Smart-Glasses Recording Is a Felony in 5 States
Not the civil matter the roundups imply
Search "can I record with smart glasses in a two-party consent state" and the answer comes back sounding like a parking rule: in some states you need everyone's permission, so ask first. The word that keeps getting left off is the one the statute leads with. In five states the thing being described is not a privacy tort you might get sued over. It is a felony.
California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts each attach a felony charge to secretly recording a private conversation without the consent of everyone in it. The roundups are not wrong that these are "all-party consent" states; they are wrong about which shelf that puts the offence on. And the device is not incidental to it. A raised phone answers, by being visible, the exact question these statutes ask. A pair of glasses that looks like glasses is built so that it cannot be answered.
What the statute names, in each of the five
The place to start is the penalty line, because it is the part the summaries drop.
Maryland is the plainest. Its wiretap statute says it is "unlawful for any person to ... Willfully intercept" any oral communication, and a person who does is "guilty of a felony and is subject to imprisonment for not more than 5 years or a fine of not more than $10,000, or both" — Courts and Judicial Proceedings § 10-402. No qualifier, no first-offence discount. A felony, five years, ten thousand dollars.
Florida reaches the same class by a longer road. Section 934.03 makes it unlawful to intentionally intercept an oral communication unless "all of the parties to the communication have given prior consent," and a violation "is a felony of the third degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, s. 775.084." There is a narrow first-offence step-down in the statute, but it is written for unscrambled radio signals, not for the microphone on someone's face capturing a conversation two people believed was private.
California does not call its offence a felony outright; it makes it a wobbler, which is worse than it sounds because it means a prosecutor gets to choose. Penal Code § 632(a) punishes anyone who, "intentionally and without the consent of all parties to a confidential communication, uses an electronic amplifying or recording device to eavesdrop upon or record the confidential communication," by "a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500) per violation, or imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison, or by both." State prison is the felony door, and the statute leaves it open.
Illinois here rests on the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press rather than on ilga.gov, the state's own code, which is not readable to us. The guide states that the law "makes it a felony to intercept, record or transcribe any private ... communication unless all parties give their consent," citing 720 ILCS 5/14-1 and 14-2. The Illinois consent rule reaches an in-person conversation only where a participant "reasonably intended" it to be private — the reasonable-expectation test the legislature wrote in after the state's supreme court struck the older, broader eavesdropping law in 2014.
Massachusetts is the fifth, and it is the one that says the most about the device, so it gets its own section.
The word Massachusetts turns on is 'secretly'
Massachusetts is usually filed as the strictest recording state in the country, and the penalty earns it: illegally recording an in-person conversation is punishable by up to five years and a $10,000 fine under General Laws chapter 272, § 99. But the statute has a hinge that the other four do not, and it happens to be aimed straight at this device.
Section 99 does not ban recording without consent. It bans secret recording. The Reporters Committee puts it directly: the law "only applies to secret recordings ... so affirmative consent is not necessary when all parties are aware of the recording." The Digital Media Law Project reaches the same reading — the statute forbids you to "secretly record a conversation," and the safe harbour is that "it is absolutely clear to everyone involved that you are recording."
Read those two sentences back to back and the phone-versus-glasses distinction stops being a rhetorical flourish and becomes the whole case. A phone held up between two people is doing a lot of legal work simply by being visible: in Massachusetts, an obvious recording is not a secret one, and the statute is about secrecy. Take the same act and move the camera onto a pair of frames that look like any other pair of frames, and the one fact the statute cares about, was this secret, flips. Nothing about the intent changed. The visibility did, and in Massachusetts the visibility is the element.
That is the sentence we would stand behind out of all of this: the glasses do not create a new crime, they remove the thing that kept an old one from applying. Every one of these statutes is really asking whether the people being recorded had a way to know. A phone is that way. A device engineered to be indistinguishable from ordinary eyewear is the removal of it.
Why the microphone is where the exposure lives
None of this bites on the video, and that trips people up. Silent footage of a public scene is governed by privacy and voyeurism rules, and is usually allowed where nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy — the recording-law reference sites are consistent on that. The audio is the other statute. Do Smart Glasses Record Audio? — they do, and on this hardware the microphone was never a separate switch a wearer chose to flip. Video and audio arrive together by default, which means the wiretap statute arrives with them, uninvited, the moment a conversation is in earshot.
