Smart glasses are a covert surveillance regime in a wearable disguise
KMart’s getting a lot of free advertising for their cheap smart glasses, promising one version of the future but delivering a darker one. Smart glasses are being marketed as a lifestyle accessory. Take a photo. Get directions. Ask an AI what you’re looking at. Kylie Jenner says it’s cool and normal. Smart glasses are actually covert recording devices that anyone can buy off the shelf; we should be treating them that way.
A tool for gendered harassment, not a gadget
This danger is already playing out. Misogynist men are using camera glasses to covertly film women in public for social media clout and to feed the deepfake porn engines that have turned non-consensual sexual imagery into an industry. This is the reason people buy them, not a side effect of the technology.
RMIT’s Caitlin McGrane says “If men had to worry about being covertly filmed in public, these products wouldn’t even be available for sale.” She’s completely right. The people wearing them will never be the ones filmed without consent - only the rest of us, especially those of us who are female, non-white, or non-gender-conforming. Every person in Australia deserves to be able to go out in public without being recorded.
There may be a genuine use case for camera glasses as a visual aid for blind and low-vision people, but that isn’t how they’re being designed, marketed, or sold.
Public surveillance; sold to advertisers
There’s also a second, quieter danger: these glasses see everything and everyone. Companies building this hardware aren’t neutral bystanders. They have every commercial incentive to exploit whatever the camera sees. A camera that recognises your face can profile you: where you shop, who you’re with, what stores you show interest in, and connect it to your social media account for microtargeted advertisements. This is Australia’s corporate surveillance economy, relocated from our phones to our faces, pointed at everyone around us.
The same “recognise, geolocate, track, act” process has already been adapted for more deadly purposes. Niantic used Pokémon Go players to collect vast amounts of location data, which they then sold to military drone companies. Players of Pokemon Go and users of smart glasses could well be building the systems used to attack their neighbourhoods.
Creeping into workplaces, unquestioned
We’ve also heard of smart glasses being used in corporate environments. What does it mean for a female employee’s safety when a colleague can record her without her knowledge, indefinitely, in a professional setting she can’t opt out of? What does it mean for corporate information security when any employee wearing smart glasses can walk out of a meeting with a covert video recording of commercially sensitive material? Neither question has a good answer yet, and that’s exactly the problem. These devices are showing up in workplaces faster than they are being regulated.
Smart glasses are not “just a camera”
People already carry phones with cameras everywhere, but when someone uses a phone to record you, they’re visible; you can ask the person to stop. Smart glasses are designed to erase that signal and make it easier for the user to covertly record whomever they want. Some products have a recording light, but those are trivial to cover or disconnect. That’s not an accident: a genuinely privacy-respecting product would make covert recording hard, not easy.
Smart glasses are pervasive secret surveillance, which means there’s no way to consent to it. You can’t negotiate with a form of harm you don’t know is happening to you. People wearing smart glasses are showing the rest of us that they don’t care about your consent. Ten years ago Google Glass wearers were derided as “glassholes”. Nothing about the underlying product has become less sketchy since. It’s just become cheaper and more available.
Our laws weren’t built for this, and still aren’t
Australia has never properly grappled with the concept of privacy in public space: our laws pre-date the Internet. Our current privacy laws offer us little protection of privacy once we leave the front door. The gap worsens when smart glasses add always-on recording and facial recognition to the mix. Our legal framework assumes a world of occasional, visible cameras, not a world where anyone walking past you might be quietly building a searchable, identifiable record of your movements.
Fixing this requires more than a product recall or a simple device ban. It requires:
- The government to legislate privacy reforms, to close the public-space gap that current law leaves wide open, and to actually grapple with facial recognition rather than treating it as someone else’s problem.
- A Children’s Online Privacy Code, so that kids aren’t left even more exposed by a technology built with no meaningful safeguards for anyone.
- A digital duty of care, so that companies building foreseeably harmful products - and the harms here are about as foreseeable as they get - carry legal responsibility for what their products enable, rather than leaving the burden entirely on the people being filmed.
While we do have existing anti-harassment laws, these aren’t enough to fill the gap. They generally require a pattern of behaviour to act on, and are used after someone’s been harmed: after the footage has already been uploaded, after the deepfake has already been generated, after the damage is done. None of that helps us the moment we’re standing in a changing room next to a stranger wearing a camera we can’t see.
Smart glasses aren’t inevitable. They’re a product that only exists because our privacy laws haven’t caught up to the last decade, let alone this one. We shouldn’t be racing to accommodate them: we should be asking why they’re on supermarket shelves at all.