Dutch eyewear chain Hans Anders suspends sales of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses over privacy concerns

One of the largest eyewear retail chains in the Netherlands, Hans Anders, has announced it has suspended sales of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses in the Netherlands and Belgium because of growing privacy concerns. As Reuters reports, this is one of the first cases of a major retailer deciding to pull the product from shelves for this reason.

“This decision follows the ongoing public and political debate around smart glasses and the questions being raised about the conditions under which this technology can be used,” a Hans Anders spokesperson said. The growing anger in the Netherlands reflects, according to Reuters, a broader backlash against camera-equipped smart glasses.

Pressure is growing elsewhere in Europe too. In Britain, the pub chain Wetherspoon has restricted the use of Meta glasses over concerns about covert recordings, while Meta and Luxottica face a lawsuit in the U.S. alleging that videos captured by the glasses were viewed by human annotators without the knowledge of the people filmed, Reuters reports.

The Dutch privacy authority AP warned last month that videos made with smart glasses showing identifiable people generally cannot be shared or published without their permission — permission that would be hard to obtain in a public place. The consumer rights organization Consumentenbond said this week it will take Meta to court if the company does not change the product to comply with privacy law.

The Offlimits group, which fights online abuse, on Friday called on Meta and Ray-Ban owner EssilorLuxottica to voluntarily withdraw the glasses from sale until a way is found to make covert recording impossible. For its part, a Meta spokeswoman said the company is continuing to develop the popular glasses: every pair with a camera has a lit light on the front that blinks when a photo or video is taken — it cannot be switched off, and the camera is disabled if someone covers or tampers with it. Hans Anders is a subsidiary of Nexeye, owned by the private equity fund KKR; Nexeye operates 776 stores in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Sweden, but the glasses are not sold in the last three countries.