Your Church Needs a Plan for This Yesterday

On my new article at The Gospel Coalition about smart glassses

I have a new article out on The Gospel Coalition (my debut at my employer) about something that churches need to take seriously yesterday. Zuckerberg was in the news recently for claiming Meta’s AI can replace your missing friends, but he knows that was a distraction. Their Ray-Ban smart glasses are the most successful thing the company is working on by far and he wants to keep that a secret until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Here is the situation:

Ten years ago, Apple released the Apple Watch. What was once considered niche and experimental eventually became nearly as common as smartphones; a decade later, the smartwatch market is booming, with a myriad of options from dozens of competitors.

Smart glasses are on a similar trajectory. In contrast to bulky VR headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, smart glasses are an affordable improvement on the glasses people already wear. Reading a text message or taking a photo using glasses is much more appealing than the awkwardness (and danger) of wearing a computer on your face in public.

Currently, Meta’s smart glasses dominate this new market. They’re available on Amazon and in big-box tech stores, and they can be purchased with or without a prescription in numerous colors. While Meta created these glasses for general consumers, they’re finding unexpected success among disability advocacy groups. Sarah E. Needleman’s recent piece in The Wall Street Journal described how the glasses are a game-changer for visually impaired consumers, with an executive director of the National Federation of the Blind saying, “It’s giving significant accessibility benefits at a price point people can afford.”

Unfortunately, the key features of these glasses that are enhancing lives in one demographic can be exploited by others with harmful intent.

Here is the danger:

Like with other AI-enabled devices, an individual wearing a pair of Meta’s Ray-Bans can say “Hey Meta” and give numerous voice commands, including calling someone, taking a photo, and recording video. You can even ask the glasses to give an AI-generated description of what you’re seeing. This feature is proving most valuable to visually impaired wearers.

When you take a photo or record a video, an LED light embedded in the glasses’ frames turns on. In some ways, this feature makes recording with the glasses more obvious than holding up your phone in front of you to record. But a quick Google search for “how to turn off Meta Ray-Ban light” reveals dozens of results for how to disable that light, with solutions ranging from using electrical tape or black epoxy to cover the light to advanced modifications such as precision drilling into the light to disable it. This is a clear signal that wearers find the light annoying and want to be able to turn it off.

Thankfully, Meta’s smart glasses seem resistant to tampering and modification. If the light is blocked or disabled, the glasses won’t record, and no clear-cut way to get around this has emerged. Yet given the strong demand from consumers to turn this feature off, it’s only a matter of time before a competitor enters the emerging market with a pair of smart glasses that can discreetly capture photos and videos without an indicator light. It’s only a matter of time before an individual uses a pair of smart glasses to prey on children or other people’s privacy in church.

Here is why churches need to take smart glasses seriously:

To keep attendees safe on Sundays, we must first acknowledge a scary truth: An individual with harmful intent only needs to succeed once to create a lifetime of suffering. Thankfully, churches can take these three steps to greatly reduce the risk of a predator using smart glasses to harm people who come to church.

My three steps are as follows:

1. Include specific language about smart glasses in your church’s photography policy and standard operating procedures (SOP) for security.

2. Educate volunteer teams about your church’s policies.

3. Proactively ensure that visually impaired people are welcomed and served by your church.

Go deeper on each of those three steps (with resources on how to do them) in the article.

Thanks for reading. Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon

Austin