In Case You Missed It: European Regulators Are Considering a Ban on Meta Smart Glasses While Switzerland Proposes Banking Reforms and GitHub’s Outage May Provide a Glimpse of Things to Come

Regulators in Europe are scrutinizing Meta Smart glasses over privacy issues and considering a ban. In Switzerland, changes to banking rules are front and center while Revolut opened a second hub. GitHub grappled with an outage that has implications for DevOps.

Meta Smart Glasses Face Possible European Ban Over AI and Privacy Risk

How do notice, consent and data rights work when the people being processed are not the people using a device? Smart glasses can capture faces, voices and surroundings while the wearer simply looks at someone. AI pushes the issue further because that data collected can be analyzed, transmitted or reused. European regulators are starting to treat this scenario as its own category of privacy risk. The European Data Protection Board agreed in June to prepare public recommendations on smart glasses by the autumn, after several national regulators raised concerns about their growing use. Hamburg’s privacy authority has been examining Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses since 2025, including the visibility of their recording indicator, the data transmitted by the device and how information may be used for AI training.

Switzerland Proposes Sweeping Post-Credit Suisse Banking Reforms

Swiss federal authorities announced in August that they had opened consultation on proposed changes to the Banking Act and Liquidity Ordinance rules following the 2023 Credit Suisse crisis. The measures are the latest phase in a major ongoing regulatory overhaul that aims to strengthen the country’s too-big-to-fail framework. Credit Suisse collapsed in March 2023 following what FINMA describes as years of strategic, governance, and risk-management failures and a crisis of confidence leading to over 110 billion CHF in panic withdrawals. This resulted in record losses for the company, ultimately leading to its primary backer, the Saudi National Bank, withdrawing further financial assistance and triggering an immediate liquidity crisis. UBS, now Switzerland’s largest bank, then completed its takeover, absorbing its operations and retiring the brand name.

India Opens the Door to Merchant Fees on UPI

India recently changed its rules that kept merchants using the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) from paying fees on payments and transactions. The new rules open the path to limited merchant discount rate (MDR) fees, while keeping consumer payments fee-free in an overhaul that could give banks and fintechs operating in the country new revenue for infrastructure and fraud controls without charging ordinary users. However, the new rules alone do not impose a finalized MDR regime.

India’s UPI is a bank-to-bank payment system that allows millions of users in the country to send and receive money almost instantly, around the clock, using only a smartphone app linked to their bank account. Currently, approximately 555 million consumers and 65 million merchants use the system, making it a globally recognized financial powerhouse. Moreover, UPI is no longer exclusive to India, and has expanded its operations for Indian travelers and diaspora to 11 countries in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

GitHub’s August 17 Outage Shows How AI Is Expanding the Software Failure Surface

A widespread GitHub outage in mid-August disrupted APIs, repository downloads, GitHub Actions, webhooks, Pages, and Copilot. The problems began at around 9:40 a.m. EDT, with error rates eventually reaching roughly 20% for web and API traffic and close to 50% for some archive and raw repository downloads. For many development teams, such outages mean far more than being unable to open GitHub.com. Source code may still exist safely on local machines, but the machinery around it starts disappearing. Pull requests stall, CI jobs stop launching, deployment hooks fail, and AI coding tools lose access to the context they depend on. The company has not yet published the root cause, so blaming the outage directly on AI would be premature. But GitHub itself has been unusually open about the wider capacity problem.

Revolut Secures a Second Banking Hub in Europe

Revolut, the global fintech company and digital bank headquartered in London, announced in August that it had secured a full French banking license following assessment by the ACPR and ECB. The news comes after Reuters reported the company’s push for banking licenses in France and the US back in April, making it a significant expansion milestone for one of Europe’s largest digital banking businesses. A full French banking license affords Revolut new opportunities in that country by allowing it to operate similarly to traditional banks, such as by offering lending or savings products. While Revolut is best known in Europe for everyday banking and transactions, becoming a fully licensed bank offers the potential to deepen customer relationships, capture more customer lifetime value, and ultimately, change neobank economics.