Tivoli bans camera glasses after previous incident with man filming women in bathroom

The Utrecht music venue TivoliVredenburg has decided to officially ban camera glasses. The inciting incident was a man using such a gadget to film women in the bathroom at a music festival in Rotterdam last month. The police also found footage of the man secretly filming up women’s skirts.

Tivoli already denied a man entry last weekend because he refused to remove his camera glasses, but had not yet officially banned the gadget. “We’re including this in our house rules immediately,” director Jeroen Bartelse told NOS. According to him, this is about public safety. “Camera glasses don’t fit with that because others don’t always realize they’re being filmed.”

Camera glasses can be easy to miss if you’re not specifically looking for them. Often, a light comes on when the glasses are recording, but that light is not always clearly visible.

The security guards at the Rotterdam festival didn’t recognize the glasses right away, security guard Rendel van den Heuvel, who worked that day, told NOS. “We received a report from visitors that a man was frequently looking at women in the restroom.” Security officers detained the man and frisked him. “When we looked more closely at his head, we noticed the glasses.” The security found plenty of footage of women entering the restroom, as well as upskirt footage. The police confiscated the glasses.

According to Bart Schermer, a professor of privacy and cybercrime at Leiden University, it is technically allowed to walk around public spaces with camera glasses and film. “The main question is: what are you using for, what are you filming, and to what extent is the person being filmed aware of it?” he told NOS. For example, filming in a restroom is forbidden for privacy reasons. But if you’re standing in a crowd at a concert and happen to be filmed, that’s allowed.