er ideas attainable, but with camera glasses, that proposition has landed it in a far more complicated territory. Camera glasses themselves are hardly novel. Meta sold more than 7 million Ray-Ban smart glasses last year and has lavishly invested in turning what once looked like Google Glass futurism into something people could wear in their day-to-day lives. The internet marketplace, including Temu and Kogan, also sells a wide range of cheaper alternatives. But enter Kmart Group with its family-friendly in-store accessibility, and the economics are fundamentally altered. Since last month, two of Kmart Group’s stores, Kmart and Target, have been selling the Anko camera glasses, which take 8MP photographs and record video at up to 1080p, along with calls, music and an AI assistant powered by the HeyCyan app. Kmart has emphasised that its product is essentially a camera-enabled wearable, but therein lies the problem, for the stranger standing opposite the wearer, the most consequential feature is a camera filming at eye level.  “Amy” and Australia’s privacy laws  In March last year, the ABC reported that “Amy”, whose name was changed, was walking her dog in Kings Cross when an American content creator approached her and persistently asked her out. She eventually gave him her number so she could leave, and a week later, neighbours began sending her a video of the encounter. The most unsettling aspect was that his sunglasses had contained a camera, and the footage had been uploaded to an Instagram audience of more than 1.3 million followers. “I didn’t even realise that I was getting filmed,” Amy said. NSW Police investigated and ultimately took no further action. The law encountered precisely the ambiguity that camera glasses create. University of Sydney emeritus professor Barbara McDonald told the ABC there is no general prohibition on photographing someone in public, while audio can fall under different rules where a conversation can reasonably be considered private. Australia regulates surveillance through a complex patchwork of federal, state and territory provisions whose protections depend heavily upon location, conduct, audio, publication and purpose. Camera glasses inhabit the awkward territory between someone merely looking at you and deliberately recording you, making it unusually difficult to discern which is happening. Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind said on Friday that wearables now threaten to alter that calculation altogether. “The proliferation of smart glasses – and their future peers, such as wearable pins or advanced earbuds – would fundamentally alter our experience of interpersonal interactions, in both private and public spaces, and undermine our ability to make some of those choices,” Kind wrote in a blog post this morning. “Without knowing, we could be filmed, recorded or photographed at any time.” The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is now considering whether regulatory scrutiny or intervention is warranted, while Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has asked the commissioner to prioritise the privacy implications of smart glasses. Kind singled out potential consequences for children and victims of domestic violence.  Holly Brooker, co-founder of the child-safety organisation Makes Sense, asks the same question in schools, playgrounds and family life. Her concern was with an industry racing to arrive first and being asked too rarely what happens once it gets there. Without any meaningful obligation to anticipate harm, she argued, online safety cannot be managed scandal by scandal; it has to be addressed across the technology ecosystem itself.  “They’re selling these at scale, which tells society the product is fine,” she said. “Yet there are significant privacy issues here alongside lack of consent around being recorded. Additionally, no age gating on these products are required, kids can purchase and use these. We need to get serious about what we accept as normal, and put pressure on government to regulate the tech industry with a child rights lens – because industry, sadly, won’t do it itself when profit is at stake.” Businesses are writing their own rules  So what does this mean for Kmart’s $89 glasses experiment? Today’s model can be described primarily as inexpensive eyewear with a camera attached, but future mass-market glasses are likely to inherit capabilities already appearing at the premium end, including continuous visual interpretation, translation and AI assistance of the same calibre as Meta. Businesses may consequently begin writing their own rules before governments finish writing theirs. In Britain, restaurateur Jeremy King, Soho House, Wetherspoons and ATG Theatres have already restricted recording with Meta glasses in their venues. King put the emerging etiquette rather elegantly. “I would never knowingly allow any invasion of guest privacy other than with the eyes we were born with.” Wetherspoons chief executive Tim Martin similarly said the glasses appeared to enable “surreptitious surveillance”, while theatre patrons can be asked to remove them during performances. Kmart itself described the smart glasses category as “established and mainstream” and expects customers to behave “responsibly, respectfully and in accordance with applicable laws and community expectations around privacy”. Martin’s petitioners are contesting the premise that community expectations have settled at all. “We should have a right to know when we are being filmed and to consent or decline,” one wrote; another described the glasses as “immoral and unethical, even if currently legal”. Kmart did not invent wearable surveillance, but its significance may prove more consequential: it found the price at which the argument stopped belonging to Silicon Valley and moved into Australia’s suburban streets. As Martin said, “our privacy laws are years behind this technology, and Kmart should not be selling covert surveillance tech while they catch up.”