A code, not a ban
Wetherspoons has told The Register that camera-equipped smart glasses run against the rule on filming that already applies in its pubs, and that its response is to ask wearers to turn the cameras off.[1] That is a narrower step than the one several other venues have taken, and the difference is easy to lose in a headline. The devices are not being turned away at the door. The recording is what the chain objects to.
A spokesperson drew a line between the cameras the company runs and the cameras a customer might bring in. On the first: "Like many hospitality companies, Wetherspoon has CCTV cameras for security reasons, but their use is strictly controlled by data legislation." On the second: "Apart from that, the general code that applies in our pubs, and most pubs, is that you can't film customers or employees without their permission."[1]
The glasses were then placed inside that existing code rather than treated as a new category of device. "Meta glasses seem to breach this code, and common sense, by enabling surreptitious surveillance, so our instinct is to say turn off the cameras. This is akin to our efforts to stop audible playing of videos in our pubs, which also invades people's space," the spokesperson said.[1] The comparison is telling. Loud video playback in a pub is a nuisance handled by asking someone to stop, not by confiscating the phone.
The question the chain would not answer
The obvious follow-up is what happens if a customer keeps recording anyway. The Register asked whether customers who refused to stop recording would be ejected, and Wetherspoons declined to elaborate.[1]
That silence is the substance of the story. A rule enforced by request depends entirely on what sits behind the request, and the chain has not said what that is. Staff asked to police it are left applying an instinct rather than a procedure, and a customer who wants to know where the line falls has nothing to consult. For anyone sitting at the next table, the practical position is unchanged whichever way the answer eventually goes: the person opposite may be wearing a camera, and the only mechanism standing between that camera and the room is somebody noticing and asking.
Venues that went further
The Register set the pub chain's position against a run of stricter ones, listing venues and organisers that have banned the glasses or do not permit them: the security conference DEF CON, UK Comic Con organiser Monopoly Events, the members' club operator Soho House, Brighton's Yellow Book Bar, and the theatre companies ATG Entertainment and Trafalgar Entertainment. The restaurateur Jeremy King is named in the same run, though the report renders his position as a stated view that the glasses should not be worn in his establishments rather than a formal rule.[1] The report also notes that Scottish ferry operator CalMac temporarily suspended unplanned visits to ships' bridges after a passenger made crew members feel uncomfortable during a crossing in June.[1]
What that group has in common is not a shared standard. Each has written its own, at its own threshold, for its own premises. A conference hall, a members' club, a theatre and a pub have each set their own threshold for the same hardware, and a person moving between them has no way to know the rules in advance beyond asking.
The regulator is working on a different question
The regulatory thread runs alongside rather than through this. In March 2026 the Information Commissioner's Office confirmed it is contacting Meta following an investigation by the Swedish outlets Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, which The Register reported as finding that outsourced workers reviewing footage for Meta's AI systems saw material ranging from ordinary conversation to far more private moments.[2]
An ICO spokesperson framed the principle broadly: "Devices processing personal data, including smart glasses, should put users in control and provide appropriate transparency. This includes where user data is used to train or develop AI systems."[2] The sourced description of the regulator's step is contact with the company, and it should be read as exactly that.
Note where the emphasis falls. The ICO language is about users of the device and what happens to data once captured. The pub's code is about everyone else in the room and whether capture happens at all. Those are separate problems, and the second one is currently being settled venue by venue.
Detection tools carry their own warning
One response has come from outside both the industry and the regulator. In February 2026 Yves Jeanrenaud, a deputy professor at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences in Germany, published Nearby Glasses, an Android app that scans Bluetooth Low Energy advertising data for manufacturer identifiers associated with certain smart glasses, including Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses.[3]
The developer attached a caution to his own tool. "Hence, please proceed with caution when approaching a person nearby wearing glasses," he said. "They might just be regular glasses, despite this app's warning."[3] A radio signal in range is not proof that the person across the bar is wearing a camera, still less that it is running, and an app of this kind is better understood as a rough ambient signal than as identification of anybody.
Where the rules are actually being written
Always-on recording has become ordinary consumer hardware, sold in the same shops as sunglasses and worn in the same places. The rules that govern it in a pub, a theatre foyer or a members' club are house rules, drafted by operators, enforced by staff, and revised when something goes wrong. Wetherspoons has produced one version of that: an instinct to say turn the cameras off, grafted onto a code written for phones, with the consequences left undefined.
Sources
- The Register, "Wetherspoons bars smart glasses from filming customers". Published 10 August 2026.
- The Register, "Meta smart glasses face UK privacy probe". Published 5 March 2026.
- The Register, "Hide from Meta's spyglasses with this new Android app". Published 25 February 2026.