JENI O’DOWD: Smartglasses are a creep’s best friend as demand for wearable technology booms

I was lying on a beach at Waikiki recently, doing the specific kind of nothing you travel that far to do, when I noticed a drone.

It was hovering over two young women paddling out to surf. Not passing over them. Hovering. Zooming in, pulling back, holding position, going again.

It stayed far longer than anything with a legitimate reason to be there would have. The women never looked up. I never worked out who was flying it, because whoever it was had the sense to stand somewhere people couldn’t see.

But it creeped me out. There was someone on that beach, closely watching two young women through a screen.

And now we have a cheap pair of sunglasses that does the same job. With the drone, at least you could look up or hear it buzzing. But with the glasses, you’d have to stare into a stranger’s face and spot a flashing light the size of a pinhead to know you were being recorded.

Australians clearly want them. Kmart’s Anko camera glasses, $89, sold out before most people knew they existed.

They do broadly what Meta’s Ray-Bans do at a fraction of the price: film, photograph, record sound, and push it all to an app on the wearer’s phone.

Google plans to release its Android XR glasses this year, and Apple’s version lands next year. You can already buy cheap versions on Amazon, Temu and AliExpress. This is the beginning of the normal, not a Kmart curiosity.

Attorney-General Michelle Rowland has written to Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind asking her to treat the technology as a priority.

“Privacy is an essential part of all our lives; it allows us to be who we are with dignity and without fear,” Ms Rowland said.

As the national group Digital Rights Watch pointed out, a phone has to be raised and aimed, and everyone nearby can see it happen, whereas these smartglasses are designed to eliminate that.

And here’s what removing it can actually cost.

In 2018, Sydney man Samuel Tjin was charged with 13 counts of filming a person’s private parts without consent, two counts involving girls under 16.

He had it worked out. Ride the bottom deck of a Sydney train, wait at a station, and you get a clean upward view of every woman standing on the platform above you. Then point your phone.

The interesting part is how he was caught. Other commuters saw him doing it, realised what they were watching, and filmed him back.

Last year, a woman trying on clothes at Sydney’s Macquarie Centre noticed a man filming her. She confronted him, and he was later charged.

In both cases, someone noticed the illegal filming. But now we are taking away the noticing.

US technology and culture magazine Wired reported that aspiring influencers and pick-up artists were using Meta’s glasses to record unsolicited approaches to women in public and post the footage, often without the women even knowing they were filmed.

This led Instagram boss Adam Mosseri to promise that the pick-up line videos would be taken down, and Meta has since deleted creators’ accounts over it.

I think when Meta removes content created on its own device, you get a strong sense of the problem.

Then there are children. School pick-up. The local pool. Saturday morning netball. When you see a stranger filming a child with a phone, you think, hang on, that’s not right.

A person standing at the edge of a swimming carnival, holding up a phone, would be approached within minutes. A person wearing sunglasses would not.

Tom Sulston, head of policy at Digital Rights Watch, is no fan of this technology. He calls it pervasive secret surveillance.

Even so, he allows there may be a genuine use for camera glasses as a visual aid for blind and low-vision people, before adding the obvious point. That isn’t how they are being designed, marketed or sold.

Which leaves the Government with a choice. Either ban them for the majority, or put the obligation where it belongs by making the indicator light impossible to miss rather than a pinprick.

Or go further and require the frames themselves to be identifiable, like bright yellow, in the way a taxi has to look like a taxi.

On that beach at Waikiki, I could at least see the drone. Good luck spotting a pair of sunglasses.