Whose view is it? Consent, bystanders and the ethics of seeing through a device

About the project

Funder: Kiroshi Foundation, grant KF-2022-0090
Award: ¥41.2 million (about £250,000)
Dates: 1 October 2022 to 30 September 2025
Principal investigator: Professor Judith Demery
Co-investigator: Dr Piotr Zawadzki, Faculty of Law
Research fellow: Dr Megan Thwaite
Partner: Chiba Centre for Visual Science, Japan
Ethical approval: AHREC/2022/117, with amendments

The question

An optical implant sees everyone its wearer looks at. So, increasingly, do head-worn cameras and smart glasses. The people in front of these devices are not their users, customers or patients, and they are rarely asked anything. The project set out to describe, as exactly as possible, what devices on sale record, process and keep about those people, and what the law allows them to do.

What we did

We tested nine implant models in standard scenes, staged with volunteers who gave written consent.
We read each maker’s published documentation and terms.
With lawyers in each country, we reviewed privacy, data protection and surveillance law in the thirteen countries where the models are sold.
We worked throughout with researchers at the Kiroshi Foundation’s Chiba Centre for Visual Science, who ran the device tests in Chiba.

What we found

Seven of the nine models detect faces in every frame, whether or not the wearer has turned on any feature that needs them.
Five keep some record of what they have detected for more than the two seconds the Foundation’s bystander privacy standard, KF-OS 2, allows, all under exclusions for diagnostic data.
No country’s law treats the people an implant looks at as having any say in what it keeps about them, unless the images are published.

The report

Bystanders: what optical implants see of other people was published on 9 December 2025 by the Kiroshi Foundation, as report KF-R-2025-06, with the Faculty of Philosophy as co-author. It is free to read. The Foundation has said it will be the basis for a revision of KF-OS 2, to open for public comment in 2027.

Data

The legal survey is available from the Centre on request. The data from the device tests are held by the Chiba Centre for Visual Science under the terms of the grant, and are not available from the University.

The project was funded by the Kiroshi Foundation, a charitable foundation in Japan which owns part of an implant maker, Kiroshi Opticals. Under the grant agreement the Foundation could review publications before submission for confidential information belonging to it or to a connected company; it could not change the project’s findings. The project received ethical approval from the University’s Arts and Humanities Research Ethics Committee (AHREC/2022/117), and amendments in 2023 and 2024.