Cheap camera glasses are now on Australian shelves and the instinct to ban them outright can breach the Disability Discrimination Act. The defensible move for cafes, gyms and retailers is to restrict non-consensual recording, not the device, and to fix their terms of entry accordingly.
The Take: Cheap camera glasses have landed in Australian cafes, gyms and shops. The reflex to ban them outright is the one response most likely to put a business in legal trouble. Customer privacy is a real concern. A blanket ban is still the wrong tool, because it can breach anti-discrimination law before it protects a single person.
The clampdown: Businesses and councils are already moving. An Adelaide cafe banned smart glasses over privacy fears, and Brisbane City Council banned non-consensual filming with camera devices at 21 public pools. The trigger is availability. Kmart now sells camera glasses for A$89, so covert recording is no longer a novelty worn by a handful of early adopters.
The legal trap: An outright ban treats every wearer as a recorder, and that is where it breaks. Smart glasses can carry prescription lenses or assistive features like live captioning for people with hearing loss. Banning them wholesale risks breaching the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, which can expose a business to fines or compensation orders. The federal Attorney-General has ruled out a national import ban, so the responsibility sits with each business to get its own rules right.
The price of Kmart's camera glasses, the point at which covert recording stopped being a niche worry and became a walk-in one
The workaround: The cleaner path is already visible. Restrict the behaviour, not the device. Brisbane did not ban glasses, it banned non-consensual recording, which lines up with surveillance device laws in New South Wales, Victoria and most other states. That protects other customers without punishing the person who needs the technology to see or hear.
For Australian operators: Fix your terms of entry before you improvise at the door. Write the rule around consent so it covers phones and glasses and any future device rather than singling out one product. Display the terms where customers actually see them on the way in, because unseen terms are not binding. Train floor staff on the difference between wearing a device and recording with it. Above all, resist the blanket ban, because the cheapest privacy protection is a clear rule and the most expensive one is a discrimination claim.