Newsom Vetoes Ban on Secret Smart Glasses Recording After Lawmakers Target Pervert Wearables

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed a bill that would have made it illegal to secretly record people with smart glasses in places like changing rooms and doctors' offices. The measure, Senate Bill 1130, would have made California the first US state to regulate how camera wearables can be used in public-facing businesses.

The timing is awkward. Smart glasses have quietly become a mass-market product, and the harassment stories have followed them. Critics now call them "pervert glasses," after a string of reports of people filming strangers, mostly women, without their knowledge.

What the bill would have done

SB 1130 targeted secret recording in business areas where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy. It would also have forced manufacturers to build in a visible recording indicator, and banned accessories designed to hide a recording light or mute a shutter sound.

The penalties had teeth. Individuals caught secretly recording faced fines of up to $1,500, prison time, or both. Manufacturers selling devices without a recording indicator could have been hit with up to $2,500 per violation, according to Engadget.

State Sen. Eloise Gomez Reyes, who wrote the bill, framed it as a response to always-on glasses from Meta and Snap. The scale is no longer niche: Meta sold more than 7 million wearable glasses last year.

Newsom's reasoning

In his veto message, Newsom argued the bill's definition of a "wearable recording device" was too broad and imprecise, to the point that it could sweep in ordinary smartwatches. He also pointed out that California already bans secret recording in spaces where people expect privacy, and that the state is a two-party consent jurisdiction for recorded conversations, as ABC News reported.

That argument has a gap. Existing law punishes the person doing the recording after the fact. SB 1130 went after the hardware itself, forcing a warning light onto the device so the person being filmed has a chance to notice. That hardware mandate is what dies with the veto.

TechNet, the tech industry's lobbying group, opposed the bill. It isn't the first time Newsom has sided against new limits on workplace and consumer tech; he also vetoed the "No Robo Bosses" bill aimed at AI-driven firing.

A problem that isn't going away

Other governments are moving faster. In France, Paris prosecutors opened an investigation into men using smart glasses to film women in the street and post the clips online.

In California, the people most exposed to covert filming are left with the same legal tools they had before the glasses arrived. Reyes can reintroduce a narrower version next session, and the device definition will be the first thing she has to rewrite.