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Filming Children in Public With Smart Glasses

Explained by Maya Chen — LifePivo fictional editorial host

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the law is narrower, and odder, than parents fear

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A certainty, and where it comes from

Stand near a playground with a camera visible and someone will ask you to stop, often firmly, sometimes with a phone already dialling. The instinct is decent and the belief behind it is nearly universal: that photographing a child you do not know, in public, is against the law. It is worth saying at the outset that this piece is about what the law in England and Wales actually contains, not about whether any of that is wise, comfortable, or the way things should be. The belief and the law have simply drifted apart.

Where the belief comes from is not mysterious. A generation of school photo-consent forms, safeguarding briefings and "no cameras" signs at swimming pools has taught people that images of children are governed, tightly, everywhere. Those rules are real, but almost all of them are the policies of an institution, a school, a leisure centre, a sports club, set on private premises where the occupier can impose whatever conditions it likes. That is a matter of who controls the land, not of any offence: a photographer who ignores the condition is asked to leave and, if they stay, becomes a trespasser, but the picture itself breaks no criminal law. Step onto a public pavement, where nobody holds that power to set conditions, and the institutional rulebook simply does not travel with you. What people carry out of the building is the sense that a general law must exist to match the policy they lived under inside it. Line the actual statutes up against that belief, and the gap is wide.

What the 1978 Act actually catches

The Protection of Children Act 1978 is the law most people are half-remembering, and it is severe, but it is narrow. Section 1 makes it an offence "to take, or permit to be taken or to make, any indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child," to distribute or show such images, or to possess them with a view to their being distributed. A "child" here is anyone under 18, and "photograph" is defined broadly enough to include film, "any form of video-recording," and data stored electronically that can be turned back into an image, which is exactly what a pair of camera glasses produces.

The word carrying the entire weight of that section is "indecent." The Act does not criminalise photographs of children; it criminalises indecent photographs of children, and the courts decide indecency by recognised standards of propriety, not by the mere fact that a child is the subject. An ordinary picture of a child in a park, at a match, on a beach, is not within it. That is the distinction the popular version collapses, and collapsing it is understandable: the penalties attached to the real offence are so serious that people assume its reach must be equally wide. It is not; the reach is set by the content of the image.

Voyeurism needs a private act, and a street is not one

The other statute people reach for is the voyeurism offence in section 67 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. It makes it an offence to record another person doing "a private act," for the purpose of obtaining sexual gratification, knowing they do not consent to being recorded for that purpose. Two conditions have to be met at once, and both are demanding. There has to be a sexual purpose, and there has to be a private act.

"Private act" is not left to impression: section 68 defines it. A person is doing a private act when they are somewhere that "would reasonably be expected to provide privacy" and their genitals, buttocks or breasts are exposed or covered only with underwear, or they are using a lavatory, or they are doing a sexual act not ordinarily done in public. A clothed child walking down a street, playing in a park or sitting on a bus is doing none of those things, in none of those places. The 2019 upskirting law, section 67A, added by the Voyeurism (Offences) Act, closes the specific gap of an image taken beneath clothing, for sexual gratification or to humiliate or alarm. It is a real and important extension, and it is also, by its own terms, about a shot up under someone's clothes. Neither provision reaches an ordinary photograph of a child in public, because neither is about the photograph: they are about a sexual act, a private setting, a lens pushed where it does not belong.

Where the real limit lives

If the criminal law is narrower than the belief, that does not mean there is nothing. It means the everyday limits sit in two less dramatic places. The first is harassment. The Protection from Harassment Act 1997 forbids "a course of conduct" that amounts to harassment and that the person knows or ought to know amounts to it, and "course of conduct," the Act says, means conduct on at least two occasions. One photograph is not a course of conduct. A stranger who follows a particular child, or returns to film the same family day after day, can cross into it; the single frame, however unwelcome, generally cannot. The threshold is repetition, not the picture, which is precisely the axis on which a device that captures without being noticed is most likely to tip a wearer over: what feels to the wearer like two idle glances can be, to the family on the other end, the same watcher back a second time.

The second place is data protection, and it is the one the glasses actually move. Under the UK GDPR, filming identifiable people can be "processing" of their personal data — Ireland's Data Protection Commission, applying the same EU-derived law, puts it bluntly: "simply recording and/or storing video and audio data could be considered 'processing', even if no further use is made of that data." Ordinarily a private individual is rescued from all of that by the exemption for "a purely personal or household activity." But the EU court held in the Ryneš case that a camera covering "even partially, a public space" is not a purely personal or household activity, and the Irish regulator now reads that straight across to dash cams and action cams. A wearable camera pointed down a pavement is the same shape of thing. This is the household-exemption line that decides whether a wearer counts as a data controller at all, and it is where a parent's complaint, if one is ever tested, would most plausibly land.

What the glasses change, and what they do not

The temptation, faced with a new device, is to assume it must bring a new rule with it. Smart glasses do not. Point them at a child in a public place and the criminal questions are exactly the ones above, answered exactly the same way: is the image indecent, is there a sexual purpose and a private act, is this a repeated course of conduct. The device is not an element of any of those offences. This is the same conclusion the wider UK rule on recording people in public arrives at from the other direction — the law is largely about content, purpose and repetition, not about which gadget captured the frame.

What the glasses genuinely change is smaller and more human. The social signal is gone. A raised phone is a visible act that a parent can see, object to, and step in front of; a pair of glasses is not, and Meta's own capture LED — which the company says lights up automatically and warns the wearer if it is covered — is a grain-of-rice indicator that most bystanders will never register in daylight at a few metres. The disclosure exists; it is just faint. And the second change is the one that turns a private snapshot into a regulated one: the exemption that protects casual personal use leans hardest against a wearer once the footage is shared or posted, at which point the personal-use shield the wearer was relying on is exactly the thing that falls away. The nearer fear — that the glasses could quietly attach a name to a child's face — runs into a different limit again, the one set out in what these devices can and cannot recognise.

The honest state of it

The uncomfortable truth for a worried parent is that the strongest protections here are the ones that feel least like protection: an institution's own rules on its own premises, a harassment threshold that needs the conduct to be repeated, and a data-protection regime that mostly bites after the footage leaves the wearer's own use. The single act, a stranger in camera glasses, one frame of a child in public, sits in the gap the popular belief papers over. No statute in England and Wales makes that act, by itself, a crime, and no reform is scheduled that would. Whether the device that erased the raised-phone warning should also change the law is a real question. So far it has changed only what a parent can see.

Do Smart Glasses Collect Children's Data? — the criminal-law myth about photographing children versus the federal children's-data regime

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