As retail giant Wesfarmers reports that Kmart’s $89 Anko smart glasses have sold out across Australia, Electronic Frontiers Australia is calling on the federal government to intervene and immediately ban the sale of covert wearable camera devices, including Anko’s glasses and Meta Ray-Ban products.
Inundating the Australian market with cheap, covert recording devices creates an unprecedented privacy nightmare. By embedding high-definition cameras and audio capture into ordinary, budget eyewear, Kmart and its parent company, Wesfarmers, are enabling and facilitating widespread non-consensual recording, stalking, doxxing, and voyeurism in both public and private spaces.
Dismantling the Big Tech Spin: Covert Spyware Is Not a Phone Camera
EFA firmly rejects Big Tech’s spin that smart glasses are equivalent to smartphone cameras. Unlike holding up a phone, which provides clear physical notice to those around you, wearable camera glasses are passive, covert, and engineered to look like everyday eyewear.
“Comparing a wearable camera disguised as everyday eyewear to a smartphone is completely false and manipulative,” said John Pane, Chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia. “To take a photo or record video on a smartphone, a person must perform an overt physical gesture—holding up a screen in front of their face. This physical action provides clear, unambiguous notice to everyone around them, allowing bystanders to grant or withhold consent, object, or walk away.”
“Smart glasses intentionally strip away that social notice and behavioural marker,” Pane continued. “They are covert, passive, hands-free, and specifically engineered to blend seamlessly into standard fashion frames. They are inherently unethical, highly intrusive, and in many practical applications, potentially unlawful under existing surveillance and other related legislation.”
There are so many ways these smart glasses can backfire, including:
- Weaponization in Private and Public Spaces: The low cost and discrete form-factor of Kmart’s smart glasses lower the barrier to predatory behavior, amplifying the harms already being cause by Meta RayBans and creating potentially severe, immediate safety risks for all Australians, especially women, children, and vulnerable groups. Invasion of Sensitive Private Spaces: These glasses are indistinguishable from prescription eyewear, so bad actors can easily wear them into spaces where cameras are strictly prohibited, including fitting rooms, communal change rooms, public bathrooms, saunas, and gym locker rooms.
- Exploitation at Public Beaches and Swimming Pools: In public recreational areas like swimming pools, splash parks, and beaches, wearable cameras give covert operators the ability to record minors, women, and men without their knowledge. This opens the floodgates to non-consensual filming for sexual titillation, online voyeurism, predatory harassment, body-shaming, and public ridicule on social media platforms.
- Facilitating Stalking and Intimidation: Victims of domestic violence, individuals living under protective court orders, and survivors of stalking rely on public anonymity for their physical safety. Discreet wearable recording eliminates this protection, allowing perpetrators to track victims’ routines and locations without detection.
- Doxxing and Real-Time AI Identification: When wearable cameras are paired with companion smartphone applications and AI image-recognition models, wearers gain the ability to capture a stranger’s face in public and cross-reference it against online databases. This enables real-time doxxing, instantly revealing a bystander’s full name, social media profiles, employment, and home address.
- Invasive Cloud Processing Pipelines: Companion software automatically uploads captured media to external cloud servers for processing and AI training. This potentially exposes private, non-consensual footage to human data annotators, third-party contractors, corporate data breaches, and law enforcement dragnet subpoenas.
- The End of Public Anonymity: Ubiquitous covert monitoring creates a pervasive “chilling effect” across society. Citizens who know they may be secretly recorded at any moment are deterred from exercising their usual freedoms, including attending peaceful political protests, seeking sensitive medical care, or participating freely in public life.
- Failure of Privacy Notice Mechanisms: Minimal recording indicators, such as tiny LEDs embedded in frame rims, are fundamentally useless. They are easily covered with tape, disabled via simple physical hacks, or rendered invisible in bright outdoor sunlight.
EFA points to a glaring disconnect between Wesfarmers’ corporate governance claims regarding consumer trust involving the privacy of customers and other parties. It seems this trust ends with the concept of data privacy. Wesfarmers seem unbothered selling products that will most definitely be used, at scale, to infringe on a person’s privacy in both private and public spaces. Wesfarmers appears more interested in profiting from cheap, wearable surveillance tech than in how it could be misused, particularly against vulnerable people. Such misuse will not be a fringe issue. It will be significant and potentially normalized in time. As for Meta, their abominable track record of trying to kill off individual privacy continues with Meta Ray Ban glasses.
“EFA calls on Meta and Wesfarmers to recall these products from all of their Australian retail stores and physical or online distributors immediately. It is the only ethical and moral course of action to follow when considering the real harms these devices can bring to society, especially those individuals most vulnerable to harms of this type,” said Pane.
EFA’s Policy Demands
Electronic Frontiers Australia maintains that covert camera glasses result in far more societal harm than good, and calls for immediate legislative action, regarding:
- An Immediate Ban on Covert Wearable Camera Devices: EFA calls on consumer protection regulators to halt the sale and importation of consumer eyewear featuring integrated covert cameras.
- Modernisation of State and Federal Surveillance Laws: Australia’s decades-old surveillance devices legislation must be overhauled to explicitly outlaw non-consensual, wearable optical recording in publicly accessible spaces and private facilities.
- Strict Biometric Protections: Enact statutory prohibitions against pairing wearable hardware with real-time facial recognition or automated demographic profiling software.
“We must draw a hard line in the sand and we need to do it now,” concluded Pane. “Australians have a right to walk down the street, go for a swim, or use a change room without being secretly filmed for someone else’s titillation, social media base building, algorithms, or profit. These devices must be banned pending a suitably strong regulatory solution.”
Image credit: Unsplash/Redd Francisco.