Smart glasses, in their post-Google Glass form, have found an audience with all sorts of people—theater-goers, Super Bowl streakers, and scumbags intent on extorting women, just to name a few. In China, you can now add policemen to that growing list.
According to a report from China Daily, police in China aren’t just using smart glasses for routine police work; they’re donning pairs developed specially for use by cops, with both hardware and software that’s “made domestically.” Uses among Chinese police, according to the report, include “traffic management, street patrols, and locating missing people,” which sounds important and useful but also wanes towards the dystopic.
One instance cited in China Daily’s account of police use of smart glasses involves cops identifying an elderly man who was confused and lost. Here’s what a police officer named Zhao Baoxin told the paper:
“We found an elderly man at an intersection in Heping district. He couldn’t speak clearly or tell us his name and address. The glasses quickly identified him and within 20 minutes we had reached his family and got him home safely.”
On one hand, great. I don’t think anyone can argue with helping elderly people find their way home. On the other hand, oh f*ck no. Clearly, China’s smart glasses are capable of facial recognition, and that facial recognition is being linked to some kind of government database and put in the hands of police. From a civil liberties perspective, that feels like a liability, mayhaps, though there’s nothing altogether surprising about the endeavor.
China has long been a surveillance state, operating what’s considered to be the biggest and most complex CCTV system in the world, consisting of more than 700 million cameras as of 2023. Adding smart glasses with cameras on them and facial recognition feels almost quaint in comparison.
China, though an outlier in the level of surveillance and its brazenness, might not be alone in its endeavors, unfortunately. There are early indications that a similar zest for smart glasses in policework is being echoed by the U.S. government. ICE, in particular, is reportedly looking into developing and deploying its own smart glasses that it can use for similar purposes. Specifically, security journalist Ken Klippenstein reports that ICE wants to use smart glasses in combination with biometric databases and facial recognition to “identify people in real time.” Yikes.
The fact is that smart glasses, for all their non-spying uses, are also uniquely good for spying, and clearly that has police, both abroad and domestic, intrigued. To make matters worse, Meta, the company with a nightmarish history with facial recognition, is also reportedly interested in the application of smart glasses that can use cameras to recognize people’s faces.
Long story short: if you were already opposed to smart glasses with cameras on them, you might want to buckle up, because the list of reasons to be icked out is growing.
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