Apple eyes WWDC smart glasses launch with a focus on privacy

Having reportedly shelved plans for a cheaper and lighter version of Vision Pro, Apple is currently focusing all of its augmented-reality efforts on a pair of smart glasses. According to a new report, these are slated to be unveiled at WWDC in June 2027, and would have arrived sooner if it weren’t for privacy concerns.

In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman lays out the particular difficulties which have dogged the so-called “Apple Glasses” project. As he explains, products in this field made by Meta and (to a lesser extent) Samsung and Google have become associated with surveillance and intrusive non-consensual video recording, but Apple stands to lose far more than those companies if it launches a pair of smart glasses because so much of its brand is built around privacy.

“Consumers remain uneasy around people wearing camera-equipped glasses, unsure whether they’re being recorded during conversations at work, restaurants or other public places,” Gurman writes. “In most cases, those fears are probably unfounded. But years of headlines about Meta’s privacy practices, viral social media posts and broader skepticism toward always-available cameras have left many people wary of the category.” Such wariness, then, isn’t confined to Meta’s products; it has created a more general distrust which affects smart glasses launched by any company.

In order to combat this, and to safeguard a pro-privacy reputation a decade in the making, Apple plans to emulate the safety measures introduced by rivals. There will be a light to indicate when the device is recording video, as on the glasses currently being developed by Samsung and Google, and a feature which disables recording if that light has been tampered with. But Apple’s measures need to go further, Gurman says.

Pro-privacy marketing specific to Apple’s entry to the market will include emphasising on-device rather than datacenter-based processing, and steering clear of facial recognition and “super-sensing”-style continuous monitoring features. Unlike Meta, Apple will choose not to have outside contractors review footage shot by its smart glasses, nor to have that footage used to train AI models.

Most drastic of all, Gurman speculates, Apple could launch a set of smart glasses without a camera at all. This, he acknowledges, would undercut much of the appeal of the category, but it would still offer a convenient hands-free device for phone calls, music playback, and AI assistance. Or, if Apple doesn’t want to go quite this far, it could include the hardware for a camera but hard-code limits on what this camera could be used for: namely, that it wouldn’t record video or still images at the user’s behest. It would act as a data collection tool for the onboard AI assistant, generating information about the user’s surroundings, but wouldn’t store the imagery for future perusal.

There are other possible approaches. The analyst Max Weinbach responded to Gurman’s article by proposing the idea of a “privacy beacon.” This would be a Bluetooth signal broadcast by AirTags or other devices which either consents to or declines video surveillance. “If I enable that feature any smart glasses that record near me would put a full body blur over me,” he explains. But this would require widespread agreement among different companies and likely regulators, and the establishment of a standardized protocol.

It’s clear that Apple’s smart glasses will be a challenging launch, from a marketing, PR and even cultural standpoint as well as a technical one. Gurman believes the device will be shown off at next year’s WWDC in June 2027, but won’t become available for sale until later in the year. For all the latest news and rumors, bookmark our regularly updated Apple Glasses superguide.