And the wiretap statutes are older and less forgiving than the privacy-in-public doctrine most people are picturing. They were written for a bug in a wall or a tap on a line: a thing installed on purpose, found later, and provable. The elements survive the jump to eyewear intact. What does not survive is the assumption underneath them that the recorded party had some chance of noticing. This desk has already spent a week on that chance and found it gone — every published method for telling whether a pair of glasses is recording comes with its own footnote admitting it fails. The statutes ask whether the recording was secret. The detection guides answer, without meaning to, that it always is.
What this does not settle
Three limits, stated rather than buried.
No court has applied any of these five statutes to smart glasses. Everything above is the statutory text and what the elements plainly reach; it is not a ruling, and the first prosecution to actually test a wiretap charge against a Meta-style device will answer questions the words alone do not.
The total number of all-party states is contested, so this piece does not give one. The roundups say twelve or thirteen and disagree over Michigan for reasons that are real rather than careless — the sister piece walks through why a single number cannot carry this rule. Five states are named here, because five is the number whose statute or reporters' legal guide says a violation is charged as a felony. It is a floor, not a census.
And two of those five we could not read at the state's own website. Illinois and Massachusetts both refuse this server, so both rest on the Reporters Committee and the Berkman Klein Center's law project rather than on ilga.gov and malegislature.gov directly. Both secondary sources quote the statutory language and the penalties, and we have named them so the reader can see exactly where the load is carried. It is the same wall the Illinois driving explainer hit, and it is not going away; the honest move is to show it rather than paper over it.
What is not in doubt is the shape. In five states the law that governs the audio these glasses capture is criminal, not civil, and the fact those laws hang on, whether the recording could be known, is the fact the hardware is designed to erase.
Related coverage
Are Kmart's $89 Camera Glasses Legal in Australia? — the same participant-versus-all-party recording split runs state by state in the US
A New York Courthouse Will Hold Your Smart Glasses at the Door — the wiretap statutes govern whether making the recording is a crime; this is the separate question of whether a venue can take the device off you at the door
Are Smart Glasses Allowed in Hospitals? — audio-consent felony exposure on the wearer, separate from the hospital's HIPAA duty
Filming the Police Has Survived Every Appeals Court That Has Ruled On It — the police-recording case pivots on the same wiretap statutes, and the on-duty-officer exception does not reach the private conversations glasses also capture
California's Smart-Glasses Recording Bill Is Not Law — the existing wiretap statutes vs the first bill written at the device itself
Can You Sue Someone for Recording Your Face With Smart Glasses? — the audio/criminal exposure runs the other way; this is the video/biometric side and its narrow remedy
Is It Legal to Record Someone With Smart Glasses in Canada? — the American map's permissive-vs-all-party split, set against Canada's single federal one-party rule
Can a Secret Smart-Glasses Recording Be Used as Evidence in Court? — the consent statute decides whether the recording was a crime; this piece is the next step, whether a court can then use it
Is Secret Smart-Glasses Filming a Federal Crime? — the audio side of the same act: the microphone, not the camera, is where a wearer's criminal exposure actually sits
Sources and verification
- California Penal Code § 632 — all-party consent for a "confidential communication"; the $2,500 / jail / state-prison penalty. Read at the state legislature.
- Florida Statutes § 934.03 — interception of an oral communication without all parties' consent; third-degree felony. Read at the state senate.
- Maryland Courts and Judicial Proceedings § 10-402 — felony, up to five years or $10,000. Read at the state legislature.
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — Illinois — 720 ILCS 5/14-1, -2, the felony language and the reasonable-expectation requirement. Used because ilga.gov refuses this server.
- Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press — Massachusetts — G.L. c. 272 § 99, the five-year penalty, and that the law reaches only secret recordings. Used because malegislature.gov refuses this server.
- Digital Media Law Project — Massachusetts recording law — the "secretly record" construction and the clear-to-everyone safe harbour.
- 18 U.S.C. § 2511 — the federal one-party baseline the states are free to exceed.
- Recording Law — smart glasses recording laws — the video-versus-audio split and the all-party framing for the device.