What Churches Need To Know About Smart Glasses

Picture this scenario: One Sunday morning, you spot a guest in your church lobby looking around the room oddly. He’s wearing a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, a new piece of tech capable of recording video or capturing a photo with a simple voice command. Your church may have a policy prohibiting unauthorized photography and videography during church events. So a member of your leadership asks the guest to remove his glasses because of their potential ability to film children or people using the restroom. The guest says these are prescription glasses, and he doesn’t have another pair with him.

As a staff member or volunteer at the church, what would you do?

This scenario isn’t hypothetical. A friend of mine had to navigate it at his church several weeks ago, and the situation may soon become more common.

Next Frontier of Wearable Tech

Ten years ago, Apple released the Apple Watch. What was once considered niche and experimental eventually became nearly as common as smartphones; a decade later, the smartwatch market is booming, with a myriad of options from dozens of competitors.

Smart glasses are on a similar trajectory. In contrast to bulky VR headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, smart glasses are an affordable improvement on the glasses people already wear. Reading a text message or taking a photo using glasses is much more appealing than the awkwardness (and danger) of wearing a computer on your face in public.

Currently, Meta’s smart glasses dominate this new market. They’re available on Amazon and in big-box tech stores, and they can be purchased with or without a prescription in numerous colors. While Meta created these glasses for general consumers, they’re finding unexpected success among disability advocacy groups. Sarah E. Needleman’s recent piece in The Wall Street Journal described how the glasses are a game-changer for visually impaired consumers, with an executive director of the National Federation of the Blind saying, “It’s giving significant accessibility benefits at a price point people can afford.”

Unfortunately, the key features of these glasses that are enhancing lives in one demographic can be exploited by others with harmful intent.

‘Hey Meta, Take a Video’

Like with other AI-enabled devices, an individual wearing a pair of Meta’s Ray-Bans can say “Hey Meta” and give numerous voice commands, including calling someone, taking a photo, and recording video. You can even ask the glasses to give an AI-generated description of what you’re seeing. This feature is proving most valuable to visually impaired wearers.

The key features of these glasses that are enhancing lives in one demographic can be exploited by others with harmful intent.

When you take a photo or record a video, an LED light embedded in the glasses’ frames turns on. In some ways, this feature makes recording with the glasses more obvious than holding up your phone in front of you to record. But a quick Google search for “how to turn off Meta Ray-Ban light” reveals dozens of results for how to disable that light, with solutions ranging from using electrical tape or black epoxy to cover the light to advanced modifications such as precision drilling into the light to disable it. This is a clear signal that wearers find the light annoying and want to be able to turn it off.

Thankfully, Meta’s smart glasses seem resistant to tampering and modification. If the light is blocked or disabled, the glasses won’t record, and no clear-cut way to get around this has emerged. Yet given the strong demand from consumers to turn this feature off, it’s only a matter of time before a competitor enters the emerging market with a pair of smart glasses that can discreetly capture photos and videos without an indicator light. It’s only a matter of time before an individual uses a pair of smart glasses to prey on children or other people’s privacy in church.

How Can Churches Keep Their People Safe?

To keep attendees safe on Sundays, we must first acknowledge a scary truth: An individual with harmful intent only needs to succeed once to create a lifetime of suffering. Thankfully, churches can take these three steps to greatly reduce the risk of a predator using smart glasses to harm people who come to church.

1. Include specific language about smart glasses in your church’s photography policy and standard operating procedures (SOP) for security.

Photos and videos taken by smart glasses should be subject to the same policies governing scope, consent, privacy, and publication as photos and videos captured by other devices. If your church doesn’t have a photography policy or security SOP, it’s urgent you create such policies right away.

What should your church’s policy for smart glasses be? I recommend that churches prohibit the use of smart glasses in areas of the church building that serve minors, such as the nursery, the children’s ministry area, and the restrooms that families frequent most. Some churches will want to limit the use of smart glasses at church to individuals with visual impairments; others will be more tolerant of their use in common areas. Whatever your church decides, pastors and church leaders must consider now and adopt policies early for how they want to handle smart glasses in church before the technology becomes more widespread.

2. Educate volunteer teams about your church’s policies.

Your volunteers should be able to accurately explain these policies and specific instructions about smart glasses to anyone who asks about them, and especially to any individual confronted for using smart glasses in violation of your policy.

3. Proactively ensure that visually impaired people are welcomed and served by your church.

We ought to rejoice that smart glasses are proving life-enhancing for the blind, but allowing these aids shouldn’t be the only way we serve people with visual impairments.

We ought to rejoice that smart glasses are proving life-enhancing for the blind, but allowing these aids shouldn’t be the only way we serve people with visual impairments.

Churches can provide printed materials in large print (or even braille) or provide a digital stream of the service that can be zoomed in on a phone or tablet for those who request it. An individual might be assigned a volunteer assistant to accompany and aid him while he’s at church, if he’s comfortable with this. He may still need, or want, to use smart glasses, but offering a variety of accommodations will mean that using smart glasses doesn’t have to be the first or only option.

Don’t wait until an incident occurs in your church to decide how you’ll handle smart glasses. Be proactive in keeping your church hospitable and safe.