Amazon’s rollout of camera-equipped glasses for delivery drivers is raising concerns about workplace privacy, employee surveillance, and the broader normalization of always-on recording technology, according to Neil Richards, a privacy expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
Amazon is providing some delivery drivers with glasses that include cameras, speakers, and other features intended to help employees navigate routes and complete deliveries. The company has said the technology is designed to improve safety and efficiency.
According to a recent report cited by Washington University, Amazon aims to have 5,000 drivers using the glasses by the end of 2026 and more than 20,000 by the end of 2027.
Richards, the Koch Distinguished Professor of Law and co-director of the Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine and Law at WashU, argues that the devices should also be viewed as surveillance tools because they introduce high-resolution cameras into employees’ everyday working environments.
He said the concern is not limited to Amazon employees. As camera-equipped glasses become more commonplace, people interacting with workers wearing them may also be recorded, potentially without meaningful consent or even awareness.
Richards distinguished camera-equipped glasses from wearable devices that primarily provide audio functionality, such as integrated speakers or hearing-assistance technology. His concern centers on devices capable of continuously capturing visual information about workers, customers and the surrounding public.
He also pointed to examples of similar devices being used to secretly photograph people, record conversations and capture encounters for distribution on social media.
The Amazon program also raises questions about how far employers should be allowed to monitor employees simply because increasingly sophisticated tracking technologies are available.
Richards said Amazon already uses digital technologies to monitor workers in delivery vehicles and fulfillment centers. In his view, adding cameras worn directly on employees’ faces could further extend workplace surveillance.
The debate comes as employers across industries increasingly use software, sensors, cameras and artificial intelligence systems to measure employee activity, productivity and behavior.
Richards believes Amazon’s deployment of the glasses could also contribute to a broader cultural acceptance of pervasive surveillance. And Richards argues that widespread deployment of newer devices could gradually make constant recording appear ordinary, reducing the social resistance that previously limited adoption.
He also connected camera-equipped glasses to broader developments involving facial recognition, AI-enabled monitoring systems and increasingly advanced surveillance cameras.
Those technologies can potentially observe and retain information about human activity at a much larger scale and for substantially longer periods than earlier surveillance systems.
Richards’ concerns are also connected to his broader research on privacy.
In a working paper titled “Privacy Is Not Theft,” which is forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, Richards argues that privacy is not simply about keeping information secret. Instead, he views privacy as an important condition for freedom of expression and the ability to live without feeling continuously observed.
From that perspective, widespread surveillance could affect how people behave even when no individual piece of collected information appears especially sensitive.
Richards argues that people who believe they are constantly being watched may become less willing to express unconventional ideas, experiment with different behavior or act outside perceived social norms.
KEY QUOTES:
“Let’s not call them ‘smart’ glasses. There is nothing smart about them. They are surveillance glasses, or as journalists in Britain and now here have aptly taken to calling them, ‘creepy pervert glasses.'”
“It is one thing to have glasses with integrated phone and music speakers or hearing aids. But it’s quite another to make, market and try to normalize everyone walking around with high-resolution cameras strapped to their faces.”
“The most basic notions of privacy — not to mention human decency — tell us that human beings have a right to not have their every interaction recorded and uploaded to a server.”
“Amazon workers’ bodies are worked and worked — often literally to the breaking point. In the context of its checkered record on labor practices, we should consider to what extent Amazon workers — as effectively test subjects for workers in other fields — have a right not to have their entire working lives tracked and recorded like characters in a dystopian novel.”
“Amazon’s attempt to roll out and normalize its surveillance glasses raises a host of problems. Their idea, like Meta’s, seems to be that if they can ‘flood the zone’ with enough surveillance cameras, their presence will become normalized and people will think it is futile to resist them.”
“Amazon’s glasses, as another example of ubiquitous, always-on surveillance, risk the normalization of other kinds of dangerous surveillance tech, from more advanced Flock cameras and real-time facial recognition technology in contexts other than cellphone and border security, to AI-enabled surveillance practices that have the capacity to observe human activity with a scope, scale and permanence that the East German Stasi could only dream about.”
“People will be less likely to feel free to be themselves, and chilled into a kind of boring conformity that is simply at odds with America’s historical and constitutional commitments to freedom of expression and eccentric individuality.”
Neil Richards, Koch Distinguished Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Cordell Institute for Policy in Medicine and Law at Washington University in St. Louis
