What to do about Meta’s AI-powered smart “pervert” glasses? Setting the bar for the rest of us, Australia’s government is considering a “world-leading” ban on the wearable — but certainly not fashionable — pieces of head-mounted spyware that would bar them from being worn in federal workplaces.
“Smart glasses can raise legitimate privacy and security concerns, particularly because of their ability to record and capture information, and we need clear and consistent guidance for public servants,” Katy Gallagher, Australia’s public service minister, said in a statement Thursday, as quoted by Reuters.
Gallagher said she was seeking guidance from the public service commission on prohibiting the devices in government buildings.
The government will also convene a roundtable of major employers like Microsoft and Commonwealth bank to set guidelines for AI in the workplace, Reuters reported.
Australia’s federal government is one of the largest employers in the country, so the example it sets could echo to private companies, too. Perhaps it could be farther reaching than that: the government hopes that its action could be a move toward a “potential world leading ban.”
Around the globe, bans on wearing the Meta glasses have come in piecemeal fashion. Some courts in the US and the UK have prohibited them, and so have businesses ranging from your typical restaurant to buzzy nightclubs. But rarely have governments gotten heavily involved, and Australia’s ban would be the first on a national level.
In the eyes of critics, the glasses’s always-on microphones and their ability to record people in public pose flagrant violations of privacy. Beyond that, what really seems to have catalyzed the public against the glasses is the alarming behavior of the people who wear them.
Men, many of them wannabe influencers, are filming themselves interacting with strangers in public who clearly don’t know they’re on camera or don’t want to be filmed. Some of these amount to meanspirited pranks. In a more alarming genre of video, others will harass women and look for their reactions to their sleazy pick-up lines. Some schoolboys are building online following by making this kind of Meta glasses content, too.
Meta has responded to the unfolding PR crisis by saying it would ban the Instagram accounts of these content creators and brick the cameras of customers who’re caught using them inappropriately. Clearly, many feel this isn’t enough.
More on smart glasses: Meta Is Using Instagram Users’ Photos to Build a Universal Facial Recognition System for Its Hated Smart Glasses, Class Action Lawsuit Claims