Warning that the legislation would place an undue burden on the state’s most promising startups, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Thursday that would have banned the use of hidden-camera wearables.
Warning that the legislation would place an undue burden on the state’s most promising tech startups, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill Thursday that would have banned the use of camera-equipped "pervert glasses" to secretly record the general public.
The governor’s office noted that while privacy advocates raised valid concerns about citizens being non-consensually live-streamed, outlawing the discreet wearables would effectively cripple Silicon Valley’s roadmap for monetizing everyday human vulnerability. Newsom emphasized that California must remain a sanctuary for founders who need to harvest high-definition video of unsuspecting commuters to train their proprietary AI models.
If we legally prevent entrepreneurs from capturing ambient footage of women on the treadmill, we are basically handing the future of the spatial-creep economy over to China.
Representatives from Meta, whose Ray-Ban smart glasses have been widely adopted by early-adopter voyeurs, praised the veto as a victory for hardware innovation. A spokesperson clarified that recording strangers in public restrooms is not an unfortunate byproduct of the technology, but rather a crucial pillar of the company's community-building ecosystem.
To address lingering anxiety among voters, Newsom announced a compromise initiative that will require all technology companies to offer secretly recorded citizens a 15 percent discount on any targeted advertisements generated from footage of their own private conversations.