Violence against Women and Girls: Smart Glasses

John Slinger Excerpts

Wednesday 4th November 2026 Westminster Hall

[Shockat Adam (Leicester South) (Ind)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Mr Wishart. I congratulate the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine) on securing this important debate.

I declare my interest as a practising optometrist. For my whole working life a pair of glasses has been my livelihood, and it has been nothing but an object of trust and good, allowing people to see and changing their lives. It is one of the most trustworthy pieces of clothing we could have. No one has ever been deceived by a pair of glasses, except perhaps when Clark Kent prevented us knowing he was Superman. My son likes to wear glasses with no lenses, so he can look very intelligent posting on social media with books in coffee shops. It is a matter of debate how convincing that is, but generally glasses are a product for good.

I am not a technophobe. I have seen in my practice, and that of colleagues, what this technology can do, as has been acknowledged by hon. Members. It can be used for good. More than 2 million people in this country live with sight loss and 250 more begin to lose their sight every day. For a blind or partially sighted person walking down the street to be able to ask their glasses what is front of them and hear that, for example, a van is unloading scaffolding, is genuinely life changing. I will not argue that we should take that away—I suspect nobody here would—but we cannot ignore what is happening.

It has been reported that more than 7 million pairs of one brand alone were sold last year in this country. We have all witnessed men using these glasses covertly on our streets, posting the footage online and then demanding money to take it down. There are reports of women being filmed during sex without knowledge or consent. As the hon. Member for Leicester East (Shivani Raja) mentioned, a small LED is supposed to warn of recording, but it is easy to miss. I sell these glasses and know it is not always possible to see the lights.

[John Slinger (Rugby) (Lab)]

I am not familiar with the glasses the hon. Member is discussing, but it strikes me, as a lay person, that it would not be difficult to cover a small LED on a pair of glasses. Does he agree?

[Shockat Adam]

I absolutely agree. We must ensure that they are tamper-proof. Somebody will always create something to supersede technology, which I will come to. A woman cannot move away from a camera if she cannot see it.

I also want to consider what these glasses could do in school changing rooms. We know children can be cruel. It could be devastating to record a child—girl or boy—in their insecure period, upload the footage and threaten them with blackmail.

Harm does not stop at the wearer. It was reported earlier this year that workers paid to label footage for AI training were viewing intimate recordings captured by these devices, including people using the toilet. The people in the footage had not consented and were not aware that it was being used for training purposes.

The National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection told us last month that at least one in five flagged online VAWG crimes are image-based abuse, with almost 75% of the victims being female. Every digital form of this abuse is rising, yet when we ask how many arrests have been made for covert filming, the answer is that the information is not held centrally, so we are legislating in the dark. I would like a response from the Minister on that point.

This abuse is not restricted to cameras, because hearing technology is now arriving in spectacle frames. Hearing glasses with directional microphones are already in our practices, and the patients starting to lose their hearing are often the same patients who are fitted with varifocal glasses. Again, I welcome that because live captions, conversation boosting and real-time translations are incredible. I tried the technology and even though I was in a noisy room, it did not just help me hear the conversation I was having—I was able to hear somebody else’s conversation on the other side of the table. If we take all that into account, we have facial recognition, which manufacturers are reportedly exploring, and a device that can know who we are, where we are and what we say without us even knowing it is there. The wearer knows they are using the device; people around them do not.

What is the law doing about that? Filming in public is generally lawful and data protection laws do not apply to individuals acting in a personal capacity, but the Information Commissioner has said that doxxing is largely outside their remit, wearables are not regulated in any particular category and the Government’s own violence against women and girls strategy does not mention smart glasses. As Doughty Street Chambers put it,

“English law was not written with this technology in mind”.

The industry already knows what is good. At this year’s 100% Optical, EssilorLuxottica, which makes the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, told practitioners that devices should show people nearby that they are in use, that encryption is

“not nice to have, but an absolute must”,

and that only necessary data should be collected.

--- Later in debate ---

[Marie Goldman (Chelmsford) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Wishart. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine) for securing this crucial debate. As we have heard, smart glasses can pose a very real threat to the safety and personal privacy of women and girls in particular. Smart glasses, combined with the ease of communication and anonymity provided by social media, have offered a new avenue for gender-based harassment. Recordings of women and girls taken without their knowledge or consent can be livestreamed or uploaded and distributed online with far too much ease.

