Smart Glasses, Smarter Policies: Addressing Legal Risks Of Wearable Technology In The Workplace

The Rise of Smart Glasses at Work

Smart glasses are rapidly transitioning from a novelty seen in movies to a mainstream workplace tool. Devices like the Ray-Ban Meta line and Samsung’s Google-powered glasses are being used across industries. These smart glasses can capture audio and video, take photos, live-stream, and support real-time transcription, translation, or AI-assisted extraction of information from whatever the wearer sees and hears.

The technology also serves critical accessibility functions. Smart glasses can assist the wearer by electronically magnifying what they see, recognizing objects, providing hands-free navigation assistance, and real-time captioning for individuals with visual, hearing, or cognitive disabilities.

This article explores the employment law, privacy law and intellectual property issues arising from the rise of smart glasses at work and offers practical steps for employers to manage these risks.

Employment Law Issues: Surveillance, Recording and Employee Relations

The central legal issue in the rise of smart glasses is the ability of the wearer to covertly record. Unlike a phone or camera held in plain sight, smart glasses make it much more difficult to recognize that an individual is recording conversations or people around them.

In the workplace especially, this poses issues related to employee privacy. Employers should be aware that many employees will be uncomfortable with colleagues recording them or their conversations in the workplace. If employers are allowing the use of smart glasses, policies should be developed regulating use and barring recording in privacy-sensitive situations, such as washrooms, lactation rooms, and confidential HR meetings. Further, employers should be aware that the use of smart glasses to monitor employees may be seen as negatively affecting the work environment or, at a minimum, having an impact on employee morale.

In the context of a workplace investigation, the use of smart glasses may complicate a complaint where a complainant or witness surfaces a covert recording as evidence of harassment or a poisoned work environment. While Canada has a one-party consent exception, meaning a participant in a conversation may lawfully record it without informing the other parties, the surreptitious nature of the recording can still undermine trust and give rise to separate privacy or harassment complaints.

The potential legal risks should not be a complete deterrent to allowing employees to use smart glasses, especially where they serve as disability aids. Employers should be mindful of their duty to accommodate employees. Where an employee requests to use smart glasses because of a disability, employers should engage with those employees to understand their needs and obtain the relevant medical information to assess if use of smart glasses is an appropriate accommodation.

Privacy Law Issues: PIPEDA, Provincial Laws and Electronic Monitoring

Smart glasses can capture a significant amount of personal information about the people around the wearer, raising privacy considerations for employers. When someone acting on behalf of an employer wears smart glasses in the course of their duties, and those devices capture personal information, whether of employees, customers or other third parties, Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) (or the applicable provincial privacy laws) may apply.

Where PIPEDA applies, employers must, for example, provide notice and obtain consent, limit collection to what is necessary, use appropriate safeguards, limit retention and be prepared to respond to individuals’ requests to access their personal information. Even where monitoring through smart glasses is technically possible, it may not always be appropriate. Recording in private or sensitive areas of the workplace, for instance, is unlikely to be justified.

There are also transparency requirements in Ontario. Ontario’s Employment Standards Act, 2000 requires employers with 25 or more employees to have a written policy on electronic monitoring. This policy must disclose whether the employer monitors employees electronically, describe the circumstances in which monitoring may occur, and explain the purposes for which any collected information may be used. For employers deploying smart glasses, this requirement has practical significance. If devices can capture data about employees, the electronic monitoring policy should address this.

Intellectual Property Issues: Confidential Information and Content Ownership

Recordings made through smart glasses may capture privileged, proprietary, or confidential business information. A glimpse of a colleague’s screen, a glance at a whiteboard during a strategy session, or a conversation in a meeting room could result in sensitive information being recorded outside the employer’s control.

This poses significant risks for employers. Trade secrets, client information, legal advice protected by solicitor-client privilege, and proprietary processes could be exposed. Where an employee captures such information without authorization, particularly if workplace policies already prohibit such conduct, this could be grounds for disciplinary action or trigger contractual obligations arising from a security breach.

Ownership of content captured by smart glasses in the course of employment is not straightforward. Where the employer provides the device or the recordings are made to fulfill job responsibilities, the employer has a strong claim to ownership. However, if an employee uses their own device or captures content outside the direct scope of assigned duties, the question becomes less straightforward. The smart glasses platform’s terms of service may also claim to grant the technology provider certain rights to captured data for the technology provider’s own use, which may be inconsistent with an employer’s policies or contractual obligations to customers or other third parties.

Given this ambiguity, employment agreements and workplace policies should address ownership of content in connection with the employee’s work. Addressing the issue upfront avoids disputes and allows the employer to control how sensitive content is used, stored and deleted.

Five Practical Steps for Employers

• Address privacy compliance: A privacy impact assessment should be the initial step. It can help identify risks and mitigation strategies before smart glasses are used or permitted in the workplace.
• Update technology and recording policies: Existing workplace policies may not contemplate wearable technology. Updating these policies to address smart glasses would help set expectations and provide a foundation for addressing misuse. For Ontario employers with 25 or more employees, the electronic monitoring policy should reflect any employer monitoring that may occur through these devices.
• Establish clear usage rules: Identifying clear usage rules and communicating these rules to employees helps manage expectations. The duty to accommodate an employee’s disability may require allowing an employee to use smart glasses at work.
• Strengthen confidentiality protections: Employment agreements and confidentiality policies addressing wearable-generated content, including ownership and restrictions on capturing sensitive information, can reduce exposure and reinforce expectations.
• Train employees and managers: Training on acceptable use, privacy implications, and consequences of misuse helps employees understand the policies and supports consistent compliance.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.