Recalling the “Candid Camera” of yore, we can still remember the reactions from folks who had no idea they were being filmed.

Allen Funt’s prescient reality TV show may be long gone from the airwaves, but in its place is a wave of always-on technology that can make anyone a star, even if they don’t want to be.

The latest example is smart glasses, wearable computers designed to look like regular eyewear while offering hands-free access to information through audio, built-in cameras and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. They’re subtle and convenient — a major selling point, especially for people on the go who want to access information without pulling out a phone. For users, that’s great.

So great that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has proposed $7.5 million dollars next year to develop smart glasses that can be used by immigration enforcement agents in the service of real-time biometric recognition of people in the country without legal authorization, NewsNation reported.

As in, ICE and Border Patrol agents walking around scanning people’s faces. Sounds to us like something out of “RoboCop.”

We had concerns about these devices before even considering large-scale deployment by law enforcement. What if we just want to walk down the street without having our faces scanned and our identities uploaded into the nether regions of some vast data system?

Of course, it’s not just the government. Millions of pairs of these glasses have already been sold to regular customers like you and me. And companies like Meta are moving quickly to expand what these devices can do, including identifying people and instantly pulling up information about them, potentially turning ordinary public encounters into data points for the companies that make the glasses.

What they plan to do with that data, we don’t know. We also don’t know who is seeing what users record, though Yunus Emre Tozal wrote on these pages last month that some smart-glasses footage has been routed to overseas workers for manual review, including reportedly sensitive, unintended footage.

This is the kind of concern that rightly has civil liberties groups on the alert.

“Face recognition technology on the streets of America poses a uniquely dire threat to the practical anonymity we all rely on,” Nathan Freed Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union told The New York Times. “This technology is ripe for abuse.”

He’s right. What good reason is there to record someone anonymously and without their consent?

Illinois does offer some protections. The state generally requires all-party consent jurisdiction when it comes to recording private conversations, and it has some of the strongest biometric privacy laws in the country.

But those protections have limits. Much of what these devices capture may fall outside traditional definitions of privacy, especially in public spaces. And even when rules are violated, enforcement is reactive. By the time you realize someone has recorded you without your consent, the damage is already done.

That’s the core problem. The technology is moving faster than the norms and laws meant to govern it. What once required a visible camera and a deliberate act can now happen quietly, continuously and at scale.

We’re not Luddites. There are real benefits to this technology — from hands-free communication to potential accessibility gains. But those benefits shouldn’t come at the cost of basic expectations of privacy. People should be able to move through the world without wondering whether every glance, every conversation or every face is being captured, analyzed and stored.

“Smile, you’re on candid camera,” used to be a punch line. Now it feels more like a warning.

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