Amazon plans 5,000 smart delivery glasses amid privacy concerns

By Amara Osei

Amazon said it plans to roll out 5,000 in-house smart delivery glasses to drivers this year, targeting more than 20,000 drivers by the end of next year. The Seattle-based retailer designed the glasses to guide drivers through every delivery while freeing their hands, Amazon said in a recent announcement.

Amazon explained its rationale. “After exploring a range of different approaches, we landed on smart glasses because they solve the core problem: They put everything a driver needs directly in their line of sight, using a design that’s comfortable and familiar, so their hands are just carrying packages and their eyes stay up,” Amazon said.

What can Amazon’s glasses do?

Amazon detailed the glasses’ delivery workflow in its announcement. “The glasses guide drivers through each step, from confirming the right packages are in the van to surfacing customer delivery preferences on the walk to the delivery location to capturing proof of delivery automatically,” Amazon said.

Amazon said the prompts include the number of packages associated with a stop, navigation instructions and customer delivery preferences. Fast Company contrasted those prompts with an audio alert that a pet may be present, saying drivers could probably infer it themselves.

How does Amazon address privacy?

Amazon said the camera captures only still images, with no video or audio component. The company said every image is automatically anonymized, while faces and license plates are detected and blurred.

“The blurred images are encrypted, accessible only to a limited number of people who need them to improve the delivery experience and reduce delivery errors, and automatically deleted after a short retention period,” Amazon said. Amazon also said drivers can switch off the camera whenever they choose.

Wearing the glasses is entirely optional for drivers, Amazon said. Fast Company said it did not appear that customers could opt out, other than by not shopping from Amazon. Fast Company noted that drivers may already photograph a customer’s package upon delivery.

Why are drivers objecting?

On a Reddit forum for Amazon delivery service partner (DSP) van drivers, the glasses have drawn frequent discussion in recent months, Fast Company reported. Several users raised privacy concerns, including the prospect that their bathroom breaks would be captured. Others said Amazon’s designers were out of touch with drivers’ actual needs.

One commenter predicted that Amazon would face lawsuits after drivers realized they were being recorded while using the bathroom. The commenter urged drivers to carry thermometers to document temperatures inside delivery trucks and vans, which can reportedly be much more extreme than outside. “They’ll quietly make these glasses disappear here in like 8 months,” the commenter wrote.

Other users suspect Amazon wants to gather data for AI delivery robots. “I don’t want to train my replacement,” one Redditor wrote. Another posted: “We are one step away from being replaced by robots.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to Fast Company’s request for comment about these concerns. Reddit users framed the objections around surveillance, bathroom use, working conditions and robot replacement.

What changed after the 2025 trial?

Amazon began a trial in 2025 involving more than 300 delivery service partners and hundreds of drivers, the company said. It described the resulting feedback as “strong.”

“Hundreds of drivers shaped the design through ride-alongs, lab tests, and pilot programs, and their feedback led to improvements like moving the computing hardware and battery off the headset into a small controller worn in the delivery vest to improve comfort over a full shift,” Amazon said. That hardware shift was one of several improvements Amazon tied to driver feedback.

Amazon also said: “Since our first prototype, we’ve made hundreds of updates to both the software and the hardware, and they keep getting better.” Its expansion toward more than 20,000 drivers will test whether optional wear, a camera-off switch and short image retention can ease worker concerns.