Newsom Killed America's First Smart-Glasses Privacy Law
Newsom Killed America's First Smart-Glasses Privacy Law
California's governor spent the week playing tech sheriff — banning AI-only firings, bankrolling quantum research — then quietly vetoed the nation's first crackdown on secret smart-glasses recording. His excuse: the bill was too badly written to sign.
Photo: Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1 smart glasses with their charging case. More than seven million pairs of Meta's smart glasses were sold last year alone. (CCadio / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)
Gavin Newsom has had a strange week. On Wednesday, the California governor signed California's first-in-the-nation ban on AI-only firings, dropped into a quantum lab at UC Berkeley to announce $30 million for deep-space and quantum research — and then, in the same day's paperwork, vetoed the strongest privacy bill Silicon Valley has ever faced. One pen, one Wednesday, opposite directions.
Had it survived, Senate Bill 1130 would have been the first law of its kind in America. Secretly recording someone with smart glasses — in a changing room, a doctor's office, anywhere privacy is an expectation rather than a luxury — would have carried a penalty. Come 2028, any company selling camera-equipped glasses or wearables in the state would have had to build in a visible light or indicator, something clearly showing when recording was active. For anyone who recorded anyway, the bill had real teeth: prison time, or fines of up to $1,500 for individuals and up to $2,500 for companies whose devices skipped the warning. And any gadget designed to hide or defeat that indicator would have been banned outright.
None of that survives. Newsom killed it with a veto letter that reads like margin notes from a stern teacher.
What the veto letter actually said
Newsom's objection came down to language — specifically, the bill's definition of a "wearable recording device," which he said was too loose to survive contact with reality. The governor summarised the measure's sweep in his own words: "this bill would make it a misdemeanor to operate a wearable recording device to capture sound or video of any other person in any area within a place of business where the person has a reasonable expectation of privacy," he wrote in his veto letter to the State Senate.
His killer line followed immediately: "For example, the bill's definition of 'wearable recording device' could include certain smartwatches or other worn devices widely used in public spaces and capable of recording which could lead to significant confusion and unintended consequences," Newsom added. Translation: on Reyes' wording, your Apple Watch might count. That is where the bill falls apart.
Photo: California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 1130 on September 30, 2026, calling its definition of a "wearable recording device" too broad. (Charles Ommanney / Office of the Governor of California, public domain)
The governor's second argument was that California already covers this ground. The state bars non-consensual recording in spaces considered private, and it is one of about a dozen with two-party consent laws — both sides of a conversation have to agree before audio or video recording. Newsom's point, as he put it in the letter, was that when the existing law does the job, a shoddily worded new one only adds confusion.
"Whatever we can do"
The bill's author, State Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, is not pretending the veto was a technicality. She wrote SB 1130 precisely because the old statutes were drafted for an era of camcorders, not for AI-powered spectacles that look like ordinary sunglasses. "Whatever we can do to protect an individual's right to privacy, we have to do," Reyes said. Her office has pointed to the bill's modest, concrete fixes — a recording light, a ban on concealment tricks — as the kind of basic consumer protection that shouldn't need a perfect legal definition to justify.
And here is the part of this that should make you uncomfortable: more than seven million pairs of Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses were sold last year alone. The Meta Ray-Bans launched in 2021 and have grown at a pace that has genuinely surprised even Meta. They record video and audio from the wearer's face, and the only thing standing between a stranger and a recording of you in a changing room is a tiny LED that most people never notice — assuming the person wearing them hasn't found a way around it.
Critics have landed on a name for these devices: "pervert glasses." Crude, yes — and it stuck, because the asymmetry it names is exact. A phone raised to film you, you can see. A camera sitting behind you at the till, inside someone's glasses, you cannot.
The problem isn't going away
Newsom's letter treats this as a drafting failure. It is one, sure. But vetoes don't come with asterisks, and the technology this bill targeted is moving far faster than Sacramento's red pens. Meta's smart-glasses sales keep climbing, Snap is pushing its own camera wearables, and AI-powered pendants that listen and record are already shipping with mixed reactions. Norway has floated the possibility of banning camera wearables outright. Last month, Apple announced that new Apple Watch software would include an always-on listening feature that can play back a transcript of the last 15 seconds of audio — a reminder, if one were needed, that the "smartwatch" Newsom worried about sweeping up in Reyes' definition is itself becoming an always-listening device.
We checked the bill's official history entries, cited in an audit by recordinglaw.com, which show the California Senate's log now reads "In Senate. Consideration of Governor's veto pending." That's the legislative equivalent of a shrug. Reyes could try an override — a two-thirds vote in both chambers — but governors' vetoes in Sacramento are almost never overturned, and she has given no public signal that she's reaching for that weapon.
