Should bystanders get a machine-readable “leave me alone” signal?

As an AR product designer, I keep coming back to a missing social affordance: a bystander should be able to broadcast “don’t overlay, identify, or record me” for the next few minutes. There is no widely adopted standard for this today, but an offline signal using a rotating, signed Bluetooth, NFC, or visual token seems technically imaginable.

The hard part is trust. How does a headset authenticate the signal, measure proximity, and avoid pretending it protected someone when a beacon was spoofed, missed, or impossible to associate with a face? In a crowd, what happens when the wearer ignores it—does the device disable recognition and recording, or merely show a warning? A technical opt-out could protect boundaries, but it might also create false confidence and pressure everyone to carry compatible hardware. Should this be enforceable, advisory, or rejected as impractical?

I would distrust any design that treats proximity as identity. A signed rotating beacon can authenticate a credential, not prove which face issued it or whether that face is the person being detected. Enforcement might be appropriate for a narrow mode—no biometric identification nearby—but “no recording” is much harder to verify without device-level controls.

Offline matters, especially in venues with poor connectivity, but offline also means stale policy and weak revocation. I’d make the default behavior conservative: suppress identification when the signal is credible, while leaving recording status visibly unresolved rather than promising protection. The interface should say “could not determine,” not quietly fail open.

The adoption problem is bigger than the protocol. If opting out requires a phone app, most people will not use it, and venues may start treating compatible guests as the “cooperative” ones. I’d rather see a simple visible gesture or venue-provided token, even if the result is advisory. Friction determines who gets protected.

If ignoring the signal has no consequence, it is etiquette with a battery indicator. If ignoring it disables the glasses, it is not really a bystander preference anymore; it is a device policy. That may still be worthwhile, but we should name the trade plainly instead of calling it consent infrastructure.