Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, translation earbuds, and recording-capable wearables are already showing up at work — often before HR knows. Here’s what employment law attorney Burt Garland says leaders need to understand now.
Somewhere in your workforce, someone is probably already wearing a recording-capable device to work.
Maybe it’s prescription smart glasses they paid $800 for and consider essential. Maybe it’s a translation earbud they use to communicate with coworkers. Maybe it’s a fitness tracker that captures more than steps. Smart glasses in the workplace are no longer a hypothetical — the technology is here whether your handbook anticipates it or not. For most organizations, the policies governing how recording can happen at work were written in a world where recording meant pulling out a phone.
This isn’t a question of whether to adopt wearables. It’s a question of how prepared your organization is for the wearables already here.
On a recent episode of This Week at Work, Phil Brandt and employment attorney Burt Garland of Ogletree Deakins worked through what business leaders need to understand about smart glasses, translation devices, biometric capture, and the legal exposure that comes with all of it. The conversation is below as practical guidance.
The visible version of this trend is smart glasses — Meta Ray-Bans and similar devices that look like ordinary frames but can record audio, capture video, take photos, and in some cases process facial recognition or eye-tracking data in real time. The less visible version is everything else: translation earbuds, smart pins, recording-capable buttons, AR headsets, and the next wave of devices that haven’t hit the consumer market yet but will.
Burt pointed to a client already grappling with this — a manufacturer using two-way radios that translate Spanish and English in real time across a multilingual workforce. Useful, even necessary in some operations. But the voices traveling through those radios are biometric data, and the recordings, if any are made, are discoverable.
The point isn’t that any one device is dangerous. The point is that the category is growing fast, the capabilities are expanding faster, and the legal frameworks employers rely on were not built for any of this.
The risk surface for workplace wearables touches at least four areas employers already manage, but now in combination:
Consent-to-record laws. About a dozen states, including Illinois, require all parties to a conversation to consent before audio can be recorded. If an employee wears smart glasses that capture audio and an employer requires or permits the device in the workplace, both the employee and the employer can face civil liability — and in some states, criminal exposure. Missouri and most states are one-party consent, but for any organization operating across state lines, the strictest applicable rule effectively governs.
Biometric privacy laws. Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) is the most-cited example, but it isn’t the only one. BIPA requires written notice, informed consent, and specific data protection practices any time biometric information — facial geometry, voiceprints, eye-tracking data — is collected. Smart glasses with facial recognition or eye-tracking capability fall directly inside that definition. So do voice recordings made through translation devices.
National Labor Relations Act protections. A blanket no-recording policy can run afoul of the NLRA when employees use recording to document protected concerted activity, harassment, discrimination, whistleblowing claims, or interference with their Section 7 rights. As Burt put it, no-recording policies are allowed where there’s a legitimate business justification — protecting confidential or proprietary information, for example — but blanket prohibitions without nuance invite legal challenges.
ADA accommodation obligations. Smart glasses can be assistive devices for vision impairments. Some are prescription. Some translate spoken language for employees who don’t share a common language with coworkers. An employer who bans the technology outright may find themselves facing a disability accommodation claim from an employee whose physician prescribed the device.
Each of these legal frameworks existed before smart glasses. What’s new is that a single pair of glasses can implicate all four at once.
There’s a quieter risk underneath the legal categories above, and it’s worth naming directly: video and audio captured during work may be considered business records, which makes them discoverable in litigation.
The example Burt offered lands the point. An employee uses smart glasses for augmented reality work on an assembly line — the device overlays assembly instructions onto the parts in front of them. Helpful technology, real productivity gain. Then an injury happens on that line while the device is recording.
The employer now has video evidence of exactly what happened. That evidence almost certainly needs to be preserved. And if it isn’t — or if it’s destroyed — the legal exposure is worse than if the recording had never existed.
The same logic applies to the everyday case: an employee wearing smart glasses captures a forklift driver running over a coworker’s foot. The recording exists. It’s relevant. It’s discoverable.
This is the part that doesn’t show up in a typical handbook review. Organizations need to think now about retention and destruction policies for data captured by wearables — before the data exists, not after a subpoena arrives.
The wait-and-see approach is the most expensive option on the table. Statutory damages under biometric privacy laws can stack quickly. Union grievances over inconsistent enforcement are common. Discrimination claims over mishandled accommodation requests are predictable. The cost of getting ahead of this is significantly lower than the cost of being reactive when an issue surfaces.
A practical starting point:
Know your consent law. Identify whether each state where you operate is one-party or all-party consent. For multi-state employers, the strictest applicable rule should anchor your default policy.
