Australia is having a sudden reckoning with camera-enabled glasses.
They have been labelled “pervert glasses”. There are calls for a temporary import ban. Privacy advocates are warning that people can be recorded without knowing it. The Australian Greens have proposed a 12-month ban on importing camera-enabled wearable devices while privacy laws catch up, and the Privacy Commissioner has raised legitimate questions about whether our existing framework is adequate for a world in which cameras are becoming smaller and more wearable.
I understand the concern.
In fact, I agree with much of it.
I just do not understand why we are making this about glasses.
I own a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. I use them regularly. And as the parent of a young child who has himself been deliberately photographed by strangers using mobile phones in public, without our permission and with no obvious practical way for us to require those people to stop or delete the images, I would welcome a serious discussion about consent and cameras in Australia.
But it needs to be a serious discussion.
If deliberately recording someone without their consent is unacceptable, then it should not suddenly become acceptable because the camera happens to be an iPhone.
The camera has changed. The privacy question has not.
There is something peculiar about the current debate.
Put a camera in a pair of glasses and suddenly we are confronting an unprecedented threat to privacy.
Put a substantially more capable camera in somebody’s hand, with multiple lenses, powerful zoom, image stabilisation, computational photography and extraordinarily detailed image capture, and we have largely normalised it.
That distinction makes very little sense to me.
My Ray-Bans use a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera. Current premium smartphones are in a completely different photographic class. Apple’s current iPhone 17 Pro, for example, has a 48MP camera system, an optical-quality 8x telephoto option and digital zoom up to 40x. That is not a criticism of the phone. It is simply relevant context when we are debating which device is supposedly the greater threat to privacy.
If I photograph something with my glasses, I capture a relatively wide field of view. They are extraordinarily useful for capturing what I am experiencing, but they are not the device I would choose if my objective were to stand at a distance, isolate an individual, zoom in and retain substantial detail for later cropping and processing.
A modern smartphone is vastly better suited to that.
Yet the national conversation increasingly treats the glasses as the privacy threat and the phone as background furniture.
Meta describes Ray-Ban Meta as using a 12MP ultra-wide camera, while Apple’s Australian specifications for the iPhone 17 Pro illustrate just how capable a current flagship phone camera has become.
Why I actually use them
The greatest benefit of my Ray-Bans has nothing to do with photographing strangers.
It is photographing my son.
Parents will understand what happens when you pull out a phone.
A child is doing something funny, interesting or completely ordinary that you know you will want to remember. You reach into your pocket. You unlock your phone. You open the camera. They see what you are doing.
The moment changes.
Sometimes they stop. Sometimes they pose. Sometimes they run towards the camera. Sometimes the spontaneous thing you were trying to preserve is simply over.
With glasses, I can capture the moment while remaining part of it.
I can be playing with my son rather than standing outside the experience looking at him through a phone screen. The camera records roughly what I am seeing. My hands remain free. He often continues doing whatever he was doing because Dad has not suddenly produced a phone and turned an ordinary interaction into a photo shoot.
The resulting photographs are often technically inferior to the ones I could take with my phone.
But many of them are better photographs.
They are candid.
They are natural.
They capture childhood rather than a child responding to a camera.
That is what this technology means to me.
It is why I find some of the rhetoric around camera glasses so disconnected from how many ordinary people will actually use them.
No, the recording indicator is not invisible
One of the claims repeated in this debate is that people have no way of knowing when these glasses are recording.
That needs qualification.
On my Ray-Ban Meta glasses, a white capture light on the front of the frame illuminates when I record. Meta states that the capture LED switches on automatically when a photo or video is taken, and that if the LED is covered the wearer is prompted to clear it before recording.
Is that a perfect solution? No.
Does every person recognise what that light means? Probably not.
Could manufacturers make recording indicators larger, brighter or more standardised? Absolutely.
And does every cheap pair of camera glasses entering the market have equivalent safeguards? I would not assume so.
Those are legitimate areas for regulation.
But “there should be a clear and unavoidable recording indicator” is a very different policy proposition from “we should ban glasses containing cameras”.
I would happily support the former.
In fact, if Australia wants to establish minimum standards for wearable cameras, requiring a conspicuous recording indicator that cannot ordinarily be disabled or obscured sounds entirely sensible.
What I struggle with is the proposition that this somehow resolves the broader privacy problem.
My phone does not shine a warning light towards the person I am photographing.
Neither does a DSLR.
Neither does the phone belonging to the stranger standing some distance away who can zoom in on my child.
If notification is the principle we care about, why would we apply it only to one category of camera?
There is also a little narcissism in this debate
There is another assumption underlying some of the reaction to smart glasses that deserves challenging.
Because the camera is located approximately where I am looking, people assume that if I look towards them, I could be photographing them.
That is true.
But it does not follow that I am.
There is a touch of narcissism in assuming that because somebody wearing camera glasses glances in your direction, you must be the subject.
Most strangers simply are not that interesting to me.
If I am at a park with my son, I am overwhelmingly more likely to be photographing him than somebody walking behind him.
If I take a photograph of him at South Bank and there are 20 other people in the background, I have no interest in those 20 people. They are incidental to the photograph.
That distinction is important because any workable privacy regime needs to distinguish between being captured in an image and being the subject of an image.
Otherwise ordinary photography in public becomes impossible.
A parent photographing a child at a school fete cannot obtain consent from every person in the background.
A tourist cannot clear every pedestrian before photographing Circular Quay.
A family cannot realistically obtain releases from an entire crowd before taking a photograph at a football match.
The Australian Law Reform Commission has grappled with this distinction for years. Its work on photography and privacy has repeatedly recognised both the genuine harms that can arise from unauthorised photography and the problems created by blanket restrictions on ordinary photography in public.
