Paris opens a criminal probe into smart glasses used to film women

Two stories about the same shift: the tooling keeps moving faster than the rules written around it — one on the pavement, one in the code review.

The Paris prosecutor's office has opened at least one criminal investigation into suspected sexual harassment involving camera-equipped smart glasses, after complaints that women were filmed in the street without their knowledge and the footage posted online. Prosecutors did not name a make of device, and declined to say how many complaints they have received or whether anyone has been identified. The office did say its cybercrime unit spent time testing smart glasses two weeks ago — buying the hardware, wearing it, working out which offences the devices could actually facilitate. That is the part worth noting: an enforcement body doing product research before deciding what to charge under.

The legal problem is geographic. Article 226-1 of the French Penal Code carries up to a year in prison and a €45,000 fine for recording a person's image without consent, but it is written for private places, not the pavement. Regulators concede enforcement gets harder once the recording happens in public and the clip is online within minutes. The CNIL, France's data protection authority, said in June that a recording indicator light is not adequate on its own to establish consent, and it has since received fewer than 10 complaints about workplace use alongside a steady stream of employers asking whether they are allowed to ban the glasses outright. Ines Legendre, a legal expert at the French internet-safety body e-Enfance, put the consent point bluntly: seeing a light come on is not agreement to be filmed, and it is certainly not agreement to have your image distributed to thousands of people afterwards.

France is not alone in moving. Australia said Thursday it is considering banning camera-equipped glasses in government workplaces, a German consumer group has filed a criminal complaint against Meta and other sellers, and the European Data Protection Board plans to examine the devices with national regulators. Meta's glasses, built with EssilorLuxottica, are the market: roughly 76 percent of global sales and about 7 million pairs sold last year. Meta says it has shipped two updates since June so the camera stops recording when the indicator light is blocked — a hardware fix for a consent problem the hardware created. Meta Connect is on September 23.

Zed has opened Delta, its agent-native Git replacement, to public beta — and switched pull requests off on Delta's own repository, so the team now builds the product inside the thing it is selling. The pitch is that pull requests were designed for human-authored diffs and are buckling now that agents write most of the code. In Delta, a review is a subthread: it inherits the original agent's context, gets its own isolated copy of the parent thread's worktrees so reviewers can run their own agents against the change, and can fold fixes back into the parent branch before anyone lands it. Storage sits on DeltaDB, which is Git-compatible rather than a new object model, and the beta is free with paid tiers coming for individuals and teams.

The interesting claim is not that GitHub is replaceable — plenty of projects are making that argument this month — it is that a reviewer needs the authoring agent's reasoning, not just the diff. Hand a change to a second agent and it has to reconstruct decisions the first one already made. Whether a review that carries that context beats one that carries less code is the question the beta is meant to answer.

What to watch: whether the EDPB's review produces draft rules before Meta Connect, and whether Delta's public beta gets a real project off GitHub instead of just its own repository.

Is a review thread with the agent's context a better unit of code review than a smaller diff — or does it just move the trust problem one step left? Tell us in the comments.

Sources: Reuters — French prosecutors step up scrutiny on smart glasses · RFI — French prosecutors investigate sexual harassment involving smart glasses · The Next Web — Paris prosecutors open criminal probe · The Local France — are AI 'pervert glasses' legal in France? · Zed — Replace PRs with Delta, now in public beta