Amazon is widening the rollout of its Smart Delivery Glasses this fall. After more than 500 delivery associates tested them over 18 months and completed over 275,000 deliveries, the company plans to put another 5,000 pairs in the field by the end of 2026 and more than 20,000 by the end of 2027. Use is voluntary for Delivery Service Partners and their drivers. The latest wave of coverage, sparked by a September 30 Bloomberg Opinion column, is less about the hardware itself than about the cameras on it.
The practical case is straightforward. The glasses replace the phone glance that slows a stop. Once the van is parked, they switch on and show the driver which packages to grab, then walking directions to the door, including inside apartment buildings and offices. They scan the package hands-free, take the proof-of-delivery photo, flag a drop that looks like the wrong doorstep, and flash a paw-print alert if delivery data says a pet may be at the address. An LED helps in low light. The display shuts off while the vehicle is moving, and a vest controller carries the battery, the controls, and an emergency button that can reach emergency services. Lenses can be prescription. Amazon says early pilots cut up to about 30 minutes off an 8- to 10-hour shift, mostly by removing the back-and-forth between phone, package, and surroundings. Drivers in the trial have described the hands-free part as something they stop noticing after a while.
Critics are not arguing with the navigation. They are arguing with what else the glasses record. Bloomberg's Dave Lee reported that the cameras take stills at regular intervals while a driver is on foot, potentially several thousand images in one shift, uploaded to Amazon's AI mapping system. Asked about a customer opt-out, the executive running the rollout, Viraj Chatterjee, said, "We haven't thought about that." Amazon says faces and license plates are blurred before a person reviews an image, and that the point is better deliveries, not surveillance. It has also confirmed the images can be obtained with a warrant, and has not said how long they are kept. Customers cannot see them or ask for them to be deleted, and Amazon does not plan to tell customers directly that the glasses are in use.
CBS News on the privacy fight over Amazon's delivery glasses.
Drivers and privacy researchers have pushed further. On driver forums, one person who sat through a training session called the glasses "definitely a dystopian move." Others say the same data used to save steps can be used to time every stop and squeeze the route, on top of the in-van cameras Amazon already runs. Washington University law professor Neil Richards has rejected the "smart" label outright, calling them surveillance glasses and warning that constant recording is being normalized as a condition of the job and of ordinary life on the doorstep. Some drivers also read the rollout as a step toward fewer human deliveries later: the glasses still need a person wearing them, but every shift is also training data for a map of how to reach the door.