By: Juliana Gorina
Wearable technology has become ubiquitous, seamlessly integrating into daily life through devices like smartwatches, rings, and now even glasses. These tools make it effortless to monitor our health, document our routines, and capture the smallest details of our day. Yet this very convenience raises pressing concerns about the intersection of emerging technology and constitutional protections. As devices become more capable of discreetly recording and analyzing the world around us, they blur the boundaries between personal autonomy and government oversight.
An example would be Meta’s AI-enabled glasses. These devices can inconspicuously capture video and, when paired with facial recognition tools, transform ordinary recordings into sophisticated forms of digital surveillance.[1] The ability to feed footage acquired without consent into AI platforms threatens to erode the privacy safeguards codified in the Fourth Amendment. Imagine leaving your doctor’s office and unknowingly being recorded by a passerby wearing Meta glasses. Hours later, a police officer pulls you over and, through access to facial recognition data, discovers where you have been, information that ordinarily would require a warrant. What might begin as a simple Terry stop could become a constitutionally problematic digital search.[2] In a political climate already fraught with concerns over ICE raids and wrongful deportations, the unchecked integration of AI surveillance into everyday devices risks normalizing warrantless intrusions and undermining fundamental rights.
Background
The Fourth Amendment sets out the right of the people to be secure in their “persons, houses, papers, and effects” against unreasonable searches and seizures.[3] The Fourth Amendment further sets out the requirement of particularized warrants based on probable cause.[4] The rise of new technology always raises Fourth Amendment paradigm shifts.[5] The broadening and narrowing of rights has been contingent on the intrusiveness of technologies used and the information it provides to the government.[6]
But search methods often lend themselves to clearer boundaries as related to seizure. A pivotal shift in Fourth Amendment protection against seizures was highlighted in Terry v. Ohio, where a line was drawn between police “stop-and-frisks” and full-on arrests.[7] In Terry, the United States Supreme Court lessened constitutional protections, allowing for “Terry stops” to fall outside the bounds of a seizure, and take place where “reasonable suspicion” existed.[8] “Reasonable suspicion” is a step down from the “Probable Cause” standard laid out in the Fourth Amendment.[9] But how do our Fourth Amendment rights apply to effective digital stop-and-frisks, when state actors are indirectly granted access to our activities through civilian technology?
Stop and Frisk 2.0
Digital surveillance has transformed traditional police practices into data-driven systems that blur the line between physical and virtual searches. Technologies such as Clearview AI[10] effectively create a “digital stop-and-frisk,” where individuals are subjected to algorithmic scrutiny without probable cause or consent.[11] Modern surveillance tools facilitate constant and suspicionless monitoring, extending the reasoning behind the Terry decision into the digital realm. Clearview AI’s mass scraping of online photos and its use by law enforcement exemplify how data collection now replaces physical pat-downs.[12] Instead of searching a person’s body, police search their digital likeness across billions of images, reconstructing biographies and associations.[13] This form of surveillance turns the public internet into an Orwellian “perpetual police lineup.”[14] Unlike a Terry stop, which is limited in scope and duration, digital “stops” through facial recognition can occur repeatedly, invisibly, and without the target’s knowledge. The constitutional danger lies not merely in data collection, but in how algorithmic surveillance erodes the “reasonable expectation of privacy” the Fourth Amendment protects.[15]
Recent events underscore this risk. In June 2025, a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer was filmed wearing Meta smart glasses during an immigration enforcement action in Los Angeles, prompting questions about whether consumer AI eyewear is infiltrating federal policing.[16] Although CBP Directive 4320-030B explicitly forbids using personal devices for enforcement recording, the incident revealed how wearable technology can circumvent agency oversight.[17] Unlike authorized body cameras—which have defined activation protocols, retention limits, and privacy safeguards—AI-enabled eyewear can record continuously, analyze scenes in real time, and potentially integrate with facial recognition databases.[18] This creates a digital ecosystem of constant observation, disproportionately impacting immigrants and marginalized communities already subject to heightened surveillance[19].
Conclusion
Together, Clearview AI and AI glasses illustrate how “digital stop-and-frisks” expand surveillance beyond traditional policing boundaries.[20] The confluence of biometric data, cloud storage, and algorithmic identification through wearable technology transforms momentary encounters into permanent records. Without strict judicial and policy constraints, such practices effectively deputize technology to perform suspicionless searches, undermining both transparency and constitutional accountability. The challenge for courts and policymakers, then, is to reassert Terry’s original limits in a digital context to ensure that technological convenience does not nullify the Fourth Amendment’s core protection against unreasonable, pervasive scrutiny.
[1] Anthony Kimery, CBP’s Body-Worn Camera Rules Collide with Consumer AI Glasses, Biometric Update (Aug. 8, 2025) (explaining that though Meta glasses do not come with facial recognition technology, it is easy to direct footage from the glasses to a laptop or smartphone and run facial recognition technology),
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202508/cbps-body-worn-camera-rules-collide-with-consumer-ai-glasses (https://perma.cc/MY9T-UPL3).
[2] Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 10 (1968).
[3] U.S. Const. amend. IV.
[4] Id.
[5] See Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296, 318, (2018) (holding that a warrant is necessary for cell tower location data because it continuously collects location data over an extended period of time); See generally Kevin Johnson, The Use of Clearview AI to Support Warrants Violates the Fourth Amendment, 34 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 991 (2024).
[6] See Johnson, supra note 5,at 1016-17.
[7] Terry, 392 U.S. at 8.
[8] Id. at 33.
[9] Id. at 26-27.
[10] See Johnson, supra note 5, at 995 (describing Clearview AI as a facial recognition technology that compiles biometric data from across the internet making individuals faces and affiliations finable through the platform’s search engine function and linkable to other smart technology).
[11] See Johnson, supra note 5, at 1026.
[12] See generally Id.
[13] See Id. at 998.
[14] Id. at 996.
[15] See Id. at 1014-15.
[16] Anthony Kimery, CBP’s Body-Worn Camera Rules Collide with Consumer AI Glasses, Biometric Update (Aug. 8, 2025),
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202508/cbps-body-worn-camera-rules-collide-with-consumer-ai-glasses (https://perma.cc/MY9T-UPL3).
[17] U.S. Customs & Border Protection, Directive 4320-030B: Incident-Driven Video Recording System (IDVRS) (May 14, 2025), https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/2025-05/CBP-Directive-4320-030B-IDVRS-signed-508.pdf (citing section 8 “Procedures”, listing prohibiting certain recording devices and prohibited recording activity) (https://perma.cc/KXH9-KT9M).
[18] See Kimery, supra note 16.
[19] ACLU of Wisconsin, Surveillance Is a Racial Justice Issue, ACLU of Wisconsin (Feb. 26, 2025), https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/surveillance-racial-justice-issue/ (https://perma.cc/PN7G-TXEZ).
[20] See Kimery, supra note 16; see generally Kevin Johnson, The Use of Clearview AI to Support Warrants Violates the Fourth Amendment, 34 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 991 (2024).
