A Delhi Police official on duty at the October 10 march at Jantar Mantar was wearing Ray-Ban Meta glasses, according to Indian Express Hindi, which posted the claim on X along with two questions for the police. MediaNama partly backs it up: a journalist who asked not to be named saw two officers at separate checkpoints near Connaught Place that evening wearing what appeared to be smart glasses while they stopped and searched vehicles. “Appeared to be” is carrying a lot there. Neither account says the glasses were Meta’s, and Delhi Police also use a different pair built by the Maharashtra firm Ajna Tech, so a camera on a constable’s face in Delhi isn’t automatically Mark Zuckerberg’s product.

What bothers me is how little needs to be proven for the problem to exist. The only warning a bystander gets from these glasses is a small LED, and MediaNama points to an investigation and online tutorials showing it can be covered or removed. Meta says it has since updated the glasses to turn off the camera when the LED is tampered with. That patch is aimed at the prankster.

A police officer at a checkpoint has no reason to hide the light, because no one being searched will argue about it.

MediaNama also lists a longer run of allegations, none of which I have verified: protesters in July saying police filmed them with Meta glasses, a Delhi High Court petition over police videography at Jantar Mantar, and Lady Shri Ram College students saying administrators used the glasses to record and intimidate them in April. A Delhi man has separately sent Meta a legal notice after an Instagram creator filmed him with the glasses and the Reel stayed up, which would make it one of the first Indian tests of whether the maker of the hardware can be held liable.

Compare that with the argument in Europe and the US. Norway’s proposal names places such as schools, gyms and clinics rather than devices, a Dutch optician chain pulled Meta’s glasses off its shelves, and Newsom vetoed the California bill that would have required recording indicators from 2028. Every one of those is about what shoppers and private wearers do. Almost nothing in that pile addresses the state as the wearer, which is the question Indian Express Hindi actually asked: can officers wear these on duty and record people without authorization?

The pressure will not ease on price, either. MediaNama notes Reliance Jio plans JioFrames at under $105, against roughly $420 for Meta’s pair in India, and Lenskart’s glasses already record audio and video. I covered the vendor-side trust problem in the smart-glasses race in a privacy piece; the Delhi version is that the cheapest camera on the street may soon be on the person with the baton.

Sources