Opinion
The best thing I ever filmed with a pair of smart glasses was my son, nearly two years old, discovering that a football is way more fun when you fall over on top of it.
I was wearing Metaโs Oakley Vanguards, which I had on loan from the company and typically use when on long runs and half-marathon training. But theyโre also great for precious moments with your kids.
My hands were full โ they tend to be when youโve got a toddler โ and I said, โhey Meta, take a videoโ, and got a clip no phone could have. The moment you get your phone out to start recording something, is almost always exactly the moment it stops happening.
A few years earlier, with an older pair of Ray-Ban Metas, I got footage I still look back at now โ kicking the footy around the oval with my wife, going for a run with a mate, splashing at the beach. Those videos look like being there, rather than watching someone film it.
Which is all to say I like these glasses. Theyโre fun and super useful. On a run, they play podcasts through bone conduction speakers, tell me how fast Iโm going, read out my WhatsApp messages and let me film something without breaking stride. They look like ordinary Oakleys, just with a camera, microphone and AI built in. The only thing that really gave me pause was the price.
Now Iโm apprehensive about something else.
Iโve spent the past fortnight writing stories about people using these things to film strangers without consent. Researchers at the University of Sydney went through 350 videos and found about 60 per cent of the covert ones involved potential harassment. Critics now call the category โpervert glassesโ, while Digital Rights Watch has a better term: โSpecs offenders.โ
Which means my running glasses have become an uncomfortable presence for people who see me coming. Is he recording me? I have no way of answering which doesnโt sound exactly like what a creep might say.
The shift in attitude has meant Iโve stopped wearing them in public as much, given the weird looks and occasional uncomfortable questions about whether Iโm recording.
We have been here before. Googleโs first effort, Google Glass, died a decade ago because its wearers were routinely abused in bars and labelled โglassholesโ. We werenโt ready.
Melbourne has watched the same movie before with dockless bike share and e-scooters, both of which worked well technically and both of which ended up in the Yarra. The technology was defeated by the few bad apples who used it worst.
Smart glasses are well intentioned and technically ready. Socially, they are being wrecked at a rapid clip by their worst users.
Thereโs a second problem: who is holding the reins. Meta has spent 20 years demonstrating it will collect what it can until someone makes it stop. It might sound like an unfair caricature, but itโs also the reputation the company has earned, and reputation is everything when youโre asking strangers to trust a camera on your face.
Metaโs answer, from chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth at the weekend, is that the capture light canโt be switched off and covering it stops the camera working. And itโs true: my Oakleys flash a bright white light when theyโre recording anything.
The $89 Kmart pair that sold out last month makes no such promise, and I have no confidence that a cut-price, own-brand device is a gold standard for anything.
Itโs worth pointing out that Australia has no general right to privacy in public. Filming at the beach or an oval is fair game. Itโs those in-between places โ the gym, the cafe, the change room corridor at Kmart โ where the law says itโs OK to film, but every social instinct says absolutely not, and for good reason.
So hereโs my take, as someone who likes the glasses and wants to keep using them. Letโs pause. Not forever, and not with an import ban, which the attorney-general has already ruled out. Just long enough to work out the rules. Weโre not ready for smart glasses, but maybe we can be.
At a minimum, recording indicators should be mandatory, standardised across every brand sold here, and tamper-proof. Greens senator David Shoebridge is right that nothing currently requires a light, a sound, or any outward sign at all.
A few more ideas worth considering: a specific offence for covert capture by wearable cameras, so victims stop depending on a privacy tort that makes them prove serious harm. And product standards built into the device, including bystander-blurring on by default. And an obligation on manufacturers to act on misuse rather than merely selling the hardware and shrugging.
These things would carry a real cost, too, because there are people for whom these glasses are not a toy. The eSafety commissioner points out they can read text aloud to blind users and caption live speech for deaf ones, hands-free.
The answer isnโt to simply ban the glasses. Itโs to create better rules to stop the creeps.
Letโs get this right so I can stop the uncomfortable looks and go back to just being the bloke who filmed his son falling over a football.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.