Smart glasses have managed to piss off a lot of different groups of people, like privacy advocates, celebrities, and women in general, but not everyone is averse, and it’s looking like you can count police officers among their fans.
According to a report from the Miami New Times, a local Florida-based paper, records obtained through Florida’s Sunshine laws (which mandate police records be kept public) show that at least two sheriff’s offices in South Florida have purchased Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses.
Documents posted to Muckrock—a forum that aggregates records obtained via Freedom of Information requests—indicate that the smart glasses were purchased by one of the two departments, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, for the Internet Crimes Against Children unit, an undercover operation. The Miami New Times reports that the Broward sheriff’s office declined to comment further on its use of smart glasses because of its policy regarding “surveillance techniques or procedures.”
The second department, the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office, tells the Miami New Times that it uses its six pairs of Meta smart glasses for “remote troubleshooting” in an IT capacity.
This isn’t the first use of smart glasses by police in the U.S., but it is part of a fairly new trend. In April, security journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing its own pair of smart glasses, which it plans to use for surveilling the U.S./Mexico border. Not only that, but records indicate that DHS is interested in connecting its smart glasses to a biometric database so that they can automatically cross-reference people using facial recognition. There have been separate reports of ICE officers wearing Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses during raids as well and reports of border control surveilling protests with smart glasses.
What makes the most recent reports different, however, is the fact that the trend has seemingly extended beyond immigration and into more routine police work, which is also a trend among foreign police departments like those in China who claim they use smart glasses to identify missing people and even for day-to-day traffic management.
The combination of police forces and easy surveillance won’t sit well with lots of people, privacy advocates chief among them—especially with the specter of facial recognition in play.