Is It OK to Record People Without Their Knowledge?

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Student Opinion

Is It OK to Record People Without Their Knowledge?

More people are using smart glasses to record, often secretly, in public. Is that ethical?

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Restaurants once plagued by camera flashes are now host to more discreet devices that can capture the meal: smart glasses.

Credit...

Stella Kalinina for The New York Times

By

Natalie Proulx

April 28, 2026,

5:04 a.m. ET

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Imagine this: You’re talking to someone in public and halfway through the conversation you notice a small blinking light in the corner of the person’s glasses. You realize the glasses are smart glasses and you’re being recorded.

Has this ever happened to you? What would go through your mind if it did? How would you feel? How do you think you would react?

In “

Dinner Is Being Recorded, Whether You Know It or Not

,” Luke Fortney writes about how, as smart glasses have become more popular and less conspicuous, this scenario is becoming increasingly common:

Last summer, Tom Wong was working at the Chubby Crab, his family’s seafood boil restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown, when a regular approached the counter. She ordered a combo — steamed clams instead of sausage, please — and ate it at a table near the door, muttering to herself in between bites.

Mr. Wong, 32, didn’t think anything of it. But a few days later, another customer came in and asked for a selfie. Then the asks kept coming.

He had been recorded without his knowledge using a lentil-size camera embedded in a pair of

Meta Ray-Ban glasses

. The resulting video had been viewed more than two million times on

TikTok

, turning Mr. Wong and the restaurant into unwitting stars.

“At a certain point, I stopped working in the front of the restaurant,” he said. “It was really uncomfortable.”

To be in public is to risk being filmed. And these days, there’s a good chance it’s happening surreptitiously with smart glasses. Their wearers are filming in restaurants, cafes and bars, capturing warped, eye-level video of drive-through pranks,

Michelin-starred meals

and work shifts at Texas Roadhouse. Servers, owners and customers can end up as captive participants.

“There are people who are using them in slick ways,” said Madi Elder, a bartender at the

Brooklyn Wine Cellar

in Downtown Brooklyn. “It can feel like harassment.”

The article continues, explaining the law around filming people without their consent:

Filming in public spaces is broadly protected by the First Amendment. Some states, including California and Pennsylvania, have two-party consent laws that prohibit recording without express permission, but enforcing them hinges on whether someone has a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in a given setting, said Aaron Krowne, a New York City lawyer specializing in privacy and civil liberties. Restaurants fall in a legal gray area: They are privately owned, but open to anyone who walks in.

Those protections haven’t been tested in cases involving smart glasses. “It has managed to stay out of the courts, which is quite shocking,” Mr. Krowne said. “I’m sure we’ll see more lawsuits soon.”

The responsibility of using these devices ethically falls largely on the wearer.

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