One of Sydney’s largest councils has joined the City of Brisbane and the City of Yarra to issue a ban on AI smart glasses at public pools as concerns mount over the potential for predators to exploit the new technology. On Tuesday evening, Canterbury-Bankstown voted overwhelmingly in favour of banning the tech at its local pools, with its mayor, Bilal El-Hayek, describing them as “pervert glasses”. Since their release, there have been reports of women being filmed without their consent and their interactions with a glasses-wearing influencer posted on social media.
The head of policy at Digital Rights Watch, Tom Sulston, praised the decision. He said it was “vital that councils across Australia ensure that public spaces like swimming pools are safe for families to enjoy without the threat of unwanted video surveillance”. It also confirmed it would call on the federal government to bring in stronger privacy laws to protect people from new technologies.
Randwick council in Sydney’s eastern suburbs has also banned the new technology at the Des Renford leisure centre. In a statement to Guardian Australia, it said “growing community concerns” about their potential misuse were behind the decision. The federal attorney general, Michelle Rowland, has not ruled out banning the glasses but has indicated how complex the laws are governing the new technology.
In August, she wrote to the privacy commissioner, Carly Kind, raising concerns she’d received from the community about their growing uptake and requesting it be given priority consideration. In advice to industry published at the end of August, the office of the eSafety commissioner warned that while smartglasses with cameras, such as Meta’s Ray-Ban, can offer accessibility benefits to low vision or blind people, companies might pit “accessibility benefits against safety and privacy considerations”, and noted there was already a backlash to the technology.
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