Newsom Vetoed the Ban on Secretly Filming People With Camera Glasses. He's Wrong.

Senate Bill 1130 would have made California the first state to regulate smart glasses that can secretly record people.

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill that would have made it illegal to secretly record people with camera glasses, and he got it backward.

Senate Bill 1130, written by state Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes, would have made California the first state to put rules on smart glasses, TechCrunch reported. Newsom sent it back to lawmakers in a letter on Wednesday, Sept. 30.

The veto's practical effect is simple. The companies putting cameras and always-on microphones into eyewear, like Meta and Snap, face no new California rules. Meta alone sold more than 7 million wearable glasses last year, the outlet reported. The stranger across the aisle on the Metro, or on the next bench at the gym, gets nothing new at all.

That's the wrong trade.

Here's what the bill would have done. Wearers couldn't record people in public without their explicit consent. Breaking that rule could have meant fines or prison time, and device makers that didn't comply would have been fined too. That last part is the one I'd put first, because it pushed some of the responsibility onto the companies instead of leaving all of it on whoever's wearing the frames.

Critics and buyers have taken to calling these gadgets "pervert glasses," after repeated reports of wearers filming and harassing people. When customers give your product that nickname, the market isn't fixing the problem by itself.

Newsom's objection deserves a fair hearing. His letter said the bill defined wearable recording devices "too broadly or imprecisely," which he warned could cause confusion and consequences nobody intended. He also said the bill repeated protections California law already has.

The breadth complaint is stronger than I wanted it to be. Apple said last month that its newest Apple Watch software would let wearers replay a transcript of the previous 15 seconds and get summaries of the day's conversations. If a watch can quietly keep a running transcript, a law has to decide whether that watch counts as a recording device, and a sloppy answer could sweep in an awful lot of ordinary wrists.

So I'll give him the drafting point. I won't give him the veto. An imprecise definition calls for a precise one, and while lawmakers start over, the cost of waiting doesn't fall on the companies selling the cameras. It falls on the people in front of them, who never agreed to anything.

The existing-law argument is thinner. As reported, Newsom's point was that the bill includes some protections already on the books, not that all of it does. The piece that's plainly new is the fines aimed at manufacturers, and no amount of old law about individual wearers covers what a company owes the public. Reyes said the bill was meant to help California keep up with how fast always-listening tech is rolling out, according to ABC News. Saying the old rules are enough is a claim that they've kept up. The nickname suggests otherwise.

Norway, meanwhile, is weighing whether to ban the technology outright. California was offering something far milder: get consent before you record, and make the makers answer for their products. Turning that down over wording leaves the state behind a country that's considering a ban.

The bill is back with the Legislature. If Reyes brings it back, the definition should be tight enough to answer Newsom, and the fines on the companies should survive the rewrite. That's the part the person on the other side of the lens actually needs.

Source: techcrunch.com, retrieved October 1, 2026.