It doesn't record unless you explicitly tell it to, and even then, it does it in short bursts. So the vast majority of the time, it's not. Having a camera mounted on your head doesn't make you an asshole, recording can.
How do you know? Take Android for example, I turn off WIFI and it comes back on whenever the phone wants WIFI. One reason I stopped using Android, there's 100s of settings buried in countless menus, maybe half of them are set as default to spy, report back to the manufacturer, report to the carrier, report to Google, the app developer, etc. But cleverly worded to sound cool and harmless. Well of course you want voice search. So we need to listen to you 24/7, duh! Don't worry, we only record your calls and cache everything you say to improve response times and the relevance of the ads. It's getting ridiculous.
I know because it heats up like hell when it's recording (not hot against the skin, but you can feel it radiating). I suppose it could be taking snapshots, but at this point it needs to sleep as aggressively as it can to stretch that tiny battery.
Yep, you can see the video on the person's screen. It's small, but very bright, and pretty obvious. If you look closely, you can see it in progress.
Everything you're doing while in public is being logged in people's brains, very poorly. I would take a video over witness testimony any day.
Videos aren't inherently evil. It's how they get used that's evil, and that's the part that you should fight. We should put strict governmental limits on access to personal video, for example.
