The Meta Ray-Ban glasses and Indian law

1. India is not likely to find success by regulating hardware because (i) such regulations will be hard to enforce in practice and in principle, (ii) the regulatory regime could set up a new license raj, and (iii) the regulations will age very poorly when similar technological capabilities come to earbuds, contact lenses, etc. along with new affordances. 2. India’s data protection regime needs to address/tighten its existing rules in five areas: (i) Meaningful notice — The DPDP Act focuses on the relationship between the data fiduciary and the data principal whereas AI wearables introduce a third-party problem in the form of people who are recorded incidentally or by accident. So the law should clarify that companies selling AI wearables have a duty to minimise data collection when that data pertains to bystanders, and introduce aggressive technical measures such as filtering faces out, automatically deleting non-user data, and where possible have on-device data processing (i.e.…