AI smartglasses risk generating an epidemic in sex crime

Critically, this technology also lets the wearer record high-definition footage of everything they see, with the only indication that they are doing so being a small LED light on the rim. Dubbed ‘pervert glasses’ by campaigners, many have warned that this tech poses an unacceptable risk to unwitting women and girls who may be covertly photographed and recorded by sexual predators.

I have spent over 20 years as a criminal defence solicitor. Over the course of my legal career, I have seen the nature of sex offending shift dramatically with changes in technology - and it is changing again. Devices like smart glasses and AI more broadly will do what smartphones and social media did to crime 15 years ago, and multiply it a hundredfold. This will mean the application of these tools to crimes that already exist on the statute books, and the generation of new types of offending that we are not yet even aware of.

Perhaps the best example of technology transforming crime is in indecent images offending, which constitutes the majority of cases handled by my firm. In 2000 - 2001, there were 665 indecent images and associated obscene publications offences recorded by police in England and Wales. By the year ending June 2024, the number had risen to just under 43,000. With the caveat that methods in recording, data collection and legal definitions have changed significantly in that time, these figures demonstrate a stunning increase in image-based child sexual abuse powered by smartphones and social media. Moreover, this does not account for the raft of other internet-centric offending - such as sexual communication with children and ‘cyberflashing’ - that has also risen exponentially and continues to do so.

AI has already started to do the same thing, and smartglasses will be just part of it. Campaigners are correct that these devices allow a person to secretly photograph a stranger in public; more worrying, they can now upload this image to one of hundreds of AI generative tools, and create a highly realistic image of their target in whatever obscene sexualised scenario they can think of. Doing so is now a criminal offence punishable by up to three years in prison, but this will do little to stop concerted stalkers, predators, or naive teenage boys. Penalties for platforms used for this purpose may have some effect, but this does not account for black market operators or the apparent imperviousness of AI to human control. Now that it's out, putting this technology back in the bottle seems impossible.

Recording a person in public is not alone a criminal offence, which is why I think it will be particularly difficult for the authorities to effectively manage this type of behaviour. ‘Upskirting’ has been a crime since 2019, but this refers to very specific behaviour that meets very specific criteria. In January, Greater Manchester Police expressed their frustration that the legislation is not currently in place to pursue a man accused of habitually recording women and girls in public, and there is no straightforward route to make such activities illegal.

As a society, we have allowed ourselves to become comfortable with greater degrees of constant unofficial surveillance, and we all now carry a device in our pockets that lets us take photographs and videos and share them with the world. Devices like smartglasses are simply the next iteration - and the modern tech that conveniences us will also convenience those who will use them to commit crime.

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Marcus Johnstone is a criminal defence solicitor of over 20 years, and the managing director of PCD Solicitors, a nationwide criminal defence firm specialising in sexual offences.

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