The initial harm of an in-person encounter is then compounded by social media algorithms. Quick to follow are abusive online commentary, online stalking and other technology-facilitated harassment. All that translates to real-world harm. Reporting in the past week by London Centric illustrates how perpetrators are getting away with it. The publication found that, if these so-called content creators film themselves approaching a different woman every day and post the videos on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, they can receive millions of views, earn money from them and face no legal consequences. The police are aware, but they are simply working within the law—in this case, law that was written in the last century.

The Protection from Harassment Act 1997 requires repeated harassment of an individual to reach the threshold for prosecution. However, harassing behaviour of the sort committed by those who are non-consensually filming women, such as those with smart glasses, is allowed as long as the women are only filmed once. To be frank, the current law makes this area the wild west when it comes to privacy and online abuse. It does not matter that the same harassing behaviour is replicated against potentially dozens of women. All that currently matters in law is that it is not done repeatedly to the same woman. As such, this disgusting behaviour is not only legal but profitable—it is monetised misogyny, plain and simple.

Those who claim, as the men filming these videos do, that it is “just a bit of fun”, need only read about the impact a few seconds of non-consensual filming has on the women who are victims of it. In one case, London Centric reported on a woman who, after being filmed without her consent by a “content creator”, described how other men have since entered her workplace, where she was recorded, to ask her whether she knows that she is “TikTok famous”. Other women have moved away from London altogether after being non-consensually filmed.

[John Slinger]

The hon. Lady is making a compelling speech. Does she agree that, in addition to the need perhaps to change the legislation and for greater enforcement, there is a huge amount of work to be done around education? I am afraid that education needs to be done for men and, sadly, boys. The statistics are clear: 91% of people prosecuted for sexual offences are men aged 18-plus. Does she think, as I do, that we need to be in schools and in the spaces where men and boys are talking, to explain to them just how disgusting this behaviour is and that it will have consequences?

[Marie Goldman]

The hon. Member makes an important point, and I agree, but we have to go after those who promote and normalise this behaviour—by which I mean the online platforms. They are essentially broadcasters. Reaching a mass audience, for example through television, used to mean having to have a broadcasting licence and being held to a high standard; but the online platforms get away with promoting disgusting, misogynistic content over and over again. People see it, so it becomes normalised.

[John Slinger]

The hon. Lady is being generous with her time. I reassure her that I completely agree that we need much tighter regulation of the social media companies. Frankly, the tech bros have had it too easy and too good for too long. We ought to find a way of holding them responsible and liable in law for some of the harms that their products cause, rather than merely suggesting that the users of their products are liable. Does she agree that we need to explore some of those concepts?

[Marie Goldman]

It seems that across the House we entirely agree on this matter.

--- Later in debate ---

[Blake Stephenson (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Wishart. I congratulate the hon. Member for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine) on securing this very important debate, and I thank hon. Members from across the House for their very thoughtful contributions. Counterpoint Research estimates that global sales of AI glasses rose by 263% in the first half of 2026, and the market is predicted to reach $44 billion by 2032—like other hon. Members, I expect the stockings this Christmas to be filled with AI glasses. It is essential that we examine how to keep women and girls safe as this market expands.

Technological innovations are too often accompanied by consequences that harm people, including women and girls. As a catalyst, technology can take the worst behaviour that already exists in our society and accelerate it, whether it is the pervasive use of early cameras, which resulted in the exploitation of women and young girls in a way that we look back on in horror, or the explosion of the internet and smartphones, which created a new range of problems that I know the Minister and others are trying to combat, day in, day out.

There are, of course, design issues with these smart glasses—we have heard about some of those today—but that does not mean that the technology itself was designed to cause harm. Rather, the problems arise from how it is used and exploited by those with the worst motivations in our society. That is why it is important to recognise that smart glasses are part of that wider pattern and present acute problems that impact women and girls. There have been numerous stories, some of which we have heard today, that illustrate the need to ensure that these glasses are not being used to harass women and girls in our country.

[John Slinger]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the work of my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Tom Collins) on digital product safety is worth considering? In a white paper that he published in July, he makes the point very effectively that, just as we require physical products to be regulated so that they are safe for users—for example, lift shafts have to be safe—we should insist, through a process that he sets out in his White Paper, that digital products are safe and that the manufacturers of those products must ensure that they are safe. I think this issue would come within that scope.

[Blake Stephenson]

I have to say that I am not familiar with the work the hon. Gentleman refers to, but I will undertake to look into it. Perhaps he could send me a copy of it—I will be glad to read it. His broader point that safety should be built into the design is important. The Government would be wise to consider that, and I have no doubt that they are doing so.