Basement, the Queens club, bans smart glasses from its dancefloor

Basement has told its dancers to leave their smart glasses at home. The Queens club, run by the people behind the Knockdown Center, has extended a long standing no photo and no video policy to cover wearable cameras, and the penalty is not a warning.

"Anyone bringing smart glasses into the venue... will be asked to leave and may be permanently banned," the club's statement reads, and it applies whether the glasses are on someone's face or sitting in a bag. The owners framed the decision around protecting the privacy, safety and freedom of the people on the floor, which is not something they felt could be reconciled with devices that record discreetly.

The pressure for a ban has been building since at least March, when EDM.com reported that men were deliberately disabling the recording indicator on the glasses to film women without their knowledge. The hardware has two indicator lights, one facing inward toward the wearer and one facing out to signal that recording is happening, and defeating the outward one is the whole problem.

Clubs have spent a decade arguing with smartphones on dancefloors, and mostly lost. Wearables are a different category, because a phone held up is visible and a pair of glasses is not, which turns a social norm question into an enforcement one that door staff have to answer.

The market is concentrated enough to make the issue worse. Meta accounted for roughly 84 percent of global smart glasses shipments in the first half of 2026, according to Counterpoint Research, and has said it plans to add artificial intelligence facial recognition features to the devices.

Anyone hoping for a technical defence is out of luck. Niels Provos, an electronic music producer and cybersecurity expert who spent fifteen years working on security at Google and more than three years as head of security at Stripe, told the site there is not much individuals can practically do. Which leaves door policies as the available answer, and Basement is among the first venues to write one down.

Venue economics and rules keep changing across live music, from business rates cuts for nightclubs in England to the arrival of AI tools that raise their own consent questions, such as Suno bringing voice cloning to phones and Ticketmaster putting a concert search app inside Google's Gemini.