Deliberately photographing someone else’s child is different
This is where my sympathy with the privacy backlash becomes much stronger.
Our son has been deliberately captured on other people’s mobile phones in public settings without our consent.
Not accidentally appearing somewhere in the background of another family’s photograph.
Captured.
As a parent, that feels fundamentally different.
And it exposes the problem with treating smart glasses as though they invented non-consensual photography.
Australia now has a statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy, which commenced on 10 June 2025. That was an important reform. It can provide a cause of action where someone intentionally or recklessly intrudes on another person’s seclusion or misuses information about them, provided there was a reasonable expectation of privacy, the invasion was serious, and the public interest in privacy outweighs competing public interests.
But it is not a general legal right to veto every photograph taken of you in a public place.
That distinction matters.
The Australian Law Reform Commission has long noted that, generally speaking, there is no common-law right that simply prevents another person photographing or filming someone in a public place without consent. The newer statutory tort gives Australians an important remedy for serious cases, but deliberately photographing a child in an ordinary public setting does not automatically become unlawful merely because the parents object.
That leaves parents confronting a very practical question: if another adult deliberately points a phone at your child, what exactly are you entitled to require them to do?
My experience of that question influences my view of the smart-glasses debate enormously.
I know what it feels like to look at someone else holding a camera towards your child and think, why are you photographing him?
I do not dismiss that concern simply because I own camera glasses.
Quite the opposite.
I think we should confront it.
But I want the protection to apply when the camera is a phone too.
The OAIC explains the new statutory tort and its threshold for serious invasions of privacy, while the ALRC’s work on unauthorised photography explains the longstanding position around photography in public places.
Brisbane may actually have the right idea
Brisbane City Council’s response to concerns about filming at public swimming pools is interesting because it focuses on the conduct rather than the gadget.
Council moved to prohibit non-consensual photography and video at its public pools, and the rule is not limited to smart glasses. It applies to camera-enabled devices more broadly, including phones, action cameras and wearables.
That is a policy I can understand.
If the environment is sufficiently sensitive that people should be entitled to greater privacy, establish that standard and apply it equally.
Do not tell me that secretly photographing somebody in swimmers through Ray-Bans is unacceptable, but doing precisely the same thing through an iPhone is somehow an entirely different social act.
It is not.
The harm is caused by what the person does with the camera.
Not where the manufacturer mounted the lens.
The ABC reported on Brisbane’s technology-neutral pool restrictions in August.
Regulate behaviour, not form factor
The Greens have proposed a 12-month import ban targeting camera-enabled wearable devices, including Meta and Anko glasses, while broader privacy reforms are considered.
I think that is the wrong target.
The Federal Government is currently taking a more technology-neutral approach. On 31 August, Attorney-General Michelle Rowland released the next tranche of proposed Privacy Act reforms for consultation. The government has explicitly identified smart glasses and other emerging technologies as part of the problem the reforms need to address, while saying an import ban is not currently part of that consultation.
More importantly, the Attorney-General has emphasised that privacy law needs to be principles-based and technology-neutral.
That principle matters enormously.
Because Ray-Bans are not the end of this.
Cameras will become smaller.
They will appear in different wearables.
They will become more integrated with artificial intelligence.
The distinction between a camera, a computer and an AI device will continue to blur.
If we write a law around spectacles in 2026, technology will route around it.
If we establish principles around consent, reasonable expectations of privacy, deliberate targeting, children, intimate settings, harassment and misuse, those principles can survive the next device.
The Greens’ proposal is specifically framed around a 12-month import ban on camera-enabled wearables. The Federal Government’s current privacy consultation instead seeks to modernise the Privacy Act for emerging technologies, including smart glasses.
What a better framework could look like
My preference would be straightforward.
First, distinguish incidental capture from deliberate targeting. Appearing in the background of another person’s legitimate photograph is part of living in a society where photography exists.
Second, provide stronger protection where somebody deliberately and persistently records an identifiable person who has clearly objected, particularly where the conduct is harassing, humiliating or exploitative.
Third, establish particularly strong protections around the deliberate photography of children by unrelated adults, while preserving sensible exceptions for family and community events, journalism, legitimate public-interest activity, law enforcement and the recording of evidence.
Fourth, identify places where a higher expectation of privacy is reasonable, including swimming pools, change rooms, medical facilities, childcare environments and similar settings, and allow appropriate restrictions on photography regardless of the device being used.
Fifth, establish technical standards for wearable recording devices, including prominent recording indicators that cannot be easily defeated.
And finally, make the rules technology-neutral.
Phone. Glasses. GoPro. DSLR. Whatever comes next.
Same conduct, same principles.
Privacy deserves better than a moral panic
There are genuine abuses occurring with wearable cameras.
Those should not be minimised.
If someone uses camera glasses to covertly photograph women, harass people, record intimate situations or build online content around unsuspecting strangers, I have no interest in defending that behaviour.
Use the law.
Strengthen the law where necessary.
Give victims meaningful remedies.
Require platforms to respond when content is distributed maliciously.
Protect children.
Regulate sensitive environments.
Make recording indicators effective.
But none of those objectives requires pretending that a camera becomes uniquely dangerous when it moves from someone’s hand to their face.
Australia has an opportunity here to have a much more important conversation than whether one particular category of consumer electronics should be prohibited at the border.
We should ask a harder question:
When should another person have the right to deliberately record you without your consent?
Then we should answer it.
And whatever answer we arrive at should apply to the camera already sitting in almost every Australian’s pocket.
I own the glasses.
I value them enormously, particularly for the candid memories they let me capture of my son.
I also know what it feels like when somebody else decides they are entitled to deliberately photograph my child without asking us.
Those positions are not inconsistent.
They lead me to exactly the same conclusion.
Don’t ban the glasses. Fix the privacy law.