The split-screen week
Now zoom out, because the context is what makes this veto sting. In the same 24-hour stretch as the veto, Newsom signed the No Robo Bosses Act — SB 947 — making California the first state to bar employers from letting AI alone fire or discipline workers, complete with written-notice requirements and civil penalties. He signed a trio of workplace AI bills and executive language on the same day. And he was at UC Berkeley announcing a $30 million investment in quantum and deep-space research, calling California the place "where big ideas become real-world breakthroughs."
So the governor is happy to regulate artificial intelligence when it's in the workplace, and happy to fund it when it's in a research lab — but when the technology is a camera on someone's face filming your daughter in a changing room, the pen runs out of ink. This is the contradiction at the heart of California tech policy in 2026: worker protections that make headlines, consumer protections that die on the fine print. And while Newsom was killing privacy bills, New Mexico was asking a court for up to $40 billion from Meta over its privacy record.
It also lands in a miserable news cycle for Meta's trust problem. The company has spent the last week insisting its Muse AI doesn't read private messages — denials we covered here, and which nobody believed. Now the governor of California has handed the company the quietest possible victory on the product line — smart glasses — that generates the loudest real-world privacy complaints. Meta didn't even have to lobby in the open. The veto did the work.
Update, Oct. 2: the industry celebrates, privacy advocates fume
The veto split the tech world cleanly down the middle. TechNet — the industry group whose members include Meta, Google and Amazon — cheered the decision. Its executive director Robert Boykin said California "already has extensive laws governing unlawful recording, and as currently written, SB 1130 is not the right approach to addressing these concerns."
Meta, for its part, struck a conciliatory note. A company spokesperson said: "We're still in the early days of building this technology and we're committed to continuing prioritizing privacy as we build." The company also pointed to its work with blinded veterans — supplying smart glasses to help read documents and identify objects — as evidence the technology has legitimate uses worth protecting.
Privacy advocates were furious. Justin Brookman, Consumer Reports' director of technology policy, argued it is far less obvious when someone is recording with smart glasses than with a phone held up in the air. He cited the cases that made the issue viral: the Aniessa Navarro TikTok — a wax technician filmed wearing smart glasses, insisting they "weren't on", in a clip that left viewers unnerved anyway — and the gym incident where a member was caught secretly filming. Bill author Reyes was blunt: "The stories are enough to cause alarm, and we need to do something as soon as we can."
SB 1130: the questions everyone asks
What would SB 1130 have required? Fines of $1,500 for a first offence and $2,500 for repeat offences — plus potential prison time — for secretly recording someone with a wearable device, and a mandate that smart glasses sold in California carry a visible recording indicator from 2028.
Why did Newsom veto it? In his veto letter, Newsom said the bill's definition of "wearable recording device" was too broad — it could sweep in smartwatches and other wearables that were never the target — and the drafting needed more work.
Who cheered and who booed? The tech industry — TechNet's Robert Boykin and Meta — welcomed the veto. Privacy advocates — Consumer Reports' Justin Brookman and the bill's author — condemned it.
Is this over? Hardly. Newsom signed the companion bill SB 947 the same week, a reintroduced version of the smart-glasses bill is widely expected, and with more than 7 million Meta Ray-Bans already sold, the pressure for a second attempt will only grow.
Our take
Let's be honest about what happened. Newsom was right that the bill was badly drafted — a law that can't distinguish between a pair of Ray-Bans and a Fitbit is a botched law, and signing it would have invited colossally stupid litigation the moment someone's smartwatch recorded a coffee queue. But "fix the wording and reintroduce it" is a fantasy solution in a state where the legislature is out of session and the tech lobby never sleeps. A narrower bill next year means another year of millions of camera-equipped glasses with nothing but a blinking LED between a stranger and your privacy.
The veto is not where this failed. What failed is that nobody in Sacramento had a backup plan. If the definition was too broad, an urgency clause could have tightened it — and if the Apple Watch was the problem, carve out devices whose primary function is not recording. Instead the bill died and Sacramento walked away. That is not a privacy policy. It is a punt. And the people who get to keep filming are the ones who were already doing it.
Sources: Associated Press (Sophie Austin, Sacramento); Engadget (Karissa Bell); TechCrunch; Fast Company; recordinglaw.com's audit of the Senate bill-history log; Particle News. Bill terms, fines, and the 7M+ sales figure cross-checked against AP, TechCrunch and Engadget reports.
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