WashU Expert: Amazon’s smart glasses raise privacy concerns

Amazon’s rollout of smart glasses for its delivery drivers raises significant concerns about privacy, workplace surveillance and the normalization of continuously recording technology, WashU Law privacy expert Neil Richards said.

Amazon is giving some delivery drivers glasses that include cameras, speakers and other features designed to help drivers navigate routes and complete deliveries. Amazon says the glasses should improve safety and efficiency. According to a recent report, Amazon aims to have 5,000 drivers wearing the glasses by the end of 2026, expanding to more than 20,000 by the end of 2027.

But Richards, the Koch Distinguished Professor of Law and co-director of the Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine and Law at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that the technology should be seen as yet another surveillance tool.

‘There is nothing smart about them’

Richards dislikes the term “smart glasses” for devices that incorporate high-resolution cameras.

“Let’s not call them ‘smart’ glasses,” Richards said. “There is nothing smart about them. They are surveillance glasses, or as journalists in Britain and now here have aptly taken to calling them, ‘creepy pervert glasses.'”

“It is one thing to have glasses with integrated phone and music speakers or hearing aids. But it’s quite another to make, market and try to normalize everyone walking around with high-resolution cameras strapped to their faces,” Richards said.

Richards said similar glasses already have been used to secretly photograph people, record conversations without permission and film encounters for sharing on social media.

“The most basic notions of privacy — not to mention human decency — tell us that human beings have a right to not have their every interaction recorded and uploaded to a server,” he said.

Amazon’s history of worker surveillance

Richards said the glasses fit into Amazon’s broader approach of monitoring its workers. He said Amazon already uses digital tracking to monitor workers in delivery vehicles and fulfillment centers.

“Amazon workers’ bodies are worked and worked — often literally to the breaking point,” Richards said. “In the context of its checkered record on labor practices, we should consider to what extent Amazon workers — as effectively test subjects for workers in other fields — have a right not to have their entire working lives tracked and recorded like characters in a dystopian novel.”

Richards said the cameras raise a broader question: How much information should employers be able to collect about workers simply because the technology exists?

Normalizing surveillance

Richards also sees Amazon’s glasses as part of a larger trend toward increasingly pervasive surveillance technology, affecting far more than the workers themselves.

Amazon and Meta, he said, appear to be trying a similar strategy to Google’s earlier attempt to popularize Google Glass. The technology was widely mocked and Google Glass wearers were labeled “Glassholes,” Richards said, before the product was eventually discontinued.

“Amazon’s attempt to roll out and normalize its surveillance glasses raises a host of problems,” Richards said. “Their idea, like Meta’s, seems to be that if they can ‘flood the zone’ with enough surveillance cameras, their presence will become normalized and people will think it is futile to resist them.”

Richards said the concern goes beyond glasses to facial recognition and artificial intelligence (AI) surveillance systems that can monitor behavior on an unprecedented scale.

“Amazon’s glasses, as another example of ubiquitous, always-on surveillance, risk the normalization of other kinds of dangerous surveillance tech, from more advanced Flock cameras and real-time facial recognition technology in contexts other than cellphone and border security, to AI-enabled surveillance practices that have the capacity to observe human activity with a scope, scale and permanence that the East German Stasi could only dream about,” Richards said.

Richards argues privacy is more than keeping information secret. In his working paper “Privacy Is Not Theft,” forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, he argues that privacy is essential to preserving freedom of expression and to living without constant observation.

A society without meaningful privacy, he said, risks creating people who are less willing to behave outside accepted norms.

“People will be less likely to feel free to be themselves,” Richards said, “and chilled into a kind of boring conformity that is simply at odds with America’s historical and constitutional commitments to freedom of expression and eccentric individuality.”