UK Cinemas Latest to Ban Google Glass from Being Worn

When Google released its first Glass units to the public, it didn’t take long before some caveats of wearing a pair in public could be seen. Last March, a self-proclaimed “dive bar” in Seattle preemptively banned the specs from being worn in its establishment, as its owner simply considers Glass to be a potential breach of privacy. Since then, we’ve seen this same argument brought up time and time again.

Other establishments have different reasons for disallowing Glass to be worn, such as the conglomerate of cinemas in the UK. Because the Glass has video-recording capabilities, it’s probably easy to see why they’re not going to be allowed, though it’s being noted that they can’t be worn in general, even if a movie is not playing.

There are a couple of facts about Glass that takes the sense out of this ruling a little bit. If Glass is recording, a light will make that evident. Further, Glass is designed to stop recording after 45 minutes, which is half the length of most movies. Multiple people could get together and later stitch their sources together, but at the end of the day, people have been releasing cinema-filmed copies of movies to various torrent sites and other repositories for a while, and in generally good quality,  so chances are that Glass might not have been the best solution to begin with.

That last fact could certainly change as time goes on, though, when Glass and its competitors become even more powerful, and more capable. In the end, the fact that cinemas want to ban Glass from being worn really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though it will be inconvenient for those wearing them who genuinely have no intent to record the movie they are about to see.