Should smart glasses be banned in public places?

Law Report

This episode of Law Report examines two distinct legal challenges in Australia: the regulation of smart glasses due to privacy concerns and the

Key takeaways

Western Australia has announced a complete ban on smart glasses in public schools effective next month.
Research shows 'pickup artist' subcultures use smart glasses for 'ambient capture' to record women without consent.
Current New South Wales surveillance laws focus on audio recording, leaving a legal gap regarding unauthorized video capture.
A NSW Local Court judge ruled that a $50,000 debt was unenforceable because the underlying activity constituted unlicensed bookmaking.
Section 56 of the Unlawful Gambling Act 1998 provides that agreements relating to prohibited gambling have no legal effect.

Main topics

Smart glasses privacy regulation
Surveillance law gaps
Unlicensed bookmaking legality

Notable quotes

I like to refer to smart glasses as computers for your face.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates the difficulty of applying existing statutory

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Speaker 4 (0:07) The name's Bond, Alan Bond. Billionaire businessman, America's Cup winner and, oh yeah, con man. Bond cooked the books of Bond Corporation. Speaker 1 (0:19) He wanted everybody to know that he was in charge, they better look out. It was the biggest fraud in Australian history. Speaker 4 (0:26) I'm Mark Humphries and I'm here to tell the full Alan Bond story. Search ABC Rewind on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (0:44) Hi, Damien Carrick here. This is The Law Report on ABC Radio National. If you don't pay your gambling debts to an unlicensed bookie, can they take you to court to recover the money? Speaker 2 (0:55) A court is not simply deciding whether someone ought, as a matter of personal morality, to pay. So that's not an issue here. Speaker 3 (1:02) That's coming up, the case of the two poker players who ended up in court over unpaid gambling debts. First, growing concerns over privacy breaches linked to smart glasses are seeing authorities around the country move to restrict where they can be used. WA has announced a complete ban in public schools, which will take effect next month. And a number of local councils nationwide have also prohibited their use at public pools and leisure centres. In Sydney, Randwick City Council is now investigating whether or not it can go one step further and ban smart glasses. at public beaches. And Canberra is also considering restrictions in all Commonwealth workplaces. But how effective is regulation at this level and do we need a different type of legal response? Milica Stilinovic is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney. She has a focus on technological harms and governance of emerging technologies. What are smart glasses? Speaker 1 (2:00) Damien, I like to refer to smart glasses as computers for your face. So everything you can basically do with your smartphone or your computer, access AI or have things AI enabled, tracking, looking for locations, taking photos, recording audio, that is now placed into your point of view. But just like with many things, not all smart glasses are equal in that there are some glasses with larger computational stacks and other glasses that don't have that particular computational affordance. So, for example, a lot of people think of smart glasses as the meta Ray-Ban glasses, which have a full suite of these types of affordances. And then you can look more towards even realities, which don't have... have the recording or audio or visual capacity. And then all the way down to the Kmart smart glasses and the ones you can find on Amazon that can record, but they can't upload immediately to platforms like Ray-Ban Metas. So it's a bit of a wild card in terms of what you're going to get when you buy a smart glass. Speaker 3 (3:11) Okay, so there's a range in terms of the capacities of these products. What are some of the positive uses? And I know you've researched... The negative uses. Tell me first about the positive and then tell me about the negative. Speaker 1 (3:24) Well, first and foremost, we're looking at the visually impaired. So this could be really groundbreaking tech for the visually impaired and being able to move through their day to day. On the lighter side, we're also seeing this as a great inclusion for those who are videographers, content producers, influencers that are then able to take their audiences. through their day-to-day through this POV or point of view capture. So imagine the world-class chef teaching you how to cook a meal straight down the barrel of a gun, looking at the ingredients and the dish and what they're doing, or a skateboarder taking you on their journey. So these are some of the positives. You know, you're not looking down at your phone, so maybe that could be a hazardless experience when you're walking through the streets or sightseeing. So there are those little positives. However, currently we're seeing that the negatives are outweighing the positives. Speaker 3 (4:26) And you've done research looking at the negatives. Tell me about what you found. Speaker 1 (4:29) Indeed. So the team and I, we first looked at what are smart glasses and how they're being positioned, looking at advertorial, branded content, paid partnerships, that sort of thing. And we came to see this pattern that there was a normalization of certain behaviors that were breaching privacy, that were breaching bystander consent, that were going into places that may or may not be somewhere that people would want you to record. So it's that kind of pushback on our understanding of privacy. And from that, we started looking into a subculture known as pickup artists. And these glasses seem to have complemented the next generation of pickup artists and pickup artistries. So we looked at 350 videos of pickup artist content where we were seeing what we like to refer to as ambient capture. or this kind of covert recording through a woman's everyday experience while they're walking down the street, working out at a gym, hanging at the restaurants. They were approaching them at places of work, in the stairwells of their apartments and at the beach. They would try a corny line, possibly an insistence. They would ask for a phone number and if they were unlucky, they would ask for the Instagram handle because that's what misogynistic King Andrew Tate would say to do. And then they would upload this content online, leave the comments open and subject the woman to a barrage of abuse. This abuse would either look into their physical appearance all the way to identifying the woman online and potentially doxing as well. Speaker 3 (6:19) So very serious issues around people's rights to just go about their business. Speaker 1 (6:23) We also spotted children as well. So there was a lot of footage of children and minors within this pick-up artist ethos or atmosphere as well. Speaker 3 (6:34) So in response to these concerns, there have been a range of issues introduced at various levels of government around Australia. Do you welcome Western Australia's blanket ban on smart glasses in schools, a blanket ban on the use by staff, students, parents, carers, visitors, contractors, everyone? I Speaker 1 (6:54) feel it's inevitable that the ban was going to come simply because the tech itself was run away. we had started to place bans when unfortunately the market has already been flooded with smart glasses. And so this is the sledgehammer that attempts to stop that kind of behaviour or at least protect society's most vulnerable. And so in that context, yes, it is a welcome change. It is a little bit too