Brisbane already bars covert recording with smart glasses at its public pools. Katy Gallagher, Australia's finance and public service minister, has now put the same question to the Australian Public Service Commission about every federal office, per Digital Trends. She asked for advice on prohibiting camera glasses across Commonwealth workplaces, which is the term for the federal government's own departments and agencies, and on what exemptions such a rule would need. Nothing has been decided.
Australia's eSafety Commissioner, the national regulator for online safety, has warned that a wearable camera carries risks a phone doesn't, because there is often no visible sign that recording is happening. Point a phone at someone and they can see you do it. Look at someone through a pair of glasses and they can't. The recording lights are small, and people have covered them over or tampered with them outright, which is why Meta switched off the cameras on thousands of modified Ray-Bans earlier this month.
Nobody is proposing to stop Australians buying the glasses. Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has said an import ban is not part of the government's current privacy reforms, which look more broadly at how new technology collects personal information about people. That leaves the rules to whoever owns the room. Councils, workplaces and organisations can set their own, and several already have. Camera-equipped personal devices are restricted in Australian childcare settings today.
The glasses also do real work for the people who need them, which is why exemptions are on the table rather than a blanket prohibition. They can turn speech into text for a deaf wearer, or describe a room out loud to someone with low vision. Disability advocacy groups have pressed that case with policymakers.
Hamburg barred the glasses from its trams and swimming pools at the start of September, and in August US Immigration and Customs Enforcement told its own officers not to wear them while budgeting for face-recognition software of its own.
For now the glasses stay legal to buy in Australia and banned from a Brisbane swimming pool.