Update no-recording policies with intentional carve-outs. Maintain the prohibition where the business justification is real — confidential information, trade secrets, sensitive areas — and build in the exceptions the NLRB and the courts already require.
Address wearables specifically in policy language. Smart glasses, translation devices, recording-capable wearables, and AR headsets should be named. Generic “no electronic recording” language written for the smartphone era doesn’t cover what’s coming next.
Build an accommodation process for assistive wearables. Treat requests to use smart glasses the way you’d treat any other accommodation request — individualized analysis, interactive process, evaluation of alternatives. Avoid blanket bans.
Update Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) agreements. Most BYOD agreements were written for phones and laptops. They need to expand.
Address data retention before there’s data to retain. If wearable-captured audio or video could become a business record, the policy governing how long it’s kept and when it’s destroyed needs to exist before an incident happens.
Train employees on consent laws and privacy expectations. Most employees don’t know that wearing recording-capable glasses into a meeting in an all-party consent state could be a criminal act. They need to. And while you’re at it, make sure the rest of your employee compliance training is current — AAIM membership includes a compliance training video series covering anti-harassment, ethics in the workplace, drug- and alcohol-free workplace policies, and related foundational topics.
Train managers on what to do when they notice a device. This is where most organizations will live or die operationally. Frontline managers see the device first. They need a playbook.
Audit how these devices intersect with existing legal obligations. Healthcare organizations carry HIPAA obligations layered on top of everything above. Financial services organizations carry GLBA obligations. The audit needs to account for those specifics, not just “regulated industry” in the abstract.
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“Now is not too early to start. Employers should start developing those clear policies that address smart glasses, other wearables, train the employees on the consent laws and privacy expectations, update the confidentiality policies.” — Burt Garland, Shareholder, Ogletree Deakins |
There’s a culture layer underneath the policy layer. Most employees don’t bring recording-capable devices to work because they’re hoping to catch something. They bring them because the technology is in their lives, and the workplace is part of their life.
When employees do start using these devices defensively — recording every interaction, capturing every meeting — the underlying issue usually isn’t the device. It’s the culture. People reach for documentation when they don’t trust the system to be fair, when feedback feels arbitrary, when accountability feels one-directional.
The technology question and the culture question are not separable. Organizations that get ahead of the policy work and invest in workplace culture at the same time will have a much easier time managing what’s coming. Organizations that try to solve this with a one-page handbook update and a strongly worded memo will not.
Smart glasses are the visible edge of a much larger shift. Contact lenses with embedded display technology are already in development. Implants are not science fiction at this point — they’re a roadmap. The category is growing, the capabilities are expanding, and the policy frameworks most employers rely on were not built for any of it.
The opportunity here is real. Hands-free instruction, real-time translation, augmented reality assistance, and assistive accommodation are all genuinely useful applications. The leaders who get ahead of this — clear policies, trained employees, equipped managers, intentional culture — will be in position to capture those benefits. The leaders who wait will spend the next few years reacting.
If you’d like help thinking through what this looks like for your organization, the AAIM Solutions Team is here for it — solutions.team@aaimea.org. Not yet a member? Learn more about AAIM membership.
Can my employees wear smart glasses to work?
Generally yes, unless your organization has a clearly written policy restricting them. A blanket ban is risky because smart glasses can be prescription, assistive, or required for translation, and disability accommodation law may require a case-by-case interactive process. The stronger approach is a defined policy that addresses recording, biometric capture, and use in sensitive areas.
Is it legal to record a meeting using smart glasses?
It depends on the state. About a dozen states, including Illinois, require all parties to consent before audio can be recorded. Most states, including Missouri, only require one party to the conversation to consent. Multi-state employers should default to the strictest applicable rule.
Are smart glasses considered an ADA accommodation?
Smart glasses can be an ADA accommodation when they serve as an assistive device for a vision impairment or other qualifying disability, particularly when prescribed by a physician. Employers should treat a request to wear smart glasses the way they’d treat any other accommodation request — individualized analysis, interactive process, evaluation of alternatives — rather than relying on a blanket ban.
Do smart glasses fall under BIPA?
Smart glasses fall under Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act when they capture facial geometry, voiceprints, eye-tracking data, or other biometric identifiers. BIPA requires written notice, informed consent, and specific data protection practices any time biometric information is collected. The same logic applies to translation devices that record and transmit voice data, since voiceprints are biometric.
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Want to Hear the Full Conversation? Phil and Burt go deeper on Illinois’ BIPA statute, the real-time translation radios already in use on a manufacturing floor, and what’s coming next after smart glasses — including the contact lens technology that may make all of this look quaint. |
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