Shockat Adam

I absolutely agree. We must ensure that they are tamper-proof. Somebody will always create something to supersede technology, which I will come to. A woman cannot move away from a camera if she cannot see it. I also want to consider what these glasses could do in school changing rooms. We know children can be cruel. It could be devastating to record a child—girl or boy—in their insecure period, upload the footage and threaten them with blackmail. Harm does not stop at the wearer. It was reported earlier this year that workers paid to label footage for AI training were viewing intimate recordings captured by these devices, including people using the toilet. The people in the footage had not consented and were not aware that it was being used for training purposes. The National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection told us last month that at least one in five flagged online VAWG crimes are image-based abuse, with almost 75% of the victims being female. Every digital form of this abuse is rising, yet when we ask how many arrests have been made for covert filming, the answer is that the information is not held centrally, so we are legislating in the dark. I would like a response from the Minister on that point. This abuse is not restricted to cameras, because hearing technology is now arriving in spectacle frames. Hearing glasses with directional microphones are already in our practices, and the patients starting to lose their hearing are often the same patients who are fitted with varifocal glasses. Again, I welcome that because live captions, conversation boosting and real-time translations are incredible. I tried the technology and even though I was in a noisy room, it did not just help me hear the conversation I was having—I was able to hear somebody else’s conversation on the other side of the table. If we take all that into account, we have facial recognition, which manufacturers are reportedly exploring, and a device that can know who we are, where we are and what we say without us even knowing it is there. The wearer knows they are using the device; people around them do not. What is the law doing about that? Filming in public is generally lawful and data protection laws do not apply to individuals acting in a personal capacity, but the Information Commissioner has said that doxxing is largely outside their remit, wearables are not regulated in any particular category and the Government’s own violence against women and girls strategy does not mention smart glasses. As Doughty Street Chambers put it, “English law was not written with this technology in mind”. The industry already knows what is good. At this year’s 100% Optical, EssilorLuxottica, which makes the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, told practitioners that devices should show people nearby that they are in use, that encryption is “not nice to have, but an absolute must”, and that only necessary data should be collected.