone’s safety and privacy in public spaces. Meta and other developers are breaching everyone’s right to privacy, while failing to be transparent about what they are doing with the data they have collected. As in so many other areas of life, this modern technology will undoubtedly have a heightened impact on violence against women and girls. On Monday, I sat in this room for a debate on the social media ban, and it struck me how long all Governments of whatever flavour have put off acting on social media, even though the evidence of harm has been there for years. I do not want smart glasses to go the same way, where we only regulate once it is too late. We are only 50 days from Christmas, and we can expect these glasses to be sold everywhere in numbers. How can we put the genie back in the bottle once they are being worn everywhere? We have called for them to be banned on the parliamentary estate, but frankly, everyone deserves the same privacy that we should enjoy in this place. I look forward to the debate, and I am thankful to everyone who has attended. I hope to hear from Members across the House who are concerned about the use of smart glasses and from the Minister, to understand what the Government intend to do about this potentially dangerous new technology.