Smart glasses like those sold by Meta are raising difficult questions around privacy and enforcement. (Reuters: Carlos Barria)
How would you feel about being filmed without consent while teaching your toddler to swim? Or lying on a Gold Coast beach in togs?
Wearable eyewear with the ability to film, record, and share video footage, known colloquially as "smart glasses", have taken Australia by storm.
Support is growing for a ban on the import of so-called “smart glasses”.
But the influx of glasses has set off alarm bells for portions of the public who view the technology — labelled "pervert glasses" by some — as an unreasonable incursion on personal privacy.
Public backlash has been steep enough that Brisbane City Council (BCC) last week became the first local council in the country to ban their use at public swimming pools.
Section 227A of the Queensland Criminal Code bans recording people without their consent in "circumstances where a reasonable adult would expect to be afforded privacy".
That includes people in a private place or engaged in a private act and covers things like recording people in swimming pool change rooms.
BCC's change goes a step further and adds a new condition of entry for public pools, banning non-consensual use of all camera-enabled devices, with lifeguards given the power to remove people from the premises.
Experts have questioned whether local council regulation is enough to curb misuse of smart glasses.
Elizabeth Englezos, a lecturer at Griffith University's school of law, said while BCC's move to leverage conditions of entry to a public place to ban the devices was "kind of a clever idea", broader regulation would need state or federal heft.
"The problem is that we don't necessarily know when someone's wearing the glasses and therefore when you're being recorded," Dr Englezos said.
Labelled "pervert glasses" by some, smart glasses allow users to film, record and share video footage discreetly. (ABC News: Shaun Kingma)
While Brisbane's new ban gives lifeguards the power to evict people using smart glasses without consent, Dr Englezos said that still did not help identify people using them in ways not intended by the manufacturer.
In advice to industry published last Monday, the Office of the eSafety Commissioner made several recommendations to manufacturers to help balance the technology's benefits and harms.
