A Dutch eyewear chain just said no to Meta's smart glasses.
Hans Anders, part of the Nexeye retail group with more than 400 stores across the Netherlands and Belgium, has stopped selling Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses online and in stores, indefinitely. The retailer says the move follows the ongoing public and political debate over where this tech belongs and how it should be used. The decision lands after reports that the glasses' camera has been used to film "hundreds, maybe thousands" of Dutch women without consent, with footage reportedly circulating on Telegram and other sites. The Dutch Data Protection Authority has already warned that filming identifiable people without permission breaks the law, even though enforcing that on a crowded street is another matter entirely.
Meta's pitch for these glasses has always leaned on a blinking recording light as the privacy safeguard, but that light is easy to cover and does nothing to stop someone from aiming a camera at your face while pretending to check their phone. Hans Anders is one of the first retailers to actually pull the product over it rather than just issue a statement, and that gives consumer group Consumentenbond more leverage in the court fight it says it's ready to start if Meta won't change how the glasses handle privacy.
Wetherspoons already bans the glasses in its UK pubs, and the UK Cinema Association is weighing similar rules against piracy and livestreaming. Covert recording, it turns out, is a much easier sell to a trade group than it is to a regulator.