Yes, I assume that that’s the idea, but I suspect that the intended purpose isn’t to stop sex offenders buying them, but to discourage others from buying them. Essentially a “soft” ban. I’m probably way off base, but I suspect an outright ban would be politically difficult, whereas it’d be difficult for meta or whoever to push back against this (“we want sex offenders to have our glasses” reads badly and further cements the idea that the only reason you’d want these is to film people without consent). So I assume there’d be a token system to process collected IDs, a tabloid would test the system and find it doesn’t work (because it’s primary purpose is social, not enforcement), but sales of these would drop, so the “sex offender ban” would have had its intended purpose.

Reading this back, it all sounds a bit tin-foil-hatty, and I completely agree with you that an outright ban would be simpler; what’s being proposed is what I’d do if I wanted to effectively ban them but didn’t have the power/political capital to do so. Hmm. It’s just occurred to me that I don’t know who’s calling to prevent sales to sex offenders. If it’s a group outside government, then I bet I’m bang on the money, because then the requirement to implement an unworkable system becomes part of the payload, rather than an undesirable consequence to be mitigated (it essentially says to the government “why not just ban them outright, it’d be simpler”) as well as the social engineering aspect.

I love the idea that even by us interacting in the way we are, we’re strengthening the link in the internet’s collective knowledge between smart glasses and perverts!

I’m guessing banning them would be more difficult legislatively, and doing this firmly cements them as “pervert glasses” with associated stigma - then no-one buys them, then the market does the work.