Looking through the Smart Glasses Lens



Technology, Entitlement, and Equity

How to cite this learning scenario

The Smart Glasses Lab (2025). Through the Smart Glasses Lens: Technology, Entitlement, and Equity. www.AI4Education.org . Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
abstract
Abstract This scenario explores a disturbing case at the University of Green, where a man wearing smart glasses secretly recorded women on campus and uploaded the videos to social media. While these glasses represent a new frontier in wearable technology, offering real-time translation, navigation, and accessibility features for users with vision impairments, they also highlight how innovation can amplify existing social harms. The same device that empowers some can be weaponised against others. This duality, between accessibility and abuse, frames the central dilemma: how can educational institutions design policies that protect those who rely on assistive technologies while also protecting privacy and safety? The scenario challenges educators, policymakers, and technologists to interrogate where entitlement intersects with engineering and where accountability should be coded into design. It invites reflection on how technology mediates gendered power, how we normalise surveillance through “content culture,” and what it means to balance inclusion with consent in the age of smart wearables.

“People filming others without consent are not entitled to do so. That is a violation. People using smart glasses for accessibility are entitled to do so. That is inclusion. These are not competing rights; one is an abuse of power, the other an exercise of equity.”

Through the Smart Glasses Lens: Technology, Entitlement, and Equity

October 2025It begins with a campus-wide safety alert. Students at the University of Green are warned about a man wearing Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses who has been approaching women, recording them without consent, and posting the clips online under pickuplines.pov. The response is quick and divided. Some call it a joke. Others demand harsh penalties. Others call for a total ban or shrug it off as the price of modern life. 
"You cannot stop bad behaviour." The comments sound familiar. They are the language of resignation dressed as reason. But this is not inevitable. It is designed. When devices record without consent and when voyeurism is disguised as entertainment, technology becomes another form of power. The glasses are marketed as innovation - because they are. They offer translation, navigation, and assistance. But, they also offer opportunity for exploitation. The same lens that can read a street sign can just as easily capture a young girl's face. And we cannot be monofocal in our thinking. On the same campus, a student with low vision could be putting on the same kind of glasses. They help him read text, identify friends, and move safely through spaces that once excluded him. For him, the technology is not a threat but a bridge to participation. 
But, if he enters a lecture, and the room goes quiet while people whisper, and ask "is he filming?' staff may soon approach him and ask him to remove the glasses until “policy catches up.” In that moment, the device that gave him equal access to education becomes used as a justification for exclusion. These two stories are not equal, but they are connected. One is about a man violating women’s safety. The other is about a man being denied the right to belong. One is sexism. The other is ableism. The problem is not that these coexist, but that our systems cannot tell them apart which means we risk treating all contexts where the technology is present, as a risk - which means we react instead of reflect. As such, perhaps the question is not whether smart glasses should exist on campus. It is whether we have the capacity to govern them with discernment, through established rights based frameworks and whether we can we separate the misuse of technology as a weapon from its use as a tool for equity? 
We can. We just have to think this through. And think through a lens of: > People filming others without consent are not entitled to do so. That is a violation. > People using smart glasses for accessibility are entitled to do so. That is inclusion. > One is an abuse of power. The other is a right to equity.
The term entitlement is used here to name, rather than obscure, the social conditions that enable harm through technology. It captures the everyday assumption of access, control, and authority that allows some to treat others’ boundaries as optional. Using this term shifts attention from individual acts to the cultural and structural forces that normalise unequal power relations and embed them in how we use technology, and what we feel entitled to say and do. Avoiding the term risks softening accountability and overlooking how gendered privilege is translated into technological practice, to reveal how social permission becomes engineered into tools that shape equity in education.

Research Topics

Research Questions

How does or does not, the design and marketing of AI enabled wearables reproduce gendered and cultural patterns of entitlement and surveillance What forms of governance or accountability could compel companies and users to prioritise equity and safety over novelty and control How can educational institutions teach and model the ethical capacity to distinguish between the misuse of technology and its equitable potential
In what ways are content creators and influencers shaping cultural norms and expectations about surveillance, gender, and credibility in education as smart glasses become part of mainstream?teaching and learning environments

Examine how gendered power and surveillance shape the design and use of AI enabled wearables, focusing on what change behaviours that normalise harm through technology are required. Investigate how technological innovation is or is not associated with exploitation, and how governance structures can hold to account those that correlate or cause harmful social consequences. Explore how education systems can model anticipatory governance by addressing entitlement and shared responsibility in the use of emerging technologies.
Analyse how content creators shape social attitudes toward gedner based violence through their use of smart glasses.

Data Collection

Critical Discourse Analysis examining corporate marketing, design language, and policy statements to identify embedded gendered and cultural assumptions. Thematic Interviews with educators, students, and technologists about responsibility, harm, and cultural norms in the use of wearable AI. Participatory Workshops engaging men and mixed gender groups in reflective discussions on power, consent, and technological accountability within education and design contexts.
Digital Ethnography examining influencer content across platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram to trace narratives about smart glasses, consent, and innovation in educational contexts.

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Acknowledgement of CountryWe acknowledge the Ancestors, Elders, and families of the Kulin Nation, who are the Traditional Owners of the land where this work has been predominantly completed. As we share our own knowledge practices, we pay respect to the deep knowledge embedded within the Aboriginal community and recognise their custodianship of Country. We acknowledge that the land on which we meet, learn, and share knowledge is a place of age-old ceremonies of celebration, initiation, and renewal, and that the Traditional Owners’ living culture and practices continue to have a unique role in the life of this region.
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