Meta’s smart glasses now have a square peg pushed through a round hole — the Guardian ran a piece this week asking whether anyone can tell the glasses are filming from its LED. Reasonable question. Wrong premise. While that argument runs, cameras with better coverage and no indicator at all are driving past you, and nobody has said a word.

Cameras on cars were never the fight. Dashcams went mainstream here in Korea without one, because the rules governing cameras in public were written for fixed installations and a dashcam is not one. They became ordinary equipment, running whenever the car is on, pointed at whoever is in front of it. In June Korea extended the same deference upward: companies developing autonomous driving can now use collected road footage without mandatory blurring or pseudonymization. The pattern is the same one it has always been. The camera stays because someone needs it — the driver for his own protection, the company for its training data. The pedestrian was never the party being weighed.

The case against cameras has always been the same one. Smaller. Quieter. Harder to notice. That is why the rules bend against the camera sensors. But film cameras were not permitted because they were bulky and loud. Nobody licensed a Leica on its size. We allowed cameras on roads and in museums because roads and museums are public, and that is the whole of it. A camera does not become an invasion because it got better at being a camera. Name the situation where you are filmed by someone in smart glasses, neither family nor friend, and you are not in public. Changing rooms. Toilets. Hospital wards. Short list, and everything on it is already illegal to film. The law is not the gap. Enforcement is.

Here is the bit I contend with. Every phone sold in South Korea makes a loud noise when it takes a picture — not by a statute, but by a standard issued in 2004. Camera phones went on sale here from 2000. The concession arrived four years late and has been playing security theater ever since. It also arrived broken. The standard’s own title covers phones with “still image or motion picture function.” Video is named in the document. Video, however, has never made a continuous noise while recording. The selfie came later and got out the same way. The standard fixes how loud the sound must be, never when it must sound. A camera goes silent not based on the surroundings but based on the needs of the photographer — hardly a privacy feature.

What it leaves behind is worse. When an accusation is made, the phone gets checked, and its owner is asked to demonstrate the absence of something that was never going to be in the camera roll. The offender walks free through a loophole that was in the standard from the start. Everyone else gets stopped for taking pictures.

The camera phone standard produces a noise that may or may not sound at all. The car had cameras long before any of this, and now collects the road in far more depth for a driverless future. Meta’s LED arrives twenty-odd years late and says it addresses privacy yet again. They all try to create a security theater, an answer to a premise we already settled. It is a square peg for a round hole — no, a square peg to a wall, hoping it goes through.

The objection is not against recording itself. It is that we keep going back on the very premise we accepted the day we allowed cameras outdoors — in good faith, every time, and never once